Ender's Game Movie Review

For years people have told me to read Ender's Game. The book was released when I was two years old and the book has been on my "to read" list for ages, though was a pretty low priority. Well, along came the movie version of Ender's Game (2013). I had no idea what I was getting into, but it was pretty cool.

In the near future, a hostile alien race called the Formics have attacked Earth. If not for the legendary heroics of International Fleet Commander Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), all would have been lost. In preparation for the next attack, the highly esteemed Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford), Major Gwen Anderson (Viola Davis) and the International Miliary are training only the best young children to find the future Mazer. Ender Wiggins (Asa Butterfield), a shy, but strategically brilliant boy is pulled out of his school to join the elite. Arriving at Battle School, Ender quickly and easily masters increasingly difficult war games, distinguishing himself and winning respect amongst his peers. Ender is soon ordained by Graff as the military's next great hope, resulting in his promotion to Command School. Once there, he is trained to lead his fellow soldiers into an epic battle that will determine the future of Earth and save the human race.

For being a product of the 1980's, Ender's Game has a whole lot of components that are popular trends among contemporary young adult literature. This movie is what would result if the Harry Potter series and the  Star Wars series had a baby. There's that "I'm a what?" moment where the seemingly unassuming and bullied kid ends up being special and superior to his peers. The character is whisked off to a school where they learn a super special power. There is the intelligent token female friend character, the goofy male friend character, and the bully at the new school. The character learns they are the chosen one, etc. They did this in Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and X-Men just to name a few off the top of my head. Except Ender's Game has the protagonist go to a sci-fi school to learn about commanding battleships by playing video games and zero-gravity laser tag, which makes it very different from the other stories.

We've got some pretty good actors in this movie. Harrison Ford is amazing and plays the tough mentor and military leader  very well. I love Asa Butterfield; he was amazing in Hugo and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. He's pretty good here, too. There are moments that he, like the other young child actors, are hard to take seriously. The kid actors are usually in their mid-teens, but many look younger than twelve. When these kids try to look hardcore and serious, they just end up looking funny. I actually laughed out loud at how ridiculous these prepubescent kids looked when they tried to act like hardened tough military soldiers. But when Butterfield has a meltdown, he plays it well. When he is horrorstruck, he means it. All the actors who played major characters were exceptional. The few minor character kids were less skilled and were harder to take seriously.

The special effects are phenomenal. That space battle toward the end is really a sight to behold. You get a broad scope of the fight scenes and a feel for how everything flows. It was neat seeing how Ender was a strategist; he was thinking several steps ahead of everyone and while not physically superior, he managed to get the upper hand by thinking the situation through. The only part of the story that confused me is how playing zero-gravity laser tag is supposed to prepare the kids for commanding fleets of spaceships. It would have made more sense if they were being trained as zero-gravity foot soldiers, not for the command seat in a battleship.

I have no idea how the movie compares to the book, I still haven't read it. Offhand, I didn't feel inspired to run off and pick up a book after seeing the movie. I've heard lots of bad things about Orson Scott Card (the book's author), none of which I have bothered to verify. I've read other books by Card, and if Ender's Game is like his other works, it could probably be half as long and still get the whole story across. I understand that Card's stance against gay marriage has caused a lot of people to boycott the movie. To me this sounds exactly like the religious groups boycotting The Golden Compass movie back in 2007; a group of people doesn't like the opinion of the author, therefore the movie based on the book written by the person they don't like should be refused by all. Ender's Game is pretty good on its own. While The Golden Compass did have some anti-organized religion themes in it, Ender's Game makes no commentary about homosexuality, antisemitism, or any of the other views I've heard the author has. Think what you want about Orson Scott Card, but the movie isn't bad.

Ender's Game is a decent movie. The acting is good, the story isn't bad, the special effects are great, and the complex theme of children's natural compassion clashing with the adult-mandated need for decisive power-plays is interesting. Story gaps aside, the action sequences tend to take center stage. If I was eleven, I'd probably think this is the best movie I'd ever seen. It's a much better space opera than the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was. Regardless of your views of Orson Scott Card, I think this is worth seeing. The movie didn't endear me enough to buy a copy, or read the book for that matter. It's a decent science fiction fantasy that will be a crowd pleaser.

What is your favorite movie adaptation of a book? Comment below and tell me why!

The Help Movie Review

I enjoy watching movies of simpler times, and of romanticized decades of the early-to-mid-1900s. Occasionally I let myself daydream of living in such times. Then I see a movie like The Help (2011) which makes me realize that these “simpler times” were rife with their own sets of problems. These problems are often downplayed or even ignored in movies for the sake of depicting a sense of nostalgia.

During Civil Rights era Mississippi, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) is a southern society girl who returns from college determined to become a writer. She gets a job writing a cleaning column for her home town’s newspaper, and seeks the advice from one of the local African-American maids. Between observing how the wealthy white families treat their hired help and being told that the nanny who basically raised Skeeter spontaneously moved to Chicago without notice, Skeeter sets out to write a book about the perspective of the black maids and nannies that are so obviously mistreated. She gains the trust of Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and later Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), a nanny and a maid respectively, and sets about anonymously writing their stories and opinions about working for white people. Skeeter’s perspective on things change and before the story is even sent to the publishers, the whole town has a thing or two to say as they become unwittingly, even unwillingly, caught up in the changing times. The town’s racist, snooty social ringleader Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) is bent on stopping the stories from becoming public knowledge for the sake of her own reputation and to keep the hired help where she believes their place is.

I’ve reviewed a couple of movies that are set in the 1960’s; Hairspray and X-Men: First Class both depict a fun and exciting vision of the 1960’s. Even Panic in Year Zero had an innocent, Leave It to Beaver sort of quality to it. On one hand, The Help reminds us of the civil rights movement as well as the gross inequality and injustice that were prevalent in the day. But on the other hand, The Help also seems to downplay the pain and widespread suffering of the day, similar to how Hairspray did. The Help is a story about pain, but it seems to avoid actually being painful. Really, we don’t typically go to the movies to see abrasive truths, we like feel-good movies. The Help certainly is a feel good movie with intermittent moments of uncomfortable reality. Still, it takes place in racially segregated Mississippi.

The feel-good quality of The Help doesn’t make it a bad movie, though. It’s well written, and very well acted! The characters were either generic or unique. Hilly isn’t very different from Hairspray’s Velma Von Tussle, and Skeeter is another single girl trying to make it big just like CoyoteUgly’s Violet Sanford. Where the movie really shines is in Aibileen and Minny’s characters. I can’t think of another character that is as downtrodden in quiet sorrow and still shows genuine love for the children under her care like Aibileen. I also can’t think of another character that is as amusingly vindictive and even vengeful towards her own oppressors while still trying to help and teach them the way Minny is. Both Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer stole the show in any scene they happened to be in. They were great!

I couldn’t help but get caught up in the story and become invested in the characters. It was well written and well acted. The sets and costumes were spot on. There was a brief scene in a grocery store. Even it looked like it was taken out of the 1960’s with all the products in 60’s style packaging and everything illuminated with a dull glow from the halogen fixtures above. There was lots of loving detail that went into The Help.

Even though it was a lengthy film at two hours and twenty six minutes, it’s still good. There are some shocking scenes, some funny scenes, touching scenes, and sad scenes. The movie isn’t going to appeal to everyone. You probably won’t enjoy it if you don’t like dramas in general. In spite of good intentions, I felt like some of the characters had subtle bits of racial stereotyping woven in from time to time. It’s subtle, so I didn’t find it terribly offensive. At any rate, I enjoyed The Help. It’s worth seeing if you don’t mind long drama films. It may even be worth buying a copy of should you find it to be entertaining enough. I might do that.

What's your favorite historical movie? Not necessarily a drama; X-Men: First Class was an action movie, after all. Comment below and tell me why!