yesterday 10:39 | Last updated yesterday 10:40
Release: November 8, 2013
Director: Gavin Hood
: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld and more.
Runtime: 1 hr 52 mins
Censorship: 11 years
rating: + + +
Poor Asa Butterfield. At age ten, he played the son of a Nazi camp commandant who at the worst possible way discovers what dad’s job entails. At 13 he was the orphan Hugo Cabret living in poverty at a train station. And now, 16 years old, he plays a child soldier in a harsh and inhuman future.
The young Briton is eerily adept at playing vulnerable, grief-stricken characters. With his lean physique and his expressive blue eyes he gets what hurts the character to do evil in all of us who watch.
And as Ender Wiggin, he has not much to smile about. Ender lives in a future where life on Earth is threatened by ant-like aliens known as technicians. Gifted children are put in military school in a specially designed space station, as their sharp senses are considered particularly suitable for strategic warfare.
Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) sees a unique talent in Ender and decides to focus specifically on him. This “investment” means he sees that the boy is subjected to violence, ostracism and mental manipulation – all to attract the right management capabilities. But Ender has doubts before being groomed into a killing machine, and is torn between his soft and its harsh side.
“Ender’s Game”, based on Orson Scott Card’s book of the same name, is a lavish science-fiction adventure with dizzying effects and exciting action scenes. It is also an extremely bleak film, which gets “Hunger Games” seem like really frisky. The hope is there, but much of the film is characterized by icy cold, loneliness and despair. Maybe it needed a dose dystopian gallows humor a la “Starship Troopers” – if only to cheer up poor Asa Butterfield.
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