"Ender's Game" Reviewed

Adam Ant recommends a boycott

Asa Butterfield is so much the best thing about the kid’s book quasi (though much earlier) Hunger Games in the not so distant future playing computer games by children will save the world. Not a million ways from a Phillip K. Dick novel (a specific one, but I can’t remember what it’s called), 12 year old Ender, the youngest of three is the chosen one to lead the world against a civilization of sophisticated ants in a planned attack.

Harrison Ford is Colonel Hyrum Graff and the other in this pas de deux and between them they own this biug budget pas de deux as young Ender learns how to command and kill but at what price? Asa is terrific, he has a preternatural calmness and bothh looks his age but also looks like a timeless sort of Machiavelli tinkering on the rules of war, stuff like first you stop your foe and then you stop them from attacking you again. “He did it for the right reason” Harrison gruffs. Ender ends it and Fraff gruss -ah, got it.

Ender makes enemies and friends  in equal parts, usually the same person and in the same order, climaxing with a beautiful looking balletic war game with Moises Arias as the only other actor to make an impression, mostly because he acts with his nose. Ender almost kills him, and that’ll teach you to try and steal the show, big nose.

“Ender’s Game” isn’t  a particularly good movie but it is better than “Gravity” and Asa is a terrific actor with a perfect mix of innocence curdled and naivete paid off. In a sense the directing of Asa in the movie exactly mirrors the directing of Ender in the movie.

Guess who wins… no, it’s not that simple, sucker.

Grade: B-