Adapting novels into feature films is always a pretty big challenge. So much so that it’s rarer than you’d probably like that a filmmaker is able to do it well. The problem is that there’s so much more room for a story and a set of characters to breathe in a novel than there is in a movie—which can only last somewhere between 90 minutes and two and a half hours—so there’s always some compromises that need to be made when trying to cram all of that nuance into a work that can be digested in one sitting. Too often filmmakers aren’t shrewd enough when adapting a novel, and they end up making bloated, slow-paced films that still don’t manage to reach the depths that the original work mined anyway. Writer/director Gavin Hood’s new adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s well-regarded science fiction novel Ender’s Game doesn’t make this mistake. It cuts the original work down to the absolute essentials, indulging itself nowhere and only including what’s absolutely necessary to get the story told. It’s nice to see a literary adaptation that doesn’t fall into all of the same old traps that usually spring up. Sort of. What’s unfortunate is that this approach doesn’t end up resulting in a successful film either.
Ender’s Game is so swiftly paced and excises so much nuance and detail from the original text that it feels like you’re watching an outline for a movie instead of a whole feature. Nothing we’re presented with gets any time to breathe, to naturally develop, or to hit with any impact. Basically the whole of the narrative is the story of a bright young boy named Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) being picked to be trained to be humanity’s last hope for survival in a future war we’re waging with an alien enemy, which you would think would mean the focus would be on his development as a soldier. Unfortunately, in a movie that’s trying to squeeze so much in, we get one instruction scene and suddenly he’s an expert in warfare. We get one mock battle sequence and suddenly he’s an expert fighter. He has one hallucinatory confrontation with the enemy and suddenly he’s an expert in their mindset. The movie doesn’t even give us the common decency of a montage sequence so that we can better accept the fact that he’s experiencing growth. When a story flies by so fast that you can barely even keep up with what’s happening, it’s not likely that you’re going to find yourself very caught up in any of the drama, and that’s certainly the case here.
The acting, the staging, and the dialogue delivered can be so clunky in places that the movie earns unintentional laughs as well. Butterfield is spotty from scene to scene as the lead, which is disappointing because his work was generally strong in Hugo, and he fares the best as far as the younger actors go. One plus is that the adult actors, including Harrison Ford as the commander of the soldier school where most of the action takes place, Viola Davis as something of a child psychologist, Nonso Anozie as a drill sergeant, and Ben Kingsley as a mysterious guru character do much better. It’s especially surprising to see Ford appear to be engaged when having to do ridiculous sci-fi things like manipulate machinery that isn’t really there and spout expositional gobbledygook. He was a good sport here, though it didn’t stop much of what he did from playing so unnaturally that it seemed like the sort of thing Mystery Science Theater 3000 made its name mocking. In the end, Hood has made a movie that’s leaps and bounds better than the genre work he did with X-Men: Origins - Wolverine, but considering that’s one of the worst movies that’s been made in the last decade, it’s not saying much. The long wait fans of Card’s novel suffered through to finally get this film adaptation certainly wasn’t worth it.
