In the increasingly rabid race to turn the next popular YA book series into a Harry Potter-size hit film franchise, there have been some surprises (The Hunger Games­) as well as more than a few casualties (the latest of which was this summer’s already forgotten Mortal Instruments).

With Ender’s Game, Lionsgate Films’ effort to dominate the burgeoning YA market, Orson Scott Card’s award-winning YA sci-fi work is brought to life with a gaggle of fresh faces, as well as some old familiars. Harrison Ford headlines as the domineering Colonel Graff, who is as active as can be expected as a military commander not currently at war: many of his scenes tend to blur into one another as he gets lost in increasingly complex analyses of Ender with his military cohort Gwen Anderson (the benign Viola Davis).

In truth, the most surprising thing about Ender’s Game is, as a film about the prospect of intergalactic warfare, just how slow and cerebral it can be. Ultimately, it’s too slow, depending far too much on weak characterizations: practically every character whom Ender encounters has it in for him, bad, but with no real explanation. Why all this youthful militancy? The only one who is different, dutifully so, is Hailee Steinfeld, a tall young athletic fighter who warms to Ender as inexplicably as everyone else shuns him.

Coupled with this is the phantom menace of the alien race which attacked Earth years before the events of the film; we see this in news footage and snippets, but never really get a sense of the actual threat posed by these beings. Yes, the presence (or not) of the threat plays a part in the film’s plot, but in order for that plot to move and keep us along for the ride, something needs to be at stake. There were many moments during Ender’s Game when that something was far from clear.

What makes the film watchable, in the end, is Ender himself, played by Asa Butterfield (of Hugo and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas). Inexplicably captivating, this otherwise shrimpy young thing has a certain swag and an intelligent, quiet intensity that make him compulsively watchable. It’s a shame that so much of the film remains marooned in the ‘game’ of military training (amounting to space-age Quidditch), and only at the film’s end does Ender truly strike out on his own to find himself.  

—DH