The End of the Game

Ender (Asa Butterfield) plays the game.

«« Ender's Game.  Written and directed by Gavin Hood, based on the novel by Orson Scott Card. At area theaters.

Full disclosure: I haven't read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Though widely acclaimed, its pulpy, "repelling the next alien bug invasion" idea already sounded tired during the Reagan Administration. Matters have gotten worse since then, as the premise has become the object of disaster-epic (Independence Day), cheeky political satire (Starship Troopers) and outright farce (Mars Attacks!). The only way to make an un-ironic version of Ender's Game now is to hope nobody saw those other movies.

          Bad news: they did.

          Director Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Tsotsi) appears to have shut his eyes and hoped for the best in his adaptation of Card's book. Special effects notwithstanding, this is one of those rare movies that is so entirely sealed off from its cultural context that it could have premiered anytime, in any decade. For one (minor) instance: the characters in this supposed distant future make reference to "e-mail", which seems about as likely as people in 2013 still calling their automobiles "horseless carriages."

          For those non-fanboys out there, Ender's Game is about Ender Wiggen (Asa Butterfield), a gifted "tweener" who is recruited by Earth's military government to command the human fleet against the dreaded alien bugs, known as the Formics. It appears that only children are agile in mind enough to command huge battle-fleets—which I guess makes interstellar generalship like women's gymnastics. In any case, Ender is regarded as Earth's last, best hope by the Academy's ranking gray-hair, Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), who clashes constantly (and tediously) with the resident shrink (Viola Davis) over whether Ender is really, truly, absolutely ready to save humanity. No points for guessing if he is or not master of his own "game."

          The centerpiece dramatic device here is a zero-gravity gym where the space cadets engage in mid-air laser-tag games. This may have sounded pretty cool in 1985—when  laser-tag wasn't available to play in most strip-malls—but the idea seems even more derivative now, after watching Harry Potter prove himself in similar fashion. Quidditch in space is still just quidditch.

          Though predicable and dull, Ender's Game is topical in one sense: it endorses the superhero principle, the idea that what we need is a singular, individual savior to solve our problems. It is true that most Western literature extols the role of the individual in society—in fact, the emergence of the individual in history pretty much is what Western literature is all about. But today's taste for superhero stories arguably goes beyond that. At a time when our problems seem so intractable, and our politics so dead-ended, we yearn instead for someone extraordinary, someone above the usual checks and balances, to swoop down and "fix it" for us. And lest he or she become a Caesar, we further prefer them to go away, back to the Batcave or the Fortress of Solitude, until we need them again.

          I suppose even forlorn hope is better than no hope at all. One problem with waiting for superheroes, though, is that it invites everyone else to stand around and watch, as the entire population of New York did at the climax of The Avengers. Worse, it excuses the fact that most of our problems are not fixable by individuals at all. They're systemic problems, having to do with how things are arranged and done by masses of people. Letting Ender Wiggen control all our drones gets us some notable "kills", and doesn't require us to change hearts and minds in Pakistan. Imagining Superman flush away greenhouse gases from our atmosphere is gratifying, and absolves everybody from changing the cars they drive. Superheroes do us favors, but are favors really a substitute for justice?

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro