Monday, November 4, 2013

Ender's Game: An IMAX Experience

Well, this is a surprise.  I saw Ender's Game on Friday, here it is Monday, and various parties are saying that, with a $25 million opening, it is a bomb already!

The movie gods giveth, and the movie gods taketh away.

I was quite dubious about Ender's Game going in: a mini-major trying to launch a new franchise, who spent over $100 million to make it, from a "cult" science fiction novel by Mr. Notoriously Picky Writer who is on as a producer (I guess being a producer makes him too busy to write his own novels anymore), a director I had never heard of, and a marketing campaign which didn't really tell you squat about what the film was about.

With all of this going for it, how could it miss?

But, after possibly the lamest narrated opening exposition ever, explaining the attack on Earth by an alien species (is there any other kind?), the film picked up considerably, and worked for me. Worked not without missteps, but it exhibited a strange combination of elements until it became its very own movie by the end.

"Dish here Batt'l School ain't big enuff for us bot - see?"
Certainly, Orson Scott Card's notion of training young video-gaming-addicted kids to fight our future battles for us against alien invaders, followed classic sci-fi practice: Find a trend in human behavior that you are not crazy about, and follow it to its furthest extent. From the perspective of 1985, this was eerily prescient. But from the perspective of 2013, it seems like a pandering attempt to capture back the Hogwart's crowd.

There are many interesting and new things going on in Gavin Hood's film, but some of them are undermined in strange ways: while I liked the family dynamic at the beginning, their video wall was straight out of the original Total Recall (1990). It was interesting to see all of the dynamics of the nameless zero-gravity laser-shooting game, but it had an annoying resemblance to the Quiddich game in the Harry Potter novels and films - and just as impossible for non-coms to understand. There was a strange pleasure in watching as a central character someone as young as Ender Wiggin, but the tired old method of having all the grown-up supervisors muttering "he's the one" had me shaking my head - we have seen much of this before.

So I think the filmmaker's had a tough proposition: tell the story contained in the first of the Ender novels, while trying to avoid many of what have by now become clichés in this genre. But the film impressed me by being able to take me there anyway, despite some of these objections which popped out from time to time.

Futurist films have better luck with me when they ground themselves in Earth's reality and history. At least Gravity (2013) takes place within the space program that we currently have, which makes it more compelling for me. Here, the attack on Earth by the Formics was made grim by having our forces battle the advanced aliens with fighter planes which closely resemble those we have today.  But after that, we have to project ourselves into an assembly of sometimes hard to swallow concepts, such as an international effort to protect Earth from future alien attacks and the ridiculously expensive Battle School to train the young'ns to do what the Old Farts can't.

But to place this defense in the hands of a rigorously trained super child - well THAT'S new.  But in order for a film such as this to work properly, there is a certain amount of fantasy-fulfillment that has to go on.  I don't know anyone who wants to be a hyper-computerized battle commander - do you? Throughout this film, there is really no one to cling to, although Viola Davis' character of Gwen Anderson might have supplied it if she had not been pushed out of the way.

Although I didn't really understand the object of the zero-gravity game, once Ender enters into the proceedings, his super-defensive impulses are depicted in the most gloriously liberating scene of gunplay since Kate Beckinsale shot herself a circular escape hatch in Underworld (2003). Ender has so much fun shooting and blasting people in this mock-battle that he is twirled about for us with both arms extended, firing away, and laughing in delight.  The filmmakers must have considered this an epiphany for Ender, and the high point of the film, because the musical score reaches its absolute zenith here. As David Byrne once observed, "People look silly when they are in ecstasy." If Ender is half-warrior and half empath, it is easy to see which half the filmmaker's choose to glorify so strongly.  The sound system at the Chinese has no ability to reproduce this overloud orchestra with sound effects with anything like fidelity.  I am sure it sounded great at Todd-AO, but here, at these levels, it's pretty shredded.

I enjoyed most of the performances, despite the underwriting of most of them.  The whole thing is very stylized and controlled.  There are no mistakes.  They show you only the things they want you to see.  No one forgets their car keys.  Asa Butterfield as Ender, is quite a performer, pulling out all the stops when he discovers that the Top Brass has treated him pretty much the same way as all the bullies in Battle School did. Harrison Ford rumbled his way through, but I was glad that his part was not just a walk on.  In order to subject Our Hero to the most humiliating hazing, we are introduced to the most extreme caricature of personal militarism in Bonzo Madrid, played here by Moisés Arias, who must be channeling Eddie Cantor's evil twin.  The film's precis of "The more you hate your enemy, the more you love them" seems sort of crazy, but gets its first demonstration after Bonzo decides to attack Ender at his most vulnerable: while taking a shower. Ender lashes out, and Bonzo falls, cracking his head open.

Ender's personality causes him to be extremely remorseful over this, which is kind of puzzling.  We hated Bonzo enough when he was attacking us, but now that he has suffered a cracked dome because of a flaw in his balance, we are suddenly all choked up?  Ender is the kind of person you would want as a benevolent dictator, but as we all know, being a dictator robs you of your humanity and your intellect.  Being a super-militarist robs of you of some of your humanity also. Ender's sympathy for the Formics is indeed uncharacteristic of someone with a military mindset, and this duality is where the film either captures you, or it looses you. I am not sure where it left me. When this film ends, it ENDS.

What I find interesting when I see films like this and others, like Prometheus (2012), is that these films reflect an interest we have in interplanetary exploration along with knowledge of the sciences, while at the same time, these very things are hideously low on our national or international agendas. The oft-encountered futurist vision of all the nations pulling together to Save Earth from Whatever, always strikes me as hopelessly idealistic, given our reactions to Earth's current problems.  But at least here, fighting an alien invasion, Earth's loss of 40 million people is supposedly enough of a hit to bind all the nations together to form a common defense.

So who knows?  I liked the strategy of leaving the depiction of the Formics to the end, which, without giving away the store, Our Hero Ender decides to empathize with, allowing the film to throw itself into a whole new direction.  I hope that they get to make some more of these films.

Just for the record, the Chinese was showing this film with the sidewall curtains closed, and no masking top and bottom.

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