The Beginning of the Ender’s Game

For millions of people, especially those who were once bookwormy nerd-skewing preteens like myself, few books were as important as Ender’s Game—the tale of that unwittingly xenocidal second grade space warrior just resonated more deeply than whatever was on TV. 

I still recall, pretty vividly, sharing Ender’s primal rage at those bullies, his weirdly intense love for his sister, Valentine, and his conflicted stew of triumph and regret after he [spoiler alert] wipes out an entire intelligent species by being really good at what is basically Starcraft 5.

Yesterday, the trailer for the film—Ender’s Game is now a major motion picture starring Harrison Ford, in theaters this November, in case you hadn’t heard—was finally released, and it was nostalgia city.

I had forgotten about many of the secondary characters and much of the technology described in the books—the rotating space station that housed the Battle Room, hands-free war-gaming, etc. I certainly didn’t recall any gents with facial tattoos. But in the cinematic sci-fi world, I suppose we’ve got to signify post-now in some visually striking way or another, and it might as well be Ben Kingsley with tribal tats on his face. 

Mostly, the trailer was pretty underwhelming—partly because Harrison Ford delivers the voice over that accompanies the action with a valium-inflected boredom that makes his Blade Runner narration seem inspired. But also because the film looks suffocated with stock Hollywood CGI, and preditctably obsessed with cartoony battle scenes and alien-killing action. It looks like every other sci-fi vehicle to have emerged over the last three years, and maybe less visually interesting.

And that’s fine, it’s Hollywood, whatever. But it is kind of too bad that it’s getting turned into a film in the midst of a bona fide reprisal of PG-13 sci-fi, where there are no doubt directives aplenty from the studio to ‘be like Hunger Games and that Star Trek reboot’. It means it’s going to be strictly conventional. The trailer seems like the beginning of the end—the beginning of a bloated two-dimensional action trilogy, the end of an Ender we can actually empathize with.

Ender’s Game is like the Catcher in the Rye of sci-fi; long since canonized, deeply beloved, a book to relate to during those rocky formative years—and everyone was kind of quietly glad that it wasn’t made into a movie for so long. Even though all of those people, myself included, will see it now that it has been. It’s a sacred sci-fi text, and it’s so much more interesting than an action movie—I mean, it’s a moving story about a six year-old who murders two kids, broods, and then promptly commits genocide for the military. There is no way any Hollywood production is going to pull that off without taking a sandblaster to its moral complexities. 

Again, big whoop. That’s what Hollywood does for a living, and the book’s not going anywhere. But seriously, somebody cheer up Harrison Ford. He just seems so sad.