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Ender's Game (2013), PG-13, 2 stars

Boy, is Sir Ben Kingsley and Harrison Ford happy to be in this movie?
Another science fiction movie in the future? Well, I am a science fiction fan and I always anticipate any project that filmmakers and writers can distribute to the audience. What kind of original creativity can anybody come up with? I thought Neill Blomkamp's Elysium was a good action movie with sci-fi touches, but did not show the issues of the lack of health care on Earth too well. Ever since Inception, the originality seems to dial down in sci-fi films. I mean Gravity is a great sci-fi film, but it looked like a real perilous situation. This movie had sparks of visual wonder, but there is no thought or originality in the script.

The movie starts out with an attack of Earth in 2086 by an alien species called the formics. What a terrible basic name for an alien species. Someone who I would not reveal sacrifices himself to prevent the attack from getting worse. Years later, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is being watched by Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) and Major Anderson (Viola Davis) beating a school bully in a virtual game. After a fight with the bully and his gang, Ender tearfully goes home and has a calm conversation about it with his sister, Valentine (Abigail Breslin).

Later in the movie, Graff and Anderson come by the Wiggin household and states that they off Ender a place in Battle School as they saw how Ender reacted to a removal. Graff convinces Ender privately to go to the school and Ender reluctantly accepts.

Ender is called a "launchie" in the school and he earns respect from his fellow "launchies". (What the hell kind of word is that? Anyway...) After Anderson sees Ender pass a "mind game" with such intricate detail and skill, he is transferred to a more advanced class called the Salamander Army, where he meets Bonzo and Petra (Moises Arias and Hailee Steinfeld). The rest of the movie is basically training setups and cliches and a battle that was not of high interest to me.

Butterfield's and Steinfeld's characters as Ender and Petra having a talk during a meal.
The best aspects of this movie are the production designs and the visual effects, of course. The visual effects look so intricate and wonderful that I believed that the filmmakers spent more time on the effects of the sci-fi world than the story and the character development. It was fun to see the climactic action sequences. The production design of the space station or Battle School is technically impressive of seeing how children might get training later in the future when it does not involve weapons.

Butterfield is a pretty good actor with pep and is convincing, but his character does not seem to be too interesting comparing to other movie kids such as Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen. Hailee Steinfeld gives a good performance, but not as memorable as her performance in True Grit. The other actors seemed to be in their own individual movies, which they would give great performances but it seemed like that all of the actors wanted to get the day of the shoot over with and get their paycheck.

My problem with this movie was that the story did not have a lot of thought into engaging me to find the emotional and thinking balances between the story and the characters. The problem was that the training scenes and character development were slow and agonizing that I was starting to feel bored. The last third of the movie really improved with the action. But, somehow, I just did not feel that I would put in children in a harmful situation to save Earth. The movie is great looking, but not a memorable start to a series. I wish the filmmakers luck for the sequel.

**

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