Movie Review - Ender's Game

Ender’s Game **½ (PG-13) Here’s what you need to know about this f/x-heavy sci-fi adventure intended for young viewers. It’s another video game posing as a movie, with a veneer of existential musings. In a future Earth, alien invaders almost wiped us out. We learned virtually nothing about their motive or nature, but know they’re gonna try again with a bigger, badder force. Our best shot as survival rests with young recruits possessing the skills and instincts for a real-life incarnation of the kind of virtual warfare they can handle more adroitly than adults.

Ender Wiggin is spotted as the likely Neo for this variation on The Matrix, Starship Troopers and tons of other space and computer-based opuses, with a few Harry Potter-esque personal components. Since the lad is a scrawny nerd with limited skills apart from cyberspace, we watch him react to bullying and other manipulations from his peers and the brass (mainly Harrison Ford and Sir Ben Kingsley, as both are slumming in supporting roles). The CG effects are quite good. The plot is mostly formulaic, and the acting pedestrian, which seems out of place for action occurring almost entirely in outer space. There is an interesting ethical point in th4e mix, but no one will be buying tickets for that aspect. Overall, the film is passable for the genre, but lost in a crowded field of similar options, including some that jazz up their fanciful action scenes with 3-D. That could have given this one a boost. (11/1/13)