Ender's Game

Ender’s Game

Sometimes I still find myself stunned at how far visual components have evolved in cinema, the craftsmanship is noticeable and the attention to detail is impressive, Ender’s Game is visually, very well crafted and fun to watch. Ender’s Game is an Us vs. Them, military, shoot em up type of film, based in the future and Earth’s military is preparing for another attack from an alien species. Ender, a stand out student in battle school is exploited for his skills in simulated combat, except the military doesn’t let Ender know that his simulated kills are real. Lies, deception and all the other great qualities you would expect from an international military. This movie is very prevalent in our current times when you compare to drone warfare which is currently a hot topic, the detachment from a reality based fight into a video game type battle; adding a strange new psychological twist into combat, as if it needs another one. One aspect of this is when Ender finds out that his kills were real, he is regarded as a hero but he now views himself as just a killer, a savage. Seems like a lot of responsibility and pressure for a child to handle. This is another interesting aspect of this film, the exploitation of a child in order to gain an advantage over the aliens without him really understanding his own actions. Of course the movie exaggerates this idea to the extreme of combat but we are doing this to our children, some parents strip the most important developmental years of their child’s life away and replace it with over the top expectations, rehearsals, practice and tests. Movies like Ender’s Game are so interesting because they take some of the most uncomfortable aspects of our own society and blow them up to show them to us in this nicely package product, the same could be said about Hunger Games as well. And that’s what I really like about this film is that it went beyond entertainment and had some good social thought incorporated into it, giving the viewer the opportunity to think about larger social problems, instead of being just an action packed, eye candy flick.