Film Review - Ender's Game (2013)

Ender's Game is based off the 1985 Sci-Fi novel and stars Asa Butterfield as Ender Wiggin, a gifted young child when it comes to strategic games and who Graff (Harrison Ford) believes is the one to lead the Earth against a deadly alien race that nearly wiped out humanity 50 years before but this will be a very deadly game for Ender to play.

I went into this movie with very mixed feelings as I was not familiar with the source material but at the same time Sci-Fi is a weakness genre of mine so I was convinced to go and check it out, did it deliver?

Actually I thought it did, this was a well made Sci-Fi film with some good action scenes but the film also values character moments as well and as a result, you find yourself really enjoying the story more because you have more of that investment in what happens.

The cast is also very good in their roles with Butterfield really showing that he can more than hold his own in a big film, Ford actually seems to be enjoying himself in a film role and there were times watching him where I went "That's the Harrison we all fell in love with", Viola Davis, Hallee Stenfeld, Abigail Breslin and Ben Kingsley also performed very well and Stenfeld and Butterfield also have a very nice chemistry.

But the real highlight of the film for me is the battle sequences, they were fantastic both in terms of the effects and in the writing in terms of laying out tactics for the fighters ("Accelerate to attack speed and draw their fire away from the Cruisers" from Return of the Jedi to use as an example) and in terms of the battle scenes themselves with the shots of the various fighters swooping to dodge enemy fire, protect their mother ships and more.

Sadly that was also the one area of the film where it fell for me, not in a negative sense I have to say but more the sense of that I was enjoying these scenes so much I wished for them to be longer so they could be more of a proper space battle like the one in Jedi which is 9 minutes of pure excellence and yet with all of this CGI tech we have at our disposal we still haven't seen a good space battle since, a shame but this is only a minor complaint from me about the film.

And so, Ender's Game is a game worth seeing for Sci-Fi fans but non fans of the genre will not find a lot here to interest them and fans of the book should walk out of this one pretty pleased with the result, let's call this one a very nice surprise, 3 out of 5.