Ender's Game

It's hard to talk about Ender's Game because I honestly don't know where to start.

I wrote a little about it on my librarian blog (you can read it here if you like), mostly addressing how I felt about Orson Scott Card, the book, and going to see the movie. I always intended to see the film, no matter how I felt about OSC; when I bought my ticket, I donated to the Human Rights Campaign as well. But I've been excited about this movie since the first trailer was released; it was a really well done trailer, managing to touch on the treatment of the kids in battle school, the characterization of Ender, and the mystery of Mazer Rackham without actually saying much of anything. It looked good. The casting was good. I had no reason to be anything other than optimistic.

To say the movie didn't deliver is an understatement.

Ender commands a really cool looking, but ultimately superficial, space battle

You can't be a book lover and a movie lover without running into the adaptation problem from time to time - books get adapted into movies all the time, and for the most part I enjoy them as a different mode of telling the same story. I try not to get hung up on small inaccuracies or changes made, because things inevitably have to change when moving from one medium to another. This was not the problem with Ender's Game. The problem with Ender's Game is that every change made, every omission, every alteration, fundamentally changed the tone and meaning of the story, so that by the time it's all wrapping up, you're left with a completely different message than the book offers.

From the very first scenes, which whip past you so fast it's almost impossible to digest them, I knew we were in trouble - all the key scenes were there, but presented in a manner that felt like the writers said "Okay, these moments are important, we have to include them," but without any understanding of why they were important. As a result, emotionally weighty moments from the book fall flat or feel goofy, because there's no context or buildup or anything to give them their importance. The scenes are presented almost in a vacuum, because the director has never taken the time to show you why they matter.

The "showing versus telling" is a problem here. Gavin Hood, the director, has pretty much decided that information has to be spoon-fed to the audience via voice-over or info dump by Ford, even when the telling contradicts what little he takes the time to show us. Every important development in Battle School is compressed into two battles, in ways that mean the audience has to be told why they are important - exposition which doesn't make the visual make sense, by the way. Like other big visuals (which do look stunning, I have to say), Battle School loses a lot of coherency for the sake of making a big special effects splash. You get the feeling that some things were changed simply for the sake of including those special effects.

I will say I enjoyed the acting, for the most part - Harrison Ford was perfect at getting Graff's gruffness, but also showing the real affection he develops for Ender. Ben Kingsley is great at Mazer Rackham, although his accent coasted just this side of incomprehensible. The place where the acting breaks down is with the kids, but I'm not quite willing to place all the blame on them - I've seen and loved Hailee Steinfield, Abigail Breslin and Asa Butterfield in other films. They are weak in Ender because the writing and the direction are weak, because the emotions and tone are wrong. Ford and Kingsley are great actors with years of experience under their belts, and actors of that caliber can elevate weak material (which they are absolutely doing here). Steinfeld and Butterfield simply don't have the experience; they needed more help from the script and the director, which they clearly weren't getting.

I can't really tell you how much I wanted to like this movie. I absolutely do not think the story is unfilmable - but you have to start with filmmakers that understand the material they're working with. There was a message in Hood's film, but it wasn't the message of the Ender's Game novel...and his Ender is not the Ender I grew up with.

A Reaffirmation on why I love movies

I love movies.

I love them because they're transportive, because they're sentimental, because they're exciting.  I love them because they tell you so much about the people who make them.  I love them because I can watch the same one, over and over, and continue to get something back from it.  I love how they move me.  I love everything about them.

And apparently so does Martin Scorsese.

Hugo is a giant love letter to cinema.  Affection saturates every frame.  Set against the lush backdrop of Paris in winter, there is not a moment of this film that fails to remind you how powerful movies are and how deeply they resonate with people.  It starts as a mystery: Hugo, an achingly young boy who lives orphaned in the walls of a train station taking care of the clocks, is trying to fix a small automaton, a project originally started by his father.  Fixing the automaton is how Hugo stays connected to his father; he is convinced that, once functional, the writing machine will reveal a hidden message from the deceased Monsieur Cabret.

To fix the machine Hugo steals bits of clockwork from George (Ben Kingsley), who owns a toy shop in the train station; his god-daughter is Isabelle, enchanted with the idea of the great adventure and loquacious from devouring every book she can get her hands on.  She meets Hugo when he's caught by George and has his notebook (full of mechanical sketches done by his father) taken from him by the older man.  Working together, Hugo and Isabelle begin to discover that the automaton is more than it seems and may help George re-discover his purpose in life.  (I won't tell you who George is, if you're trying to preserve the surprise, although IMDB has his full name listed.  If you're interested in the real person Kingsley is portraying, click here.)

I'm not the first person to use the phrase "love letter to film" in description of Hugo, and I use it now because it's the only phrase I can think of that encompasses the beauty and poetry of this film.  Scorsese gives us a symphony of light and clockwork, punctuated by gusts of steam from passing trains and the snowy streets of Paris.  Visually this movie is stunning: the train station is all warm, golden light, framed by the faces of clocks and ornate iron grates.  Paris is blue and white winter, with the lights of the city (and especially the Eiffel Tower) picked out like stars in the sweeping shots of the city.

Asa Butterfield as our titular hero has huge blue eyes that break your heart in nearly every shot.  He and Chloe Moretz (as Isabelle) are the focus of the film, and they do an excellent job of the heavy lifting.  I'm always ready to simply accept the job that child actors do in films, and when a young person comes along who can actually carry his scenes next to a veteran like Kingsley I'm properly impressed; both Butterfield and Moretz pull their roles off beautifully.  Moretz should start winning awards any day now, if she continues doing this well.

It was interesting to me that Scorsese chose to do a movie that's essentially an ode to silent film and the history of film in 3D; I understand now, I think.  We get scenes from some of the earliest films made, and to think about how far the film industry has progressed since those first efforts is really breathtaking.  About 98% of the time I think 3D is poorly done and completely unnecessary; here, it's beautiful and thought-provoking.  The early filmmakers were inventing the wheel that Hollywood keeps trying to re-imagine, and every once in a while a film comes along that shows you not only a new way to build that whee, but a whole new purpose for it you could never have imagined.  Hugo is this kind of movie.

Go see it.  You won't be disappointed, I promise.