Ender's Game (Gavin Hood, 2013)

[colinr0380]

Spoilers:

I'll be interested to see how it fares on repeated viewings but for now I was extremely pleasantly surprised by Ender's Game, being unfamiliar with the Orson Scott Card novel (if nothing else, this has gotten me interested in reading more of his work). This is also a perfect film to segue from the War films list into a potential Sci-fi list with, given that it includes all of the shared archetypal elements of loyalty to your squad, training sequences, a focus on the trials of leadership and literally dehumanised enemies.

The whole story of alien invasion and children being rather brutally put through boot camp to fight back and save the Earth plays for the majority of the film as a non-satirical, extremely straight faced, teen oriented Starship Troopers (to such an extent that at the 3/4 mark I was on the edge of my seat about whether I would end up loving or hating the film, and excited that even at such a late stage that everything was still in the lap of the film to either succeed or fail to live up to my expectations!) but eventually becomes just as devastating, if not more so, in its implications. It is fascinating to me that it has only taken Hollywood sixteen or so years to finally come up with something to rival Starship Troopers!

I particularly liked that the main preoccupations of the film are on the growth into leadership by standing up to bullies, thinking and planning for yourself even against orders and being able to plan on the fly. Yet the film also creates a fascinating contradiction of seemingly only being able to be an effective leader when you are single minded in your goals, able to sacrifice others (including yourself) to achieve your victory. Is it actually a requirement to have people (superiors, colleagues, squad mates, the entire military system itself) surrounding you who can help to hinder you from seeing anything that might distract you functioning in your laser-focused, single-minded goal?

It also provides an extremely effective moral lesson of the dangers of failing to be able to distinguish between war games (or video games) and reality - not entirely dangers on a 'loss of individual morality' level (the games actually seem to heighten engagement for our teen characters), but on the ways that an aptitude for game systems can be exploited and treated like a transferable skill for any interchangable conflict.

I especially liked that violent war games are fully legitimised in this society, but it is the more mental, problem solving ones that could potentially cause the most damage to a warrior's well being, because it makes you think differently about a problem, not just about the most effective way to deal with a wave of enemies! (I especially like the way that the problem gets solved by the crudest of means! As well as this 'mind game' seeming to be the filmmaker's nod to the current trend of Harry Potter, Jack The Giant Killer-style fantasy trends with all of their terrible CG characters!)

I also liked the 'empathy for the enemy' theme as well, which ties in beautifully with the fear of/abandonment to latent violence that our hero feels seething within himself, and sees expressed by other family members and on a more abstracted, intellectualised (at least seemingly so) wider level by his society he is growing up in. Bizarrely for a teen oriented blockbuster sci-fi film, this theme most reminded me of the very similar character conflicts in Only God Forgives!

In terms of technique on show, I particularly wanted to point up the beautifully done hypersleep sequence of intercutting between the slow push in on Ender asleep in his tube (with its numbers flashing past on it) and the sped up interstellar travel to the alien planet. This is not so much an entirely new technique (seemingly all sci-fi films have hypersleep tubes and Doctor Who-style stargate sequences), but I loved the sense of propulsion into the final act of the film that this sequence provided, as well as the 'fast motion-slow push in' intercutting creating a sense of events moving quickly against a darker sense of apprehensive foreboding. As well of Ender operating at a different kind of mental speed to everyone and everything else.

The film beautifully plays on Harrison Ford's gruff father figure persona. I think this might have been the best thing that he has been in since K19: The Widowmaker. I can even somewhat overlook Ben Kinglsey playing a half-Maori character! (!?!?!?!?....!?!?...!?!?) since, well, you know, it is the future and anything is possible, I guess!

(Incidentally I love that the regularly repeated, turned into propaganda video footage of Kinglsey's character repelling the alien invasion decades previously, turning him into Earth's greatest war hero, plays almost exactly like Randy Quaid's victorious and heroic pilot moment in Independence Day! I wonder if that was meant to be an intentional nod to the earlier film, or whether flying a plane into the exhaust of an alien mothership is just one of those things that looks similar however you try to film it? Either way, I found that highly amusing!)

Also, in this post-Twilight, post-Hunger Games, post-Harry Potter world of teen dramas taking place in genre films, I particularly liked that this film throws in all of the elements but carefully avoids the temptation of a love story (or God forbid, a love triangle! ). There is a moment very near to the end of the film that is almost tailor made for a grand first-last kiss goodbye, but the relationship stays on a more professional level, and in some ways ends up being all the more powerful for it.

[jbeall]

The original books are very much (even moreso than the movie) about Ender's relationship with his siblings. His relationship with Peter is relegated to the back burner here.

But yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by the film adaptation. There's a huge emotional swing from the cold and calculating aspects of Ender's personality to the weight of his guilt at the end, but it doesn't feel out of place or forced, and that's a very difficult transition to navigate given the genre constraints imposed by the action sequences. I suppose that's also what made the books so enjoyable back when I was a teenager; now I need to go back and see if they still hold up.

[movielocke]

The books, which lend me half of this username, are ones that were very important to me in my teenage years. They're well designed to be seductive and flattering to adolescent mind, particularly if you think yourself smart, misunderstood and lonely. I thought the film was well made enough, it needed some breathing space in a few places, so many attempts were lovingly made to include every iconic scene from the books that the pacing felt a little breathless most of the time and occasionally left the film feeling a little incoherent. For me, the best parts of the movie were when Gavin Hood discarded Card's rather nonsensical/academic understanding of military environments for the more realistic feeling additions, such as the way he handled Dap and all the bootcamp elements.

I thought the themes were well handled, the text and subtext came through and overall the film was a success, it manages to mute some of the more disturbing elements of the subtexts by minorly changing the contexts.

SpoilerShow

My views have drifted over the years on the book itself, because the book's denouement does such a masterful job of inverting the victim and perpetrator, in fact even though Card builds up Ender as history's greatest killer, he manages to make him innocent of killing. It's quite amazing, Ender becomes Anti-Christ and Christ unified at the end of the book, he brings apocalypse in his left hand and destroys their world, and he brings resurrection in his right hand with promising their species a new life and a new planet. Only he has the ability to destroy, only he is empowered with the ability to save. It's quite amazing. And morally it's quite toxic.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This paper is probably the best piece of scholarship on Ender's Game, and it carefully dissects the amazing way that Card uses plot and characterization to make the reader complicit in and agreeable to genocide and murder. Remember, Card foreshadows the destruction of the buggers early on, twice having Ender murder, and twice engineering him into 'innocence' from his actions. Remember, Card says it is okay Ender murders Stilson, the boy in the very beginning of the film and movie, because Ender wanted to use the murder to teach a lesson to the other boys, a lesson to leave him alone. It's a very good reason for murder, making people terrified of you. Ender also uses the same strategy in murdering Stilson--preemptive attack, with immediate extreme unexpected escalation to the nth degree--that he uses against the buggers.

This is one of my favorite parts of the essay:

I do not make the allusion to Christ casually. The figure of Christ, like that of Hitler, comes up briefly in Ender’s Game, and the associations it calls up are revealing. When Ender’s friend Alai points out that his habitual salute to Ender, “salaam,” means “peace be unto you”, an image immediately leaps into Ender’s mind. He recalls his mother quoting Jesus from the gospels.

“’Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ Ender had pictured his mother piercing Peter the Terrible with a bloody rapier, and the words had stayed in his mind along with the image.” (p. 187)

The word “peace” calls to Ender’s mind not the Prince of Peace, not the Jesus of turning the other cheek, not the Jesus who stayed his apostle’s hand when the apostle attacked the soldier who came to take Jesus in the garden. “Peace be unto you” evokes in Ender an image of murderous revenge against his personal tormenter: the savior as righteous killer.

Graff’s judgment on the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson clarifies Card’s definition of a killer. Presumably, someone can kill hundreds, thousands, even billions (Ender eventually “kills” an entire race) and not be a killer. A killer is motivated by rage or by selfish motives. To be a killer you must intend to kill someone. And even if you do intend to kill, you are still innocent if you do it for a larger reason, “selflessly,” without personal motives. And if you feel bad about being forced into doing it.

...Goodness is not a matter of acts, but of intentions, an inherent quality independent of what one does. “I don’t really think it’s true that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Card stated in a 2002 interview.9 “Good people trying to do good usually find a way to muddle through. What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good. They’re not good at it, they don’t have any instinct for it, and they’re willing to do a lot of damage along the way.” The import of this statement is that there are some people who are good before they act, and some others who are bad before they act, and that goodness or badness is exhibited in their actions. These "bad" people can’t do good, and “good” people can’t do bad.

Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that person’s virtue.

The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actor’s motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people.

...

Ender identifies Stryka’s real motivation (which Ender knows but she does not) as a fear of the stranger. In this case the stranger is not the aliens exterminated by Ender, but Ender himself. Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.

Given the recent loud complaints in the NYT that opponents of gay marriage are now misunderstood victims of others' fear and prejudice, that last bit especially struck me tonight, while rereading the essay.

[colinr0380]

There's a huge emotional swing from the cold and calculating aspects of Ender's personality to the weight of his guilt at the end, but it doesn't feel out of place or forced, and that's a very difficult transition to navigate given the genre constraints imposed by the action sequences.

SpoilerShow

I particularly liked the delicately handled way of fracturing the final action sequence (emphasising the distanciation of the war into pure images on a screen), which denies the pleasure of the climax just as it reaches it, recontextualises then throws the imagery at both audience and characters again, daring them to have the same reaction.

It is a bit reductive to boil things down to being a 9/11 allegory, but there does seem to be a notion there of witnessing devastation by proxy through a mediated experience (including the scariest part being when the authority figures themselves seem to be a little ruffled by what they are witnessing) versus firsthand witnessing that is quite a daring one. See also the 'doctored footage' of the Kingsley mission which turns a fluke into a propaganda victory, something which itself could contain veiled allusions to the Jessica Lynch POW rescue in Iraq.

It was interesting to read up a synopsis of the book yesterday and find out about all of the material with the brother. It seems like that is all taking the form of writing kind of Enlightenment-era treatises and that this only gets emphasised more in the sequel (I've also softened a bit on Ben Kingsley's "speaking for the dead" tattoos now that I know they have a particular thematic resonance, perhaps one of the few in the film, to this material).

That essay is a great read too, although I can understand why the religious stuff was almost completely removed for a wide release film (though I did like Ender's slightly ambivalent non-response to the one "salaam alaikum" that is in the film!) and the film effectively gets across brutal violence without having to move into murder territory, leaving the fates of the injured hanging somewhat in the balance, despite comments that they're not going to die (by the end of the film, it is difficult to believe in anything having been a truthful statement, just expedient ones).

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I must admit that during the film itself, particularly during that short but significant ice attack sequence, that I'd thought to myself: "If the aliens invaded for water, why not just destroy the water-bearing asteroids for the aliens rather than destroying their ships, and then everyone is happy? Or better yet, bring a peace offering of ships containing water from Earth and some sort of sci-fi water-synthesising machines?", but then as Bernard says, "I don't think Graff wants us to negotiate", which might work in a simulation built entirely around one objective with a defined win and failure state, but not in the real world where a more unorthodox approach can usually reap benefits.

Anyway, since all war films seem inevitably to have to come back to World War Two, I ended up thinking of Ender as quite similar to Bomber Harris. Harris was conscious of his role throughout, leaving him in somewhat of a better position than Ender, but presumably he also (perhaps not until later) had to realise he was at the mercy of history to interpret his actions. Maybe also to turn him into a convenient single hate figure, thereby exonerating everyone else surrounding him (up to the society itself) of shared culpability.

[captveg]

I re-read the original four book Ender arc of the series before seeing the movie last Fall (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind) and found that Speaker still holds up as my favorite, precisely because it removes the idea in Ender's Game that Ender's actions in killing - while shaped by many factors - are excused. The written far later Ender in Exile - which chronologically takes place between EG and SftD while bridging elements from the Shadow series of novels - also helps in this regard with Ender allowing himself to be violently attacked to instill this lesson into his attacker before he goes down the same path Ender did.

Anyone who likes the movie to the degree you do, Colin, should definitely read both EG/SftD at the least, IMO.

[jbeall]

Just to second the recommendation for Speaker for the Dead, which is my favorite Ender book. I felt the third book dropped off a bit; it's not bad, but those first two books were just so good. However, I stopped after Xenophobia, so can't speak to any of the other Ender books, including those about Bean, etc.

[captveg]

Xenocide

The Shadow series is fine enough. They get really heavily into the political fallout of the post-xenocide of the Buggers, which can be too stilted, IMO, but they are decent reads.

[jbeall]

D'oh!!! Sorry for the brain-fart.

Getting old and forgetting stuff sucks. Just re-reading info about the series, and remembered that I read Children of the Mind, too. I'm sure the Shadow books are fine, but at the conclusion of Ender's character arc, I was ready to move on to other books in my literary kevyip pile.

[movielocke]

If you like Speaker for the Dead (my favorite of the cycle as well), you guys should all read The Darkness that Comes Before, it's a Nietzschean twist on Lord of the Rings & Dune by way of the crusades with the tone of Cormac McCarthy. The author describes his protagonist as searching for meaninglessness in an inherently meaningful world.

[colinr0380]

I was just listening to the Crate & Crowbar videogaming podcast (episode 38) and during their listener questions segment they had a great discussion about arbitrary restrictions in games and whether giving players absolute choice in their actions is not really a goal to be aimed for, rather it stressed the importance of having a game designer to create, define and in some ways curate an experience for the player to have. That brought to mind Ender's Game in a particular way:

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...but then as Bernard says, "I don't think Graff wants us to negotiate", which might work in a simulation built entirely around one objective with a defined win and failure state, but not in the real world where a more unorthodox approach can usually reap benefits.

This gets into an interesting result of game design: that rather than players becoming emotionless monsters, even the most violent games can paradoxically often inspire more empathy, as at their most basic level a player is trying to work out how someone else wants them to interact with a system in order to achieve a defined goal. That goal might be a violent, amoral or outright cruel one (see for instance the recent controversy about the GTA V torture scene), but responsibility is perhaps better placed onto those who have created and curated the experience (including narrowing down the options to force a particular outcome) rather than the player who is simply trying to work out what the game intends from them, or for them to be.

Although, back to the political ideas, that itself could be seen as another form of problematic abdication of responsibility on the part of anyone who expects to be purely just a neutral observer or passive consumer of content, thinking that they have no responsibility or role to play in interactions with any system.

[lazier than a toad]

Have you played / seen someone play The Stanley Parable Mod for Half Life 2? This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Se7XMEhFU of someone playing it really explores the arbitrary restrictions placed on gamers and the ways designers create and restrict the gaming experience through a narrative / narrator, as well as how that affects the player (in a fun way though.)

[warren oates]

The best thing I've ever read about these kinds of issues is Tom Bissell's book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

[colinr0380]

I hadn't played the original version of The Stanley Parable, so that video was very interesting! The Errant Signal series also has a great dissection of The Stanley Parable's recent commercial remake.