Enders Game

When I was a kid I remember watching the movie Cloak and Dagger and how that inspired me to be more like that little kid; running from spies and outwitting evil old people with their dentures. Then of course there was The Last Starfighter; I felt like I had so much in common with Alex Rogan, his being stuck in a small town, his love for video games, and his love for busty brunettes. So naturally I was hoping for an alien that looked like Louis Gossett Jr to come down and recruit me to fight in an intergalactic battle to save the Earth! But alas none of this actually happened with the exception of me not trusting old people. Oh well, I’m still holding out hope that one day I’ll ride off into the sunset (actually it was morning)to Tears for Fears, with my hot new girlfriend, in my brand new Winnebago, that I won by cheating a potato chips contest. If you haven’t seen real Genius, do yourself a favor and do so.

As I have grown older, my heroes have changed quite a bit. Now I want be scrawny hipsters who chain smoke, moan in a mic on stage, and bang busty brunettes who are covered in tattoos. This does nothing to refute my theory that children are actually smarter than adults. So with that said, I saw that they were finally making an Enders Game movie and I immediately dismissed it because I have no desire to be a pre teen kid who plays video games to save the world. Again, I realize that with each line I type, I make myself seem dumber and dumber. But whatever, pre-teens have curfews and pre mature sexting issues; I don’t want any part of that!

I never actually got around to reading the book but apparently it holds true to it with the exception of getting a few of the events jumbled around. Enders Game is about the International Military and its training of young adults to help them in the battle against the ant people, an alien species that attacked the Earth a few years earlier in an attempt to colonize. They test the skills of these kids based upon their strategy  in combat video games, mind teasers, and actual combat with fellow students. Ender seems to be head and shoulders above any other student that they’ve ever seen and Harrison Ford has him on the fast track to be the leader of his army to help save our race.

The story itself is fine, it’s just that you can only watch so many training sequences before you start rolling your eyes and wondering if the child actor will actually hit puberty before the movie ends. I kept waiting for his voice to crack as he was training with his female friend who he clearly had a crush on. The live combat trainings where the kids fight in zero gravity was easily the best part of the movie; it looked like they were playing a cooler version of Quittage. But honestly, what doesn’t look cooler than that? The second best part of the movie belonged to Enders nemesis Bonzo. I loved how he walked around calling everyone a  pendejo. How did they get away with this? Was the kid ad-libbing or did some white guys really write this for the Spanish character?

In the end I have to rate this movie as pretty WEAK mainly because the director sucks. It was far from inspirational, all of the acting was sub par to ok at best, and there weren’t any cool one liners. Why not wait for J.J. Abrams to become available and recruit some real actors. I know Harrison Ford used to be cool but at this point he’s basically a talking head on a donor’s body.