Review: Ender's Game

ENDER’S GAME

★★★☆☆

Pre-teen Video Gamer’s Delight

Mini Review:

It’s a futuristic world where the boys (and a couple of girls) are trained to do men’s jobs, and the men watch as kids fight aliens…

Main Review:

What’s with sharp kids who cry at the drop of a hat? Harry Potter cried through his eight films. Even our local superhero Krrish 3 has hazel eyes brimming with tears…Ender sure has a name that would make anyone cry, but as he says, ‘Bean’ isn’t much of a name either.

So it’s the kids who play video games who are selected to save the planet from alien ants. The grown ups are paranoid and want to pre-empt the aliens by attacking first. And the kids are pawns in their game…

It’s predictable stuff we see: combat school bullying, grown ups pushing gifted kids, gifted kids unsure of their powers… But what amazed me is the trivia associated with this movie. All the kids were trained by Cirque Du Soleil so they could perform the battle school training exercises. In fact they trained also at Space Camp and NASA so they could learn to work their zero gravity scenes.

IMDB reports:  To achieve the effect of weightlessness for the actors in the battle room, two rigs were invented for this movie, used to capture zero gravity scenes. First was a lollipop arm, which is like a counter-balance offering a full range of motion. The second innovation was a "people crane." It's a contraption, sort of like the lollipop arm, but put on air pucks so that the effects is like you are floating around in the air.

Now when you read information like this, naturally your respect for the film grows.

The end is predictable too, and you empathize with the kid who has to live with a war on his conscience, but then they slip into sequel alert rather beautifully.

No matter how sweet the boy hero looks in the film, and how cool all the visual effects are, the movie remains a kiddie movie. As I said, pre-teens will enjoy watching this film.


(due to technical troubles on our site www.filmorbit.com, i am posting this review on my personal blog)