Ender's Game (2013)

You know, some people, when they try to justify why video games are good for them, they just make a long-winded self-important rant on Facebook, maybe complete with one of those greeting card memes. Well, the director of Wolverine: Origins (always a reliable pedigree) took that just a few steps further and made a multi-million dollar special effect jerk-off movie just to prove that. Wow. Couldn’t have just stuck to Facebook, huh?

Director: Gavin Hood

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford

IMDb

Before I go any further, no, I haven’t read the book, and no, I’m not going to bother letting that ruin this review. Because this movie sucks. It’s a pretentious, bloated mess that thinks it’s way more than it is and I’m sick of it. I don’t see a point in beating around the bush. No...I just see a point in needlessly drawing this whole charade out with play-by-play descriptions of things I could sum up in a fourth of the time.

……………..

The movie begins in a fashion guaranteed to make me want to turn off any movie immediately - a goofy looking space battle like something out of a childish RPG, told in super-fast fashion with no room for drama or background story - but I guess those aren’t that important when you have SUPER COOL LASERS and shiiiiiiit!

Apparently this is a future world where the military relies on children to fight in the military for them. Why? Did Obama’s drone program just not work out so this was the most viable alternative?

Then we get main character Ender, played by Asa Butterfield. I know it’s tough on kid actors, 99% of the time because - let’s be frank here - nobody really knows how to fucking write kids anymore in movies. But this character is just bad. There’s no other word. The performance isn’t that much better - he’s constantly wooden and flat, with basically no emotion at all. Maybe it’s the way the character is supposed to be, I dunno, but as a way of trying to get us invested in the character, it failed for me.

Don't get me wrong; bullying sucks, but the way this kid acts is kinda asking for it a little bit.

His thing is, he gets picked on a lot by bullies! I can’t imagine why when he beats them in Battleship and then makes stiff, snobby sounding rants about it afterward that would make even the characters from the Big Bang Theory want to clobber him.

There’s also Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, whose performance in this movie makes Indiana Jones 4 look like an impassioned, devoted career performance done out of a love for the art of acting. He’s terrible in this. He never sounds like he gives a crap. But to be fair, how could you when you’re handed a character who has about half of one dimension - no personality save for monotone shouting and “rah rah” speeches. Like a high school football coach run through a Han Solo filter, then whitewashed out completely.

Let's be honest now; this is really just a warm-up for Star Wars VII.

Apparently Graff thinks Ender is some kind of prodigy to lead them in battle, or some shit like that. This is even more confirmed when he sees Ender fight a bunch of kids and nearly kill one of them:

The dead-eyed rage and lack of any compassion or humanity in this kid's face is clearly proof that he is a born leader and the only one who can save us all.

"I have a fossil and I'm not afraid to use it!"

But we see it runs in the family, though, as when he gets home he has to face an incredibly common aspect of sibling rivalry: where his douchebag of a brother makes him put on a goofy alien mask and fight him right there in the room. His brother gets him in a chokehold and nearly kills him. I sure am glad these kids’ parents keep such a close watch on them! Maybe in the future the dominant style of parenting is “out of sight, out of mind.”

I miss when kids just smoked crack after school. It wasn't good, but it was better than...whatever the hell THIS is.

Ender’s sister is also shown; a complete non-entity of a character who just exists to make Ender feel better about himself. Which I guess I can understand, as approximately 80% of the other characters in this fucking thing act unpleasant and rude to him for no damn reason other than “hey! We really need to show some conflict, but we forgot to make characters with any human traits at all! They’re just fuckin’ wooden planks! What should we do?” “Try just making them all shout at one another!” “GENIUS!”

I know I keep reinforcing how poor that kind of writing is in my reviews, but movies keep doing it to begin with. So I have no choice. The sister is maybe even more annoying, as they don't even try to make her have any emotion or character of her own. She just exists to comfort Ender; nothing else.

After dinner, Colonel Graff and his sidekick Major Anderson, played by Viola Davis, arrive at Ender’s house to tell him he’s perfect for their super-special military program because they saw him get in a few fights. His parents don’t seem to give two shits that he’s like 12 and not nearly emotionally developed yet to make such a drastic choice, and send him straight off to Space Military School!

They don’t even make it all the way there yet before the movie begins to indulge in its favorite pastime - telling the audience that Ender (and by extension the movie’s creators for putting him on screen) is the GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD. And frankly even the sliced bread is beginning to pale in comparison!

Yes apparently the zero-G atmosphere in the space ship exists for no damned reason other than for Ender to make some asinine comment about how in space, there is no up or down because it’s all relative. Graff for some reason (I’m guessing all the space-weed he was hitting behind his trailer doors) thinks this is hilarious, and talks about how Ender is “the only one on the ship with a brain.”

"My happy pills are in my right breast pocket. I took a handful right before I came on scene for this shot!"

Gee. That’s pretty sad then, considering how the rest of these kids are also among the smartest in the fucking world. Are they just chopped liver now or something because the oh-so-great and powerful Ender is there? Or is this “military program” really the most desperate thing ever since that creepy guy on OkCupid messaging every girl who has a profile picture and working his way down to the hyper-Christian lady who’s married with five kids and yet still goes on OkCupid?

The space military camp scenes are pretty much no better: adults on ego power trips because their lives are fucking sad, shouting at a bunch of little kids, then Ender gets praised for being so different and cool and wonderful and Jesus-ish for no reason. Repeat until you vomit just like the kids did earlier in that zero gravity spaceship thing:

"I SHOUT AT CHILDREN TO MASK MY OWN CRIPPLING INSECURITIES."

Ender's Game: it makes you vomit.

There’s also battle scenes in this training room place, where the kids wear ridiculous looking space-suits and float around shooting lasers at each other and stuff. My favorite of these scenes is the first one, where the kids are all horsing around shooting each other with stun guns and acting amazed when, BIG SHOCK, their limbs can’t move afterward:

The paraplegics in the audience are rolling in their chairs!

Then the control-freak Freud-bait adults come out and scream at them to stop playing around. I’m just so amazed these children acted like children when we gave them free reign in a battlefield with no rules! The scene ends with them being given some kind of game to play where they shoot each other with the stun guns … you know, exactly like what they were doing before you shouted at them to stop fucking around.

I’m just glad to see military camp hasn’t changed in the future; through a mix of intimidation from adults with self-esteem problems and bullying from other kids, cadets are turned into cold blooded killers. Great job!

There’s also this weird video game he keeps playing where he is a rat who has to run around in a post-apocalyptic landscape and choose cups of poison from an ugly giant:

Insert your own acid trip joke here. I'm too lazy to come up with one. In fact, all my jokes will be like this soon...I won't even write them anymore; I'll just continually ask you to insert your own. THE POWER OF LAZY PREVAILS!

I guess we do get a sort-of explanation from Graff - it’s supposed to “master his emotions” or something and reflect his emotional maturing. Graff is unhappy, though, when Ender’s psychotic brother shows up in the game, as it indicates his emotions are going a different way than what Graff wanted. You mean children who haven't fully developed emotionally yet are unpredictable? Color me shocked, Sherlock fucking Holmes. How’d you come up with THAT brilliant deduction?

Doesn't this poor fuck look like he could use a drink right about now? Somebody make that happen for him.

And again, maybe this whole “using kids for the military” thing ISN’T a good idea?!

Ender keeps on fighting battles, even assembling a team he thinks will do well, until it’s revealed that they WEREN’T really playing a game after all but actually fighting a war against these huge Mothra wannabes that Graff and the other adults have constantly called “the enemy.” Dun dun DUN!!!

So he just walks off the ship and immediately finds this thing right away and negotiates peace with it. How the fuck was there some kind of big war between these bugs and the humans anyway? Did anyone even consider any options beyond "BLOW THEM THE FUCK UP"? I mean it seems like they're pretty easy to get along with so long as you're not sticking guns in their faces or blowing up their home planet. So I guess it really just comes down to one ultimate truth: this whole thing was just another poorly written social commentary on how we act today. Snoooooooore.

Ender ends up leaving the space station and walking to the ship where the main Mothra-alien-thing is, and does the unthinkable by talking to the alien and finding out that all it wants is a place to live without the constant threat of human extermination. So Ender leaves with the alien to help it find a new place to nest its egg. Thus proving that he truly is the smartest and best human being ever in the history of creation, so you should get on your knees and alternatingly bow and suck off the film’s director, who clearly is the One True Messiah for bringing this story to the screen for us mere homo-sapiens to experience.

That’s a bit exaggerated, sure, but you get my point: this whole movie is just so self-involved, masturbatory and revelatory that it’s insufferable. It’s horrible! Every other line is just praising Ender for how Godlike he is and there’s no depth, complexity or humanity to his character. There’s just no sense of real struggle here - Ender is waaaay too perfect, constantly monotone and static, and seems to just exist so adults can point at him and go “Look how perfect this kid is!” He’s not a realistic or interesting character when there’s no sense of who he IS as a person. All you hear about him is what others think about him, and while that MIGHT be an interesting social commentary in a better film, the character isn’t compelling enough to glean much depth or subtlety out of that concept.

I can tell Asa Butterfield tried to bring the emotion out in the character, but the script handwaves away any kind of character development in favor of more “Look how great Ender is!” crap, over and over again. We get it. He’s the fucking Messiah. You can stop hammering that in with all the subtlety of a nuclear war now. It got old in the first ten minutes, and after that it’s so omnipresent and in-your-face that it becomes less a storytelling decision and more a proxy for the creators of the film to wax their own egos until they’re as shiny as a new Cadillac. By talking about how great Ender is, I never got the sense they were telling a story; rather just primping up their own egos for making this movie. It’s lazy, self-important, pretentious, pompous crap.

The rest of the movie isn’t any better - the action isn’t that good, I’m not a fan of the sci-fi aesthetics at all and the pace is either blitzkrieg-fast at the beginning or trudgingly slow for the other two acts. I never read the book, and I’m sure some people will try and tell me I missed the point, but this is just what I got from the film - an alternatingly boring and pretentious story made by people who just wanted to show off and talk about how great they are. If you got something else from it, that’s great, but I really didn’t, and even after seeing this thing twice now, I still couldn’t stay awake without forcing myself to.

So that’s where I stand on this. Just go watch The Hunger Games and its sequel Catching Fire instead if you want a good YA movie.

Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.

The Worst Movies of 2013

So here we are again with the most prestigious time of the year for movies, the end of January. A lavish celebration that touts the best movies of the previous year and recognizes them for the pieces of art that they are. Truly this is a special time for cinema-goers as it really puts together a collection of what is truly most important in the world of films.

What? No, I’m not talking about the Oscars! I’m talking about the Cinema Freaks Best and Worst of the year lists! Get your head in the game. This is the worst movies of 2013. Like last year we’ll start off with disappointments.

Disappointments of 2013

V/H/S 2

The first V/H/S was a cracking, bloodthirsty horror movie with enough energy to power a small city. It was a real retrograde slice of fun and one of the better anthology horror movies out there. This one is the table scraps of that film, mostly relying on silly self-ironic horror comedy, which is a trend I really hope dies out soon. Unfortunately even though this isn't an actual bad film, there's just not much replay value in it, and none of the stories are really very good. I hate to be a cynic, but I am not looking forward to the endless stream of poorly-made sequels to follow this ... because unfortunately, that's how the horror genre seems to work.

Now You See Me

This one, I didn’t have many expectations for exactly, as I had not heard about it and just saw it on a whim. It was fun at first and generally entertaining, if pretty shallow as far as storytelling and characters go. But then the ending came around and ruined the entire thing. Usually that wouldn’t be enough to land a movie on this list, but the ending to this one really did just destroy the entire experience with how completely nonsensical and illogical it was. Sad.

And now with that out of the way, here we are with the absolute worst of the worst; the shittiest movies all year. The ones that will make you cringe. Let’s dig into the worst of 2013.

7. Man of Steel

This doesn’t do anything that the old movies didn’t do better. While I’m not opposed to the idea of a more somber, dark take on the character, the film is limp and lifeless, going through a rote collection of tired cliché – there’s just so little to really get into with this. The action is good, but everything is so mired in every stale modern movie stereotype that it’s tiresome to sit through. From the shaking seizure camerawork to the over-done “gritty” texture that covers everything in the film like a coat of fresh mucus, this is just weak. The story is pretty hollow too – lots of reiterations of the “conflict” the character is going through, plus an utterly boring cast of side characters that ticks every box from the helpless-yet-“strong” heroine to the curt black boss and the helpful father figure, none of them in any way fun to watch. It says a lot that a film in the mode of the original 1970s Superman films would be absolutely original and retro these days, as this kind of action movie has just about reached its boiling point now. Skip it.

6. The Conjuring

Aren’t people getting tired of this bullshit yet? There was nothing original about this, and even less that was interesting. It's just a collection of the same old exorcism tropes you've seen before, and the high production value and acting quality will really make you wish the makers had put that talent to use on something with value. Back in 2005, this kind of thing was at least a little bit interesting with Emily Rose. But like Man of Steel is for action films, this is a contrived and lifeless addition to an over-saturated subset of horror films. This will be the death of horror as we know it.

5. Kick-Ass 2

I may have overstated the quality of the first Kick-Ass a bit. I still like it, but the novelty has kinda worn off in the intervening years. That said, this is just garish. A few funny scenes, but everything is so poorly done and immature in this that it makes the original look Shakespearean in comparison. It’s not the content within, but the execution. This movie is just thrown together with too many plot lines and characters to really work, and the “humor” comes off like a bunch of middle schoolers giggling at toilet humor – it’s really just embarrassing to watch. You will be embarrassed to sit through this.

4. Ender’s Game

If this movie had any more self-fellating I’m-so-important drivel hammered into it, it would practically be an orgy. Every second of this movie is self-indulgent Hollywood pap, and the vast majority of the writing in this movie isn't trying to tell a story; it's trying to show off how great the movie is for simply existing. The acting is some of the worst all year – and even from vets like Harrison Ford – and the story is just mind-numbing. I pretty much hated everything about this.

3. World War Z

Just pure soulless tripe. From the bland characters to the boring storyline, World War Z is just a mess – not to mention the awful camerawork, which is about as good as a five year old with a handheld camera playing ‘tag’ with her friends. If you want to see some shitty modern Left for Dead/Call of Duty FPS game put on screen as a movie, be my guest, but I think putting this much money and time into making that into a movie is just a big waste of time. Imagine if they took the money used to film in all those different locations and put it towards helping the impoverished and war-torn people of some of these places. Wouldn’t that be a novelty?

2. Only God Forgives

Nicholas Winding Refn follows up Drive with a film of far, far less merit. This goes for minimalism with shots held for too long and the characters' scarce dialogue trying to get us to read between the lines, but there is nothing between the lines. Refn wants us to think there is so much symbolism and meaning in every drawn-out pause of the characters just staring blankly at the scenery, but the film is an empty void of meaning. Fortunately, as the critical reception for this movie shows, people are finally starting to see through Refn’s bullshit. The emperor is naked and people are finally starting to pull up the wool over their eyes. And I am thankful for it.

1. You’re Next

Oh my God this is just a nightmare. The fact that the movie wants us to be sucked into the “mystery” of why these abominable unlikable asshole characters are being killed off is a joke – it’s because anyone in their right minds would want to put on shitty animal masks and shoot these miserable people with arrows. And yes, that really is what horror movies in 2013 have been reduced to in terms of plot. I'm sad, too.

This starts off a zero-star movie with bad dialogue, bad acting and bad characters, and just keeps getting worse and worse as it goes on, if you can believe that. No production value, nothing to say with the script, no tension, no scares. Hell, good luck even making out what’s going on; this whole fucking movie is so dark and blurry.

I can’t think of even one redeeming factor. No, movie, a lamb's head mask does not incite fear in the audience. What's next? Are we going to have a horror movie where the killers are dressed like old Nickelodeon cartoon characters? Maybe cereal mascots? The possibilities are endless. And abjectly terrifying. But not in the way that was likely intended.

Tune in tomorrow for the Best Movies of 2013!

All images copyright of their original owners; I do not own any of them.