I was unaware of how popular this series of Orson Scott Card books has been over the years — enough to spawn a total of thirteen titles — but the premise seems like a natural for the movies.  At least as movies for very young audiences.  After all, Ender Wiggins (Asa Butterfield) is just twelve or thirteen when he is counted upon to save the world.

The premise of training children in the art of interstellar warfare because of their intuitive reason seems theoretically plausible, although the cynic in me realizes that the age of the protagonists is exactly what movie studios wish to harvest.  The film does a nice job of delineating just how difficult it would be for the chosen children to manage their emotions and control bullying from virtually everyone around them.

Gavin Hood’s movie is solid but unspectacular creating a future brimming with a doomsday threat, and shaping an unusual response to it.  Where it misses the mark is not in its training sequences, which are like video games come to life, but in a couple of weird dream sequences which look silly but have supreme importance, and at the climax, which is intentionally flat dramatically.  The story sort of demands this approach, but it certainly isn’t satisfying.

One element surfaces to become particularly engrossing, which is that perhaps the aliens who have invaded once do not actually intend to attack again.  When this issue is raised I sat and wondered just how the ruling government could have failed to at least try to communicate with the insect invaders.  Perhaps Card’s books go further in indicating mankind’s nature to fight before diplomacy, but in the film’s context it just seems especially wrong-headed not to at least try to make contact.

Ultimately, the movie just never seems fully developed, either in its narrative, nor its dramatic potential.  The performers are fine and Ben Kingsley’s makeup is terrific, yet the film fails to excite.  ☆ ☆.  21 November 2013.