ENDER'S GAME

Summit Entertainment

Rated PG-13

Running time: 114 minutes



Click below to watch an Ender's Game movie trailer.



In Summit Entertainment's Ender's Game - Earth had been attacked by aliens, so now Earth is readying soldiers to fight them. These soldiers are children - especially the chosen leader Ender Wiggin/Asa Butterfield.

Directed by Gavin Hood - who plays the giant in the mind game - and Co-Written by Hood, the movie is based on Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game, and is Produced by Card who also wrote the screenplay in order to preserve the vision of his book. This live-action movie of Ender's Game is a study in the near future of how desperate the human race would be if we were trying to prepare ourselves for another invasion. The use of training children from the start with war games instead of normal play with educational kid games is rather sad. Too bad several themes from the book never really got a chance to be developed in the movie as they were concentrating on Ender's/Butterfield's story.

Actually, despite what the trailers may imply, this is Ender's/Butterfield's story. You see Ender/Butterfield going from student to being recruited to Battle School as Mankind's last hope of a military leader against the aliens. You also see the jealousy of the other students for Ender's/Butterfield's brilliance, and I felt for his isolation and his manipulation by Harrison Ford. In a sense, this is the ultimate bully movie as Ender/Butterfield fights back.

While initially I did not think Ben Kingsley's facial tattoos were unnecessary and detracted too much for me from appreciating Kingsley's performance in the movie, the tattoos were explained in the movie as part of his Maori background and I accepted them.

The movie is actually very close to the book. While not everything could not be put in and explored, at least all the major themes were mentioned. The children were more young teenagers from high school instead of the elementary school children from the book however. This is probably due to the fact that you can not do this kind of graphic material with very young children, as well as having the marketing factor of having teen aged stars being in the movie. The videos of the aerial battle with the alien Fomecs used contemporary military fighters, so the alien invasion could have taken place today - and the battles in space were believable too. I like the fact that the U.S. Marines have Ender's Game as recommended reading for lessons in leadership.

Having read the book in college, I have always wondered how they were going to do the zero gravity effects of Battle School - if this would be an animated film or a live action film. As a live-action film, the zero G Battle School scenes in Earth orbit were very believable - especially as the young actors were trained in wire-work by Cirque du Soleil. The performances by the Academy Award Nominee stars Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, Abigail Breslin, Harrison Ford, and Academy Award Winner Ben Kingsley make you get into the characters. I think this is the best military science fiction movie I have seen. As for Ender Wiggin/Asa Butterfield - this is no game.

Rated PG-13 for violence. Running time: 114 Minutes.

Click below to watch another movie trailer of Ender's Game.



Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

 Pancho's Movie Reviews

THE CALL

TriStar Pictures

Rated R

Running time: 94 Minutes



Click below to watch The Call trailer.



In TriStar Pictures The Call, 911 operator Halle Berry receives a call from kidnapping victim Abigail Breslin and must find her.

In this high concept thriller, Berry works in a 911 emergency dispatch center - otherwise known among themselves as "The Hive" - dealing with various 911 calls, from the mundane to the intense. After making a mistake during an intense home intrusion call with teenaged victim Evie Thompson  - a distraught Berry gives up fielding calls and becomes a 911 trainer, giving a jaded view of what being a 911 dispatcher is like to her students. In the middle of the training, rookie operator Jenna Lamia gets a kidnapping call from Breslin - and is too overwhelmed and can not handle the call. Berry takes over the call, doing everything she can to help Breslin - who is locked in the trunk of a car.

After listening to the voice overs of the 911 calls at the beginning of the movie, I liked going behind the scenes of a 911 public-safety answering point (PSAP). I do not recall seeing this much detail with the 911 system before. These are real people dealing with intense situations, thus the necessity of a quiet room to decompress and the availability of psychiatric help if they need it. Berry herself was a wreck while during her research in watching them and said that she could never do this job. Berry having the support from 911 supervisor Roma Maffia in the movie was nice. I never realized that the not knowing of the results at the end of a call would weigh on an operator's mind - but when I think about it, not knowing would weigh on my mind as well.

What I did not like was that the movie went from an intense police procedural with the 911 and police resources - into a Hollywood thriller along the lines of the TV series Profiler during the last act of the movie. While by itself, the last act was good as a thriller and I was pulling for them, it was disappointing to watch stylistically after watching the technical aspects of the rest of the movie. I liked the idea of Berry using the resources of 911 - with the computer programs and communications with the first responders, like police officer Morris Chestnut - and wish that the movie would have taken the 911 resources to the ultimate level. Considering how ingrained cell phones are with people, especially with teenagers, this movie shows the much more important role that phones have in our society.

The manhunt for kidnapper Michael Eklund reminded me of the recent manhunt for former LAPD officer turned killer Christopher Dorner. The movie also reminds me that police officers are people with lives of their own too, especially with the relationship between Chestnut and Berry.

Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 94 Minutes.

Pancho 
All people smile in the same language.