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

HUGO

Paramount Pictures

Rated PG

Running time: 127 Minutes



In Paramount Pictures Hugo, Hugo Cabret, Asa Butterfield, is an orphan trying to survive as he makes his home amongst the tower clocks of a busy 1930's Parisian train station. While trying to survive in the train station community by stealing food from the station's dining establishments, as well as maintaining the complicated tower clocks that his drunken uncle had intrusted him to, Butterfield tries to repair an automaton that he has inherited from his dead father to find meaning in Butterfield's life.

Based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, this is a wonderful family movie about an orphaned boy whose life is intertwined with a magician toy booth owner at the train station, Ben Kingsley - who just happens to be filmmaker Georges Méliès.

With Butterfield being from a family of clock-makers, Butterfield steals intricate mechanism parts from Kingsley in order to fix the automaton Butterfield and his dad Jude Law discovered in a museum. Convinced the automaton contains a secret message from his late father Law, Butterfield is determined to fix the writing/drawing automaton to discover the message his father might have put in it. When Kingsley catches Butterfield stealing a mechanical mouse from him, Kingsley takes Butterfield's father's notebook from him. Determined to get the notebook back, Butterfield convinces Kingsley's goddaughter Chloë Grace Moretz - who loves a secret and is looking to have an adventure - to get Law's notebook back for him. Butterfield then realizes that Moretz's necklace key is the key that unlocks Butterfield's automaton.

This film is basically two movies, one of the children-oriented movie with orphan Butterfield living amongst the clock towers of the busy train station in the city of Paris - while he searches for parts to fix his drawing automaton. Butterfield also tries to keep out of the clutches of the orphaned lamed Station inspector Sacha Baron Cohen, who was wounded during World War 1, as well as keeping away from Cohen's dog. The other movie about Hugo is one of filmmaker Méliès as the children discover who Moretz's godfather really is. In fact the film very easily could have been called Georges, as the film spends such a great amount of time on Méliès life. What is great about a movie about Méliès is that Producer/Director Martin Scorsese actually had footage of Méliès films, especially of Méliès most famous film A Trip to the Moon.

I saw A Trip to the Moon years ago - but in black and white. Hugo actually used the hand-colored footage that was recently found in a barn in France in 2002, which makes those film clips of A Trip to the Moon even more magical with the film clips being hand-colored like that. Since Méliès was a stage magician, he pioneered the use of the practical stage special effects to use for his short films - as compared to the heavily detailed computer graphic effects of today. The opening shot was of a computer graphic zoom/dolly, which made me think that the movie was going to be a computer graphics movie instead of a live-action movie - until the shot stopped at a closeup of Butterfield. I especially felt the movie was going to be a computer graphics film after I had just seen the trailer for The Adventures of Tintin just before the movie Hugo began. When you compare a computer graphics shot like that opening shot of the movie - to the primitive effects Méliès used to do in his short films, it is awe-inspiring to see what kind of film magic Méliès used to do at the movie industry's infancy. Méliès was such a pioneer of the movie industry in his time, that he is regarded as "The Father of Special Effects."

Scorsese usually makes hard-core period piece ethnic New York films, so although a child fantasy-like film is more a style for Steven Spielberg rather than a Scorsese film, this being a period Parisian film in a crowded train station was up his alley as Scorsese deals with the period and the crowded train station. You can see Scorsese's idolism for film pioneer Georges Méliès.

This film was also shot in 3D and should be seen in 3D. As it was shot in 3D, the 3D effects are much more believable and impressive than a 2D film converted to 3D. There was a closeup of Kingsley at the end of the movie that I noticed that, instead of being a flat closeup shot with a telephoto lens usually done with a 2D film, the closeup was a 3D closeup of Kingsley's face. I normally do not notice closeups in 3D as they are usually flat. It makes me wish I paid more attention to the closeups in the rest of the movie to see if they were also in 3D. This is what a 3D film should look like, especially when shot by a filmmaker like Scorsese. Considering that this is Scorsese's first 3D film, the film is amazing. The various clockworks mechanisms shown throughout the film are especially graphic in 3D.

Rated PG for violence. Running time: 127 Minutes.



Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

Pancho's Movie Reviews