Ender's Game: Movie Review

Several years ago, I chanced upon an audio version of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, and I really enjoyed it. The book was published in 1985, but until now it had never been translated into film. Somewhere—I don’t recall whether it was a part of the audio or in print—Orson Scott Card discussed the problems in getting the book onto the big screen. One of the problems was age of the characters. I don’t recall exactly how old they were in the book, but they were young. For this and other reasons, no film version came to pass—until now. It was worth the wait. 

The problem seeing a film adaptation any book that you’ve really enjoyed is that you’re likely to suffer a disappointment. There are exceptions, To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind as a great book and a great movie. And some books probably become better as films. I’m guessing here because I never read the book, but I imagine that The Godfather is better as a film. But the finer the book, the more likely the disappointment in seeing its film adaptation. I can now add Ender’s Game as an exception to this rule. The screenplay sticks closely with the book (as far as I can remember, as it has been several years). Ender’s relationship with Valentine and Peter is not as fully developed—wasn’t Peter on the way to becoming some type of fascist leader?—but on the main points, I think they adhered to the major scenes and themes. The lead (Asa Butterfield) looks like a pre-pubescent boy (if he has any peach fuzz on that face I couldn’t see it). Some of the others were older, and some younger, but we see that Ender and the others  are kids. The premise that kids could be trained more effectively than adults in the complex and intuitive skills required makes sense. The filmmakers have maintained this crucial aspect of Card’s original vision. A child shall lead them—but at what price?

The crucial part of the adaptation is that Ender remains the central and enigmatic character. Ender is at once sensitive and ferocious. (One has to ask, once the testosterone gets turned on, what’s this guy going to be like?) We don’t know where the ferociousness comes from, perhaps the book addressed it—a combination of genetics and having Peter as an older brother? But Valentine helps nurture Ender’s sensitive side. If Ender hadn’t worked as a character, the film wouldn’t have worked, and for this we have to thank the director and young Mr. Butterfield. Others in the cast worked well also, the young actors and the veterans. I must say, however, that I wonder if Harrison Ford doesn’t tire of having to snarl in every movie (although I’m sure that’s what they hire him to do) and Ben Kingsley doesn’t tire of playing a burly, tough heavy (each new role an anti-Gandhi). But both fulfill their roles appropriately.

I read an article from The New Yorker about politics and SF in which author Tim Kreider makes an argument that really resonated with me: politics is about the future*. This strikes me as profound and accurate. Indeed, we might extend that and say that life is about the future. In any event, since politics is about our collective future, the SF genre is well suited to explore politics because of its ability to experiment with future societies. I know of political science courses based on SF literature. (Alas, I was never was able to take the one that was taught at Iowa by one of my profs.) Ender’s Game, both the book and the film, addresses tough political and moral issues (and these two subjects are often combined). An attack by the Formics traumatizes humanity. The task assigned to Ender and his fellow youngsters by the leadership of a seemingly united humanity becomes a project of genocide. I was surprised to hear the term genocide used in the film. The decision to annihilate the Formics before they annihilate humanity has been made at the highest levels. But is this necessary? The question occurs to Ender and to us. The ending leaves us wondering what becomes of Ender and his quest. Is his accomplishment a source of pride or guilt? Wisdom or foolishness? The film doesn’t try to answer the question (perhaps Card does in his later installments in the series), but to have the questions raised encouraged me that a mainstream American SF film can address tough questions. These issues are relevant to decisions made in our world every day. Most recent SF films have disappointed me, with an overemphasis on special effects and loud booms. Don’t get me wrong, FX is great, and I’d love to play in that zero-gravity training room with those stun guns—that would be terrific! But such neat stuff can’t substitute for some gravity of theme, and I’m happy that this film doesn't ignore that ingredient. 

*Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.

P.S. This entire essay is worth reading. 

Colin Wilson 1931-2013

Colin Wilson died on the same day as Nelson Mandela. I've read a couple of appreciations of Wilson. This obituary from The Guardian provides a fair assessment. But while I agree for the most part with these assessments, I want to add a few words of my own. 

I discovered Religion and the Outsider at a used bookshop in Berkley in 1997, when I was in the Bay Area for a deposition. I hadn't known of Wilson, but the title and a quick perusal convinced me to buy it. From that book (which I read not long thereafter), I went on to read The Outsider and some of the others in that cycle. I've also read his New Pathways in Psychology, which started as a biography of Abraham Maslow; however, it soon morphed into a history of modern philosophy and psychology as well as Maslow biography. I found some of this work quite intriguing. He seemed to have a sense of how existentialism works (or might work) other than by serving as a bleak outlook on life. Wilson developed his own theory of the brain and how it focuses on either the near-term or the long-term. He talked about how boredom can slip in when life has no challenge and no immediate goals. In some ways, he anticipates Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and McGilchrist's theory of the two brains. Wilson culled his insight from a journey that went from a mundane car ride to a will-we-or-won't-we-make-it battle against inclement weather. The focus was all. This experience provided him with what he dubbed “the St. Neot margin”. In the focus and intensity the battle against the storm, he identified an antidote to the despair that marked so much of Continental existentialism. He seems more at home with the European thinkers than the English heritage of Locke and Hume through to analytic philosophy.

But Wilson was an autodidact, and this was both his strength and his weakness. He could roam into whatever subject his inquisitive mind desired, but he lacked focus and standards of proof to limit his conclusions. He delved into true crime, the occult, rogue gurus, biographies of fringe figures like Gurdjieff (whom, while fringe, is worthwhile), Jung, and contemporary magicians. He also wrote about Shaw and penned literary criticism. He often repeated himself and seemed undiscerning about evidence. He often concluded in favor of suspect occurrences and practices. He explored subjects with an eye toward his fundamental insight about human consciousness, which didn’t seem to have grown or deepened much. My reading of later Wilson doesn't show much deepening of his initial insights. This became the frustration of reading Wilson. Reinforcement is no doubt worthwhile, but one suspects that he spread himself too thin in writing about the fringe or the macabre.

Besides his insights into human consciousness, I appreciated his deep love of books. Wilson was a school dropout. So when he read, he read because he loved to read. Not assigned to read Shaw, Sartre, Camus, or any other author, he read with genuine enthusiasm. He shared this enthusiasm in his autobiography as a record of reading, The Books in My Life. This book serves as a form of autobiography and as a reflection on important works, such as those of Shaw, whom he admired.

Perhaps someone should publish a “Fundamental Colin Wilson” volume that takes nuggets from his vast body of writing and lays them out so that others can explore them without having to search the junk in his work. Until that time, it's worthwhile to search this eclectic and amateur—but often intriguing—thinker.

News from Berlin by Otto de Kat

When I began News from Berlin I expected something along the lines of Alan Furst (whom I’ve enjoyed), but it turned out to be something slightly different and a bit richer, too. I read this book because de Kat participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival. I’m glad I did. 

Unlike Furst, who follows a central character through the perils of time immediately before and at the beginning of the Second World War, in this novel de Kat focuses on a family. The father is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland, the wife volunteers at a hospital in London, and their adult daughter is married to a member of the German Foreign Ministry. The son-in-law is not a Nazi; in fact, he’s unsympathetic to the Nazi regime and certainly watched by the Gestapo. The novel begins in early June 1941. The war has begun. France fell quickly; Britain just barely survived. The U.S. remains officially on the sidelines while Hitler and Stalin have a non-aggression pact. For the family, life seems balanced if tenuous. But then the daughter passes on a secret to her father about a major German action coming soon. The knowledge becomes like an infectious disease passed (intentionally) from daughter to father to mother, endangering the thin tissue of each receiver’s existence and relationships without reducing (as hoped) the burden on the person passing  on the moral and practical demands that the secret requires of them.

De Kat’s focus, however, is more than espionage and the moral dilemmas of wartime. It also focuses on the members of the family, their relationships with each other and those closest to them. The delicate balance of relationships changes as each comes into contact with the other. New realities reveal themselves and confound the characters perhaps as much as their burdensome secret. History in the family, as in life, intrudes and shapes the present in ways that the characters can’t escape and can only vaguely comprehend. 

Writers like Graham Greene, Eric Amber (I’m now reading another Ambler), and Alan Furst have written a great deal set in this time period. While titanic military and political forces met in epic struggles, individuals and families—at least those lucky enough to live—continue to try to live and maintain a semblance of ordinary life when the time is not ordinary at all. To me, that's what makes this period so fruitful for novelists and historians (such as John Lukacs) and why I’m so drawn to it. Now I add Otto de Kat to the honor role of writers who explore this dark and frightening time not so long ago.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

In Chennai, in perhaps the most organized bookstore that I’ve encountered in India, I came across Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a novel that knew of but had never read. I’d see a screen adaptation with Michael Caine as the lead character Fowler, but other than imagining Caine as Fowler when reading the novel, I don’t have much recollection of the film or recall it having been compelling. But the book is compelling. 

Written between 1953 and 1955, as Indochina (Vietnam) slipped through the grasping fingers of the dying French Empire, the intrepid world-traveler Greene explored the world of the Vietnam, and in writing this novel he foreshadowed the upcoming American involvement. Greene brings America into Vietnam at this very early date in the person of a young man named Pyle. Pyle, fresh from Massachusetts, Harvard, and full of ideas from books, comes in to change Viet Nam, to change it so that it does not embrace the Communist Viet Minh and nor cling to the French colonialists. Pyle imports a belief in a “Third Way” toward “Democracy”. Pyle and Fowler, an older English journalist who is “not involved” in Vietnam but reports on it to his paper back in England, serve as anti-types of one another. Pyle exhibits the naiveté of the American mentality and Fowler the cynicism of the waning European empires. Between them, they also have the enigmatic young Vietnamese woman, Phuong, Fowler’s hope of love and comfort, whom Pyle falls for as well, with all of his youth and innocence. 

A trip to Greeneland finds men (mostly men) living on the edges of war and society, but for all of the searching, we find few heroes or villains. Instead, we find flawed, needy, and puzzled human beings, attending to everything from drink to women to God; sometimes with insight, sometimes in despair. Greene draws his readers into this world so that they feel the fear and uncertainty of his characters. 

However, I should add that while a sense of gloom or despair often mark Greene’s setting, he also displays gems of comedy and social caricature. Greene’s perceptions of Pyle and the other Americans poke a great deal of fun at us, but not without cause, I fear. These moments of levity help keep the reader from falling too deeply into the flawed world and characters that Greene features. 

Did any of the American decision-makers of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations read this novel before taking us so deeply into Vietnam? One wonders what might have happened if JFK had read this novel, or anyone in power with the perspective to see the perils into which we as a nation had ventured. We Americans have a lot of “Pyle” in us, or at least we did back then, when our government, full of adventurers and idealists, thought that it could change the world into our image for it. After Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, perhaps we’ve outgrown that perspective. I’m not sure, but I hope so. 

One can’t leave a Greene novel such as this one without a sense of human frailty and shortcoming and an immense compassion despite it all. If this is in some sense what Greene sought to achieve, then he was one of the most successful of novelists in the 20^th century. 

The Vintage Greene addition that I read includes an introduction written by Zadie Smith that I highly recommend.