ENDER'S GAME (2013)

ENDER’S GAME (2013). Gavin Hood, dir., script, from the novel by Orson Scott Card (Card is also one of eight producers). Sean Haworth and Ben Procter, prod. design. USA: Summit (“Presents”: prod. and dist.), 2013. See IMDb for complex production and distribution arrangements.

More so than the novel — unless one has a truly excellent visual imagination — the film shows young Ender in high-tech contexts both containing and invasive: space craft, implants, physical surveillance, computer-game-mediated invasion of thoughts and fantasy life, etc. Much of the game and military technology is downright thrilling; other images are disturbing: Ender and the other conscripts — just how free they are to resign is ambiguous — are children caught inside a literalized planet-wide military-industrial-cybernetic complex. Of great interest is the visual comparison and contrast, with a good deal of comparison, of the humans and our constructions and the insectoid enemy Formics and what they have made: Formic spacecraft and human drone spacecraft, rows of humans with face-covering helmets operating cybernetic battle stations — and very much figurative “drones” in the climactic battle directed by Ender, which parallels Ender and the Formic Queen. Whatever the politics of O. S. Card, ENDER’S GAME (2013) is important viewing for the human/machine interface.

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/XI/13