Ender's Game

Starship Troopers, Alien, Tron and Star Trek also make up the movie's DNA but the story - a provocative study about the morality of warfare and conflicts of leadership - injects something powerful and new into the familiar 'chosen one' plot trajectory.

The battle scenes are spectacular but lifeless and hard to engage with. We're watching a cascade of computer-game imagery.

It was a bit like standing in a room where someone is playing a video game on a screen and you're not actually taking part in it but you have to watch interminably this game being played and it's just really a bit boring.

Enough people attended Ender's Game last weekend to place it at the top of the box office. But could any of them have known how profoundly unspectacular an experience they were in for?

While the picture loses some plot tension by assuring the viewer that Ender is basically an okay kid, it gains by showing the growth of the boy into his destiny as "the One."

Perfectly satisfactory.

Ender’s Game is a fun, dramatic look that is different and unique for most sci-fi movies. While it follows the basic trope of alien invasion, it quickly turns into a moral dilemma that involves some heavy and complex themes.

Not having read Card’s novel, I couldn’t say whether it was truly “unfilmable,” but what ends up on the screen is indeed “filmable” in that we’ve seen these narrative threads countless times before in science fiction cinema.

A joyless video game experience, complete with levels of increasing difficulty and a main character who never really faces a true conflict.

It is a fairly satisfying bit of science fiction that walks the tricky line of trying to appeal to youth and adults alike. For the most part it succeeds.