Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2014

Well, it’s a pre-teen war-gamer’s perfect fantasy. Young Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield—Hugo) is forcibly recruited for his uniquely aggressive video-game skills (children are apparently more intuitive) to defend Earth against a second attack by these ant-like alien thingies. To me, having not read the probably better kid-lit source material, this was two hours of repetitive video-game-like training sequences followed by repetitive video-game-like battle sequences, interspersed with a lot of speechifying by Harrison Ford (also Ben Kingsley in a cameo), and all to an intrusive, bombastic score. Snore. (114 min)