Ender's Game

I like Ender Wiggin and I like Asa Butterfield. Can I actually imagine the latter as the former? Just about, I think! To be fair, the lad was definitely up for it, sounding off with "The Enemy's gate is down!" and similar splendidly gung-ho noises on his Twitter-feed when he heard that he'd got the part. And in many ways a young man who's breakthrough was as an unwitting Nazi moppet in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and who then went on to play the young Mordred (as in he who is prophesied to bring King Arthur's empire down in flames) in the BBC's Merlin series, is in many ways inspired casting. From Hugo to Hugo Award? Maybe!

I can also really imagine Harrison Ford as Col Graff. I can actually hear Ford growling out that very first line of dialogue, which opens the book. And it is one the great opening lines of literary science-fiction.

It's a great pity therefore that we're probably not actually going to hear him say it.

Indeed, it's a pity, albeit an inevitable one, that they're not actually making a film of Ender's Game. Indeed, they can't make a film of Ender's Game, for the simple reason that Ender's Game, almost by definition, is unfilmable.

Ender's Game the book starts with a six-year-old boy kicking another child to death.

The kid doing the kicking is the eponymous hero.

It gets progressively more disturbing from then on in.

A film of Ender's Game would be like a sci-fi version of Harry Potter in which the hero really is Slytherin's heir. It's not just Lord of the Flies in space. It's also Reservoir Dogs done by the tweenage cast of Bugsy Malone, only with real mindless violence. The shower scene in Psycho was particularly disturbing in its time because it broke all the rules. Ender's Game's shower scene makes the shower fight in School Ties seem like something out of a children's film by comparison.

In Ender's Game, Orwell's proverbial booted foot stamping down on a human face (only literally!) belongs to a pint-sized Napoleon devil-child who goes on to save the universe largely in a fit of absentmindedness. The British Empire may have been the world's sweetest and most boyish master. In Orson Scott Card's universe the boyish saviour of the galaxy is a focused and unbending little Hitlerjunge who wins every game he plays and defeats and annihilates every enemy who crosses his path.

Suffice it to say then that Ender's Game is not a book that's suitable for children. For all that they'll tell their miniature charges not to judge a book by its cover, it's still astonishing the number of school librarians who complain that the bad language in Ender's Game is "inappropriate" merely because it normally has a picture of a sweet little boy on the front. And an actual film version of Ender's Game would certainly not be suitable for adults either.

Militarism has of course been a mainstay in mainstream sci-fi since the Golden Age of the 1950s, from the dogfights in space in Dan Dare through to those of Star Wars. Throw in a Kwisatz Haderach or two from Dune (George Lucas's other great inspiration) and there's not much else to Ender's Game, at least on the surface. Orson Scott Card merely pushes the envelope further than most in terms of realism and then allows the moral and psychological implications of interplanetary genocide to explore themselves.

My second big misgiving about the upcoming Ender's Game film then is that it's very seldom the case that cult books automatically get made into cult films. For every Blade Runner there are a dozen Dark is Risings and a gazillion Lord of the Ringses. And often, after all, it's not entirely clear what the point of making the film was anyway. Dune was a cult book that gave birth to Star Wars. Ender's Game itself arguably led to The Last Starfighter and War Game. (By the time of the Second Persian Gulf War in 1991, the point that computer games and real wars can be hard to distinguish had quite literally been made to death.) But David Lynch's film version of Dune is to this day one of the great lessons of film history in how not to make a film of a book. Again, Edgar Rice Burrows was one of the great godfathers of modern science-fiction. So what exactly was the point of making a film version of John Carter, when countless films inspired by John Carter (one, two or even three generations down the line) had already been made. Will the new Ender's Game give us space battles better than the ones George Lucas gave us back in the 1970s? I doubt it. Will the Battle School seem more realistic than Starfleet Academy in Star Trek? Maybe not! Is the zero-g stuff going to be more realistic than the zero-g stuff in Apollo 13? Probably not. Is this most epic of books going to be adapted into a film on the same epic scale as 2001: A Space Odyssey? It seems unlikely. Will it even have the same haunting psychological insight as Solaris (either version)? Well, what do you think? We're talking about the man who gave as Wolverine as a kid, after all! (It opened promisingly enough with Troye Sivan in his pyjamas*, but once he'd grown up into Hugh Jackman even the great Aussie hunk himself couldn't quite save it.)

This then is my final point. Ender's Game's strength as a work of literature lies in its morality and psychology. Its starting point is the Battle School, which is a splendid invention and a remarkable feat of science-fiction in and of itself, but it then uses the Battle School to answer an important moral question. Whereas Songmaster pondered the possibility that a wicked man (an evil galactic emperor) can love and be loved (by a boy), Ender's Game asks how a good person (a sweet little boy) can end up doing something worse than anything Hitler ever did. The space marines background is really just window dressing.

So in an age when a crass and corpulent Kiwi can turn the twentieth century's greatest and most subtle work of fiction into a bloated and tedious nine-hour-long toy commercial (and can sweep the board at the Oscars with it as well), perhaps an eye-candy, space-opera shoot-'em-up is the best we can hope for. But it won't be the genre-redefining cult epic that it ought to be, which will be disappointing (and one can expect disappointment in advance). And it certainly won't be Ender's Game.

*Actually, Messrs Butterfield and Sivan can presumably count themselves lucky. Pity young Laurence Belcher, who one can only presume landed the role of the kid version of Professor X because someone saw him in his stripey jim-jams in the Doctor Who Xmas special. (Speaking of which, I love this.) Jake Lloyd's transition from judo kit in Jingle All the Way to Jedi cozzie followed a similar logic. (But I digress.)