** out of ****
Ender's Game plays like Starship Troopers as a junior high school play. And that's its target audience, so pre-teens may enjoy it, but it's not for me.
Based of the first in a series of books by Orson Scott Card, this takes place in the future, years after Earth was attacked but then overcame a race of intergalactic creatures. Now, the military is training kids to be the next combat leaders because another invasion seems imminent. Enter Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield in a good performance), a brilliant boy who Colonel Graff and Major Anderson (Harrison Ford and Viola Davis, both wasted) see as the possible savior of humanity.
The movie is at its best when examining the strategies of war, but often that is simplistic. Mostly, we are left with cliched training scenes containing hokey action. As a juvenile fantasy, and nothing more, I guess it's a harmless time waster.
