“Game Over”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Ender’s Game is based on Owen Scott Card’s novel of the same name for young adults, and so if you are not a young adult, meaning a teenager, you can skip this movie.

Enders Game

In my opinion, even if you are a young adult, a teenager, immature, or even fascinated with video games, you can skip this movie.

Sure, Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, and Ben Kingsley appear in it, but they are there only as adult window dressing for a story that is about kids and for kids.

The hero is Ender Wiggin, the time is in the future, and the plot is that Earth has to be saved from a future invasion of aliens.

Already, I can hear the room filling with a loud chorus of Ho Hums.

We are told that the world’s smartest children are the planet’s best hope, and the reason is that the future invasion will be fought like a video game, which is strange when you think about it, because the only reality casualty in playing video games is something that might just be called “remote thumb” in order to correspond to tennis elbow.

Anyway, don’t think about it, because there is nothing in this movie worth thinking about, except that the filmmakers are probably hoping that this will be the first in a series of franchise movies and there will be more coming, on which they can lose money.

Anyhow, Ender is a young teenage boy who is bullied at school, but who is clever enough at playing video games that he is singled out for special training in anticipation of the future alien invasion.

Ender has a sister, and he tells her, “All I could think was, what would Peter do?”

Peter is their brother, who was selected for training before Ender, but he washed out of the program, which consists of being treated like privates in a military boot camp, but with training that consists of floating around in huge zero gravity sets and firing weapons at each other.

Can I get a “Ho Hum”?

Of course, there are one or more kids who give Ender a hard time, of course there are other kids who support him, and of course Ender succeeds and advances to higher levels of more rigorous training.

Ender’s Game just makes me say “Game over!”

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”