Orson Scott Card dislikes gay people and the book was better. None of those have any effect on the quality of this movie. Trust me, Ender’s Game is perfectly capable of being an atrocious film without any of that extra baggage.

Ender’s Game is a mess of a movie. The film moves at a breakneck pace, never lingering on any one scene for too long, lest the audience forms any connection with the characters. Asa Butterfield turns in a frankly bland, boring Ender, but I’m not certain whether or not it’s his fault or the fault of the scriptwriter, though considering how every thing else in the movie plays out I’m not surprised.

There is no character development or even any real characters in Ender’s Game. Instead the film opts to simply explain to the audience what is happening. This is not a good thing. Film is a visual medium and as such should not rely on being driven solely by exposition. Ender’s Game is about 70% exposition, 20% boring action sequences and 10% “character development.” I use quotations because the characters in this movie can barely be called characters at all. The titular Ender is supposed to be a tactical genius, but we never see him execute a strategy more complex than “Shoot-all-the-bad-guys.” He is also supposed to be going through inner turmoil about his violent urges, which the audience knows because every ten minutes or so Ender will say “I’m a monster because I have all these violent tendencies.” We never see these violent outbursts more than once, and Ender is so devoid of personality I could barely care less about his feelings. The only reason I know he goes through an “arc” is because a narration explains what his arc will be in the beginning of the movie. I’m not kidding.

The supporting cast fares even worse. Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff spends half the movie gazing off into the distance and doing just a terribly average job. Ben Kingsely’s portrayal of ace pilot Mazer Rackham is better, only because Kingsley is just chewing the scenery and looking ridiculous in his Maori face paint. Ender also has, as the movie puts it, a “ragtag band of misfits” who form the core of his command staff. Each one has exactly one scene with Ender in which they explain to him a basic tactic, Ender does it, and they exclaim “Wow Ender! I’ve never seen anything like that before! You’re amazing!”

You see the problem? The movie spends so much time literally telling us how important and amazing Ender is they neglect to give him anything interesting to do. Instead the film is more or less a series of events that occur as Ender moves his way up through the ranks until he eventually becomes Admiral because, well he’s the protagonist and that’s what protagonists do. There isn’t any real antagonist, outside of a local bully whom Ender “kills,” and the “Buggers”, a race of aliens that humanity is supposedly terrified of but we never see enough of to seem like a legitimate threat. There are no stakes and none of the characters are given enough screen time to develop a personality, including the hero.

Ender’s Game just wastes so much time telling us, through narration no less, about things that are occurring and why we should care about it instead of actually showing us things and letting us get attached to the characters, that there is absolutely no redeeming value to this film.