Ender, a natural born strategist, waxes philosophy like he’s Sun Tzu. Taking “The Art of War” to its next logical step, Ender believes it’s not enough to understand his enemy. For him, true understanding comes hand-in-hand with love for the enemy. When you know someone well enough to predicate their moves militarily, you glimpse into their soul. All at once, this zen of inter-connectivity gives Ender an upper hand in battle but also puts him in a constantly state of moral dread. He knows he can be a mighty conqueror the likes of Caesar but doesn’t know if he should be.  

Based on the popular young adult novels by Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game is built on a foundation of tough philosophical questions like these. Tackling ethical issues that date back to the dawn of fighting with sticks and stone and span to our current climate of piloted drone warfare, moral quandaries are given precedence in the film, but often come across as heavy-handed. For a movie all about tactics, it’s lacking in tactical approach to philosophy as process. Socrates, famous for breaking down prejudices in order to reach universal truth, championed the dissection of established beliefs through reasoning alone. To discover truth, he used critical analysis to better understand the world around him and the many false beliefs that dominated society in large. Here, Ender’s philosophy is a means to an end, an “I told you so” of childish rashness. Rather than a thought process, here philosophy is a bat. Like Bonzo, you’ll want to be sure to cover your head.

Philosophical dissection of Ender’s Game aside, the film floats by on the freckled charm of Asa Butterfield (Hugo). Unlike his peers, Ender has a preternatural tact for foreseeing the consequences, good and bad, of his physical actions and a pension for using violence to prevent future violence and Butterfield does a fine job at conveying the dueling nature of Ender’s innocence and incessant scheming. At once aggressive and acutely aware of the danger of his aggression, Ender is a moral complex character – a suiting trait for the morally complex world he inhabits.

On Earth, 50 years have passed since a devastating alien attack almost wiped clean the slate of our planet’s population. Like a post-9/11 America, tapestries wallpaper the walls with sentiments of “Never Forget.” At the hands of the bug-like Formics, Earthlings faced their demise but managed victory by a move of much-celebrated battlefield bravado. One man, we are told, single-handedly chased the enemy off and ever since, Earth has awaited the return of their ruthless enemy, all the while training legions of child soldiers. Picked as the last hope for humanity, children are utilized for their fast processing skills, unfaltering obedience, and gullible code of honor. Ender is chosen to lead not because of his tendency towards violence but because of his thought process within violence. Never the one to start a fight but always the one to finish it, he’s not a sadist, but a tactician. For these qualities, Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) seems Ender at the ideal candidate to lead Earth’s troops into the final battle with the Formic.
   
Joining Butterfield is a legion of youth actors that act little more than their age. Moises Arias as Bonzo and Hailee Steinfeld as Petra both do suitable caricatures of the seething bully and flirty love interest but Abigail Breslin as Ender’s sister Valentine is really the most reined in of these child performers. Her character is harmony, her performance refined, a nice counterpoint to the violence lifestyle that Ender’s profession has surrounded him by. She, and bullying older brother Peter, are the fulcrum points around which Ender measures himself. As Colonel Graff says, he needs to be someone who can harness both violence and peace – a cocktail of serenity and rage.

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As relevant as many of the issues seen in Ender’s Game are today (drone warfare, surveillance, video game violence, child soldiers), they fly in your face, never really developing the why? of it all.

these issues translate well  dissects these
Barking out commands with the crackly voice of a teen in metamorphosis, Ender wins the  

drone warfare
surveillance
video game violence
child soldiers
communism expressed as the “hive mentality”

Violence in video games is different from violence in real life.