Ender's Game

From now on, you're Chewbacca.

Do you think I'm cute, Private Chewie?

Grade: C +

Director: Gavin Hood

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

Director Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Ender’s Game, controversial North Carolina-based author Orson Scott Card’s decorated 1985 sci-fi novel, smacks of Starship Troopers sans the social and political satire or kitschy charm, crossed with Harry Potter (yes, I understand Card published his novel 12 years before J.K. Rowling’s first book; the comparison remains illustrative).

Fifty years after mankind was nearly annihilated by an alien insect race called the Formics, brilliant preteen Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is plucked from his family life by military commander Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) to join the International Fleet and attend Battle School. Anointed by Graff as “the One,” Ender and his fellow cadets train to essentially become virtual-reality gamer soldiers tapped to wage interstellar war against the Formics.

Hood’s visuals are impressive enough, and the cast—which also includes Hailee Steinfeld, Abigail Breslin, Viola Davis and Ben Kingsley—is solid and invested in the material. However, Hood’s screenplay eschews much in the way of intellectual shadings until a provocative penultimate act that introduces some compelling moral and psychological conundrums. Unfortunately, they are quickly cast aside for a finale that scales down the novel’s climax for a tacked-on, cloying coda.

Hugo

How are we supposed to watch this

without tinted glasses?

Grade: B
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jude Law
MPAA Rating: PG
Running Time: 2 hr. 7 min.

Like a codger lecturing his grandson about the way things were “back in my day,” Martin Scorsese's first film for children (and 3-D) is a journey traversing cinema’s early history. The ironic brilliance of Hugo is that Scorsese appropriates the en vogue visual technology of today’s movies to preserve that history and venerate pioneers of the medium.

Adapted from Brian Selznick’s 2007 book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the eponymous orphan (played by Asa Butterfield) lives in secret behind the walls of a 1930s Paris train station (the Gare Montparnasse, although nameless in the film). After the death of his horologist father (Jude Law in flashback), Hugo is adopted by his drunkard uncle and conscripted into a life spent tending the station’s intricate system of clocks, a job Hugo alone eventually assumes under the nose of the station’s fastidious inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Along the way, Scorsese peruses the relationships between the station’s denizens with Altmanesque flair, the camera drifting amongst the assortment of artisans, merchants and musicians.

One such trader is Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), a cantankerous toy salesman who discovers Hugo has been stealing parts in order to complete an unfinished clockwork automaton left to the boy by his father. With the help of Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), Méliès’ goddaughter and a bookworm with a proclivity for big words, Hugo discovers that the old toymaker is actually the renowned, real-life French filmmaker famous for his early use of special effects and one of the first to marry cinema with fantasy. However, most of Méliès’ films would be lost or destroyed in the wake of World War I. Now a broken, bitter man, Méliès fights to forget his past at the same time Hugo discovers the wonders of film, starting when he and Isabelle sneak into a screening of 1923’s Safety Last, with its iconic shot of Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock.

Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson craft a vivid universe and employ cutting-edge visuals to illuminate a couple of rail sequences: a dreamscape re-creation of the famous 1895 derailment at Gare Montparnasse, and a rendering of the Lumiere brothers’ 1897 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat that exploits 3-D to produce the sensation of audiences of the era who, according to legend, felt the train coming straight at them.

The symbolism is heavy throughout – the incessant clock motif juxtaposes mortality with art’s timelessness, while the automaton embodies man’s impulse to, like God, create in his own image. Hugo succeeds most, however, as an advert for cinephilia and Scorsese’s important film preservation effort. It springs life when recounting Méliès’ salad days of blazing cinematic trails on makeshift sets, celebrating the joy of moviemaking and its rightful place as a true art form.

Otherwise, there’s a mechanical feel to the tableau, as if it’s missing a few key components needed to complete the enchanting kids movie it augurs to be. Hugo forgets the fact that a youngster’s first love of cinema is sparked by thrills and wonderment, not a dissertation. After all, despite Scorsese’s beatification, Méliès’ movies were nonetheless the stuff of mermaids, space aliens and fire-breathing dragons.

Neil Morris

Nanny McPhee Returns

If you can't say something nice about Audrey Hepburn,
don't say anything at all.

Grade: B –

Director: Susanna White

Starring: Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith, Asa Butterfield, Bill Bailey, and Sam Kelly

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

When Nanny McPhee Returns to play governess for another harried English mother, the three children of Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) are in the midst of fighting the Grays, their two snooty, city cousins. When the youngsters ignore McPhee’s (Emma Thompson) order to cease and desist, one thump of her magic walking stick sends the kids into self-harming convulsions. Two start pulling their own hair or ears; Megsie Green (Lil Woods) cannot stop banging her own head on the floor; Cyril Gray (Eros Vlahos) flips his body in repeated pratfalls; little Vincent Green (Oscar Steer) takes a wood paddle to the family crockery.

For all the later imagery of synchronized swimming piglets and rocket-powered motorbikes, this initial encounter is hard to shake. McPhee releases the children from her spell only after they beg and promise to stop misbehaving. The implication is that the children have gotten their just desserts; some might call it child abuse. Regardless, Isabel looks on in amazement when each child calmly marches off to bed, wishing her good night along the way. Deportment is an easy virtue to embrace when you’re afraid Nanny McPhee is going to make you gouge your own eyes out.

The snaggletooth deus ex machina drop by to help Isabel as she struggles raise her children, hold down a job, and save the family farm from her duplicitous brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) while her husband is off fighting World War II. The look and structure of the film, like its predecessor, remains a cross between Roald Dahl and George Miller’s Babe films, although it does not duplicate the creativity of the former or the humanism of the latter.

CG renderings of baby elephants and acrobatic swine have the feel of a children’s storybook; not so much the flatulent cows and McPhee’s belching jackdaw. Indeed, the plodding plotline feels freest when McPhee, Cyril, and Norman Green (Asa Butterfield) escape the farm for a trip to the War Office to ascertain the condition of Norman’s father.

The cast is first-rate, particularly Thompson, Vlahos, Maggie Smith as Isabel’s seemingly daft employee Mrs. Docherty, and Ralph Fiennes’ brief cameo as a ramrod war commander and Cyril’s absentee father. Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, provides her usual overemoting and a put-on English accent as thick as the pig poo covering Isabel’s front yard.

While not as rewarding as its predecessor, Nanny McPhee Returns is a simple, unadorned fable that makes for easy family viewing. Still, the continuum of McPhee again swooping in to scare some manners into a gaggle of brats leaves you feeling like you’re not watching Mary Poppins-lite as much as an episode of Supernanny.

Neil Morris