I read Orson Scott Card’s award-winning science fiction novel Enders Game decades ago, and I remember it as one of the best science fiction novels ever.

When I heard there would be a movie, I knew I would go. I saw the film in IMAX format, and I don’t regret spending the extra money for the high-resolution experience.

In the nearer future, a hostile alien race attacks Earth in an effort to invade an colonize the planet. The race is called the “Formics” but colloquially the people call them the bugs or “buggers” due to their insect-like appearance. The brilliant battle skills and heroics of the commander of the human fleet, Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), save humanity and beat the Formics. They retreat, staying away for decades.

Humanity will never allow such an attack again, and it prepares for a massive military battle in space. To command the fleet, they are recruiting very young children to groom them only to be soldiers in the quest to save humanity. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is the boy Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford) has his trained eye on as the future commander. Graff challenges and trains Ender brutally and relentlessly to prepare him for his epic mission.

The training consists of ever more complex war games, first fought by human platoons in a zero-gravity war theater, then, increasingly on massive simulators. The kid soldiers control ever more complex and powerful space weapons. Eventually, each of the kids leads entire simulated battle groups of thousands of ships and weapons in fictitious battles with the enemy. They train day and night, because the epic showdown with the Formic is near. Will Ender be ready to be the grand commander?

I loved the way the movie recreated the sets Orson Scott Card had planted in my head through his story-telling so long ago. The battle station, the simulators, the way the games were played was exactly how I had envisioned them. The way the kids had to learn that in space, in weightlessness, there was no up or down or left or right, but rather, to function, you had to reorient your thinking, making up be the direction your head was pointing at any time to keep your bearings as you outmaneuvered your enemies.

Perhaps it is due to Orson Scott Card being one of the co-producers of this movie that the story stays very close to the novel so that Ender’s Game, the movie, is unmistakably a representation of Ender’s Game, the book.

Rating: ***