Play day

Yesterday was an epic day for Lego building at the Jackson Towers kids club.

Tim dropped Bryony off around 10:30am. Then Jamie came round an hour later (so Ju and Paul could build a bed) and Evie brought my assistant builders to three an hour after that (so Ed could do car runs).

Our task for the day - building a Lego Christmas market, all 2,878 pieces of it according to the boxes. The kids all played well together. There were enough different things to build that we could all gather round the table and help without getting in one another's way. The one-person-find/one-person-build technique also worked well.


It wasn't all building. Jamie and Evie wanted to play with other things, so the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings Lego and Doctor Who pseudo-Lego also came out to play. This meant the growing marketplace occasionally got invaded by Ringwraiths and Daleks...

We broke for lunch and watched 'The Christmas Invasion' (B's choice). We broke again for an afternoon snack and watched 'The Empire Strikes Out' (B's and J's choice). Yes, in the latter case we took a break from Lego by watching... more Lego. Lego Star Wars cartoons should really carry a health warning though. I think B nearly choked herself to death from laughing.

The kids were collected by their respective dads in the reverse order they arrived in. Evie wasn't pleased about having to go as there was still more stuff to be built. Jamie wanted to stay too when it was his time to go. Liz rang about 5pm to check we were still alive/the phone was working. Yes, but we weren't quite done yet! We finally finished around 6:30pm, and here it is completed (B's layout):


It was a fun day. The kids all enjoyed it a lot, and I did too.

Unfortunately but inevitably, this happened this morning:

Ender's Game

The enemy's gate is down. Ain't worth a Bean. There is no teacher but the enemy. The Ender's Game film is one of those adaptations which ticks all the necessary boxes. Yet I'm left not quite sure how I feel about it.

Centuries into the future, humanity is recovering from a devastating alien invasion some 60 years earlier. The buggersFormics were driven off, but many of humanity's best military leaders were wiped out. Now the brightest children are selected and trained in the orbital Battle School for the final retaliatory assualt on the Formic homeworld. Andrew 'Ender' Wiggin is potentially the best kid for the job. But can he earn the respect of his peers, and is he psychologically up to the task?

There's an impressive amount of the novel included, more than I was expecting. The subplot of Peter and Val trying to take over the world by blogging was an obvious cut which has been made. Pretty much all the other main elements are in there, at least briefly (even the mind game!). Unfortunately this does mean the Battle School section of the story feels rushed through rather quickly. Ender's jeesh, all such crucial characters across the book series, are reduced to quick character sketches. Petra is the only one who has a lot of scenes, and we still don't get to know her very well. The balances of power between the students seem to shift too quickly to be believable, and we don't get to spend nearly enough time in the Battle Room - just one practice session and two (very) short battles. This is a crying shame, as it's the focal point of the original story and the look of it in the film is fantastic.

What we're left with is mostly a morality play about the ethics of warfare, and whether the ends are more important than the means. This is actually pretty well done. The most important element retained from the book is that the film doesn't shy away from the fact that Ender is essentially a trained killer. (Although somewhat oddly it never confirms Stilson's or Bonzo's deaths, and while the beating Ender gives Stilson is brutal, what happens to Bonzo is made to look more like an accident.) Upping Ender's (and all the kids') age takes the edge off this somewhat, but it wouldn't really have been filmable otherwise. The themes still pack a punch and the main characters do a fair bit of soul-searching. The climactic battle is handled very well. The denouement is abbreviated, but the important stuff is in there.

Some of the adult characters have been changed or merged, but it doesn't really matter. Harrison Ford seems ridiculously old these days, and isn't how I imagined the character, but he still makes an interesting and sympathetic Colonel Graff. His is a troubled stewardship of Battle School, alongside his (surprisingly female) counterpart, Major Anderson. Asa Butterfield does a competent enough job of playing Ender, although nothing to really write home about. The only real disappointment as far as the cast goes is (bizarrely) Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham. Despite having some of the best material, he fails to make much of an impact. He also spouts a strange accent seemingly halfway between Kiwi and South African for no readily apparent reason.

Ultimately, Ender's Game is worth a watch but hardly a must-see. It stands up well enough on it's own to be understood if you haven't read any of the books. It's an enjoyable enough slice of sci-fi, dealing with some pretty hefty themes in-between all the whizzy computer graphics. If you're a fan of the book series, it's interesting to see how it's been interpreted and you (probably) won't be cursing the screen. They really should have referred to the 'Formics' as buggers though ;o)