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Enough people attended Ender's Game last weekend to place it at the top of the box office. But could any of them have known how profoundly unspectacular an experience they were in for? Could they have anticipated how much standing around and explaining would be required of Harrison Ford and Viola Davis?

Although writer/director Gavin Hood only met with Card once during pre-production, his script is an expertly structured story that hits the right beats, and never too hard. Even if you don't necessarily agree with the politics of the film or its writer, it exemplifies the best of blockbuster filmmaking. Ender's Game is a truly beautiful film, in which even minor shots (such as a ship transporting Ender to command school) are breathtaking.

The story's melancholy, penitent denouement is a bizarre reversal, not quite like anything else in the imaginative literature of war. It's as if an SS death-camp commander, indoctrinated to believe that the Jews were a despicable alien virus in Aryan Europe, had all along been listening to Mahler and Mendelssohn, reading Kafka and Proust, but only understood after the fact that he had a unique spiritual connection to the race he had labored so hard to exterminate.

The movie version of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" is way too kind, and the drama suffers greatly for it. The movie packs too much plot into 114 minutes and has serious pacing issues, and because its makers don't have a eye for spectacular set pieces, it never looks as grand as it should. But the film's biggest problem is a matter of tone and characterization: the characters constantly talk about how mean they can be, but their actions suggest otherwise.

Though it can't overcome the source material's problematic themes—namely, Card's intentionalist morality, which prizes a character's ideals over their actions—or its all-too-convenient characterizations, the film manages a sustained sense of momentum and tone that is rare for a contemporary, big-budget movie.

[Ford's Graff is] rational and brutal, which is a harder sell on the screen, where every punch carries an unsettling intensity that the director, Gavin Hood, has trouble managing. Mr. Butterfield is one of those young performers whose seriousness feels as if it sprang from deep within. And while he's an appealing presence, little Ender can't help feeling like a pint-size psycho.

Director Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's popular, Hugo-winning 1985 sci-fi novel is yet another intriguing, complex and strangely unlikable big-budget experiment destined to thrill the book's legion of fans—and confuse the rest of us.

War is secondhand, and the film doesn't let you forget the vague, sophomoric implications of all this jazz in the age of drone warfare, even as it eludes saying anything remotely personal about death and violence. The story of Ender's Game is timely, but the film stalls out on portentous backstory. In fact, the first two-thirds is essentially the preface to one grave climactic battle that dominates the final 40 or so minutes of the film.

Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) presents the material so solemnly that this big-screen adaptation feels like a biblical epic; there's no comic relief or even spontaneous behavior. If you dislike child actors, you might derive a perverse satisfaction from seeing dozens of them look so unhappy to be onscreen.