Movie Analysis: Ender's Game

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In the movie Ender’s Game, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives in a world that has been attacked by the Formics, an alien species with ant-like features, twice. Earth was successfully defended by the International Fleet. The IF tests young children to see if they are gifted enough to enter Battle School, a space station where children are trained for jobs in the IF. Ender is accepted into Battle School. Colonel Graff watches Ender’s progress through Battle School, and is very impressed by Ender’s progress in the face of challenges that were deliberately set in his path. Ender is then sent to a planet once inhabited by Formics to receive further instruction, where he is taught by the hero of the last war, Mazer Rackham. Ender is given battle simulations …show more content…

Thank God for you son… Ender, we won” (Ender’s Game). Ender is very confused by this. He asks, “What do you mean we won? I beat him [Mazer]. He runs the simulations. He said it was a game”(Ender’s Game). Graff explains that it was not Mazer Rackham that he was battling, but the Formics themselves. Ender becomes very upset that he was lied to, as he would’ve carried out his tactics with more of a regard for human life and would’ve studied the Formics had he known what was actually happening. Graff doesn’t care what Ender would have done, for what he did do worked, “We won! That’s all that matters,” (Ender’s Game) but Ender believes otherwise, “No. The way we win matters”(Ender’s Game). Colonel Graff and Mazer Rackham are the tricksters in the story because of how they deceived Ender into believing that he was simply battling a simulation, when in fact he was fighting a war. By telling Ender that he wasn’t affecting anything with the outcome of his battles, they released any inhibitions Ender may have had about being ruthless. This made him fight as hard as he could with no thoughts of consequences, ultimately resulting in the destruction of the Formics, exactly what Graff and Rackham were hoping to …show more content…

For example, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to justify the start of the Vietnam War. The USS Maddox came under fire from North Vietnamese boats twice in a three day period. Johnson’s call for war would have been warranted, except that incident mostly likely never occurred. The crew reported that the North Vietnamese had fired twenty-two torpedoes at them, but given the circumstances, it is believed that the Maddox had mistaken radar pings bouncing off of itself as torpedoes. President himself secretly admitted that the Maddox was probably never attacked and that attacking Vietnam was fruitless, but he still was involved with the creation of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which essentially said that the President could do whatever he wanted with the military in Southeast Asia. President Johnson is the trickster in this event because he duped the American Public and Congress into believing that the United States needed to stop the North Vietnamese by way of war, even though he knew that the USS Maddox was never attacked. Another example of a trickster in real life is Clifford Irving. Clifford Irving is best known for creating a fake biography of Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes worked in the fields of aeronautical engineering, movie making, and real estate, just to name a few examples. He was a billionaire, who later in life became very reclusive and locked himself

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