4. Asa Butterfield Plays Ender
I really don't want Asa Butterfield's job right now. Not only does he have the responsibility of playing one of the most beloved characters in science fiction, he's playing a character whose internal moral conflict is the driving force behind most of the major events in the story. Ender Wiggin is a complicated character who struggles throughout the book with making morally questionable choices for the sake of survival. Reproducing this struggle on screen is a large feat to ask of a 16 year old, but I'm confident that Butterfield is up to the task. He has some experience with playing innocent characters faced with morally deplorable circumstances. He got his first lead role when he was ten, as the son of a Nazi commandant in the holocaust piece: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. In this film, much like in Ender's Game, he plays an incredibly young character that is exposed to the harsh reality of the adult world too soon. It's not difficult to see how this role might easily lend itself to Butterfield's portrayal of Ender. A major theme of the books is Ender's isolation from the rest of society. Butterfield seems to have a lock on this detachment. He demonstrated this in Scorsese's Oscar nominated adventure drama Hugo, where he played an orphaned boy living on his own within the walls of a train station. His performance had a raw emotion to it that made his character's seclusion even more compelling. If he can bring that same emotion to his portrayal of Ender, we're in for quite a performance.