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Tokyo Trial (2016)
Entertaining and informative
I ended up watching all the four episode back, so I found it very interesting. The use of black and white clips for courtroom scenes along with those old sounding trial audio gives a nice sense of taking back to those times. Most of the actors did a great job at giving a true feeling of being from the country they are representing (except for the Chinese one perhaps).
I believe it is impossible to be completely fair when dealing with a subject like this. And there will always be many important related subjects and events that won't be covered as much as they deserved to be. So you have to take it as form of informative entertainment and realize that there might be biases of the production houses involved.
Overall for me it serves the purpose of informing me about a very important historical event in an entertaining way without too much biased viewpoint. And I did some readings after watching it in an attempt to filter the biases that this could have imposed.
Ender's Game (2013)
Combination of a harry potter and some starship movie
This science fiction action film is the adaptation of the acclaimed novel of the same name by Orson Scott Card. I have not read the book but having watched the movie, I want to find some time to read the book.
The plot of the movie is about an attack by some alien species called Formics. They attacked the earth and wiped out a lot of mankind and then there emerged this one brave commander who did sacrifice his life but managed to get into the central control ship of the Formics. Now for tackling such future invasions it has been decided to train the children into such brave commanders, who would lead in case of such wars in future. They have this view that its easier to make better soldiers out of children because children are like sponges who just soak everything up. Children are made to watch violent movies and play violent video games. For the most part of the movie, there are lots of children in this school, training for their combat with the aliens. Out of lot of those children, Harrison Ford and crew zeroes upon Ender as the last hope of the mankind.
Ender is an awesome character, very smart and tactical. He always leads with a very positive energy, making his crew have belief in themselves. However there is this vulnerable and human side of Ender. His attachment with his very passionate sister, makes him feel weak at moments. While, there are times when he gets over infuriated and aggressive. This is the reflection of qualities because of which his elder brother was thrown out of this same training procedure.
There are lots of this laser tag kind of game played at the space training center as training exercises. During these games Ender amazes everyone and outperforms even the much senior students. For some parts of the movie, it appears like a combination of a harry potter and some starship movie. Those looking for lots of wars in spaces and galaxies may go disappointed.
Couple of scenes in the movie were a little rushed and some of the scenes were not as emotional as they should have been. On acting front most of them have done really well but the best part of the movie is its end. Towards the end of the movie, Ender is made the overall commander of the earth war crew. He is asked to practice on some war emulator. In subsequent practices the difficulty level of the enemy team increases. After losing one of these practice on emulator, he finally leads brilliantly to destroy the entire species of Formics from their 'emulated' planet in this last game. And then he is informed that it was not just a game on emulator but a real attack controlled remotely by him. Lately Ender had started to believe that there is no need to completely wipe out the Formics. He cries out that he will be remembered as a killer.
Finally ender discovers that Formics had communicated to him through the mind game. He goes out on that strange planet and was able to locate the single remaining formic egg. The movie ends with Ender mentioning in a letter to her sister that he is heading to deep space with the egg, determined to colonize a new Formic world with that egg.