I Hope

"There is no God... but I hope someone looks after you".

Count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) - The English Patient

Ender's Game

Vi o filme há umas semanas e fiquei estarrecida. O filme é tão complexo e singular que decidi digerir antes de me debruçar sobre ele.

É interessante que a obra anterior tem um final substancialmente diferente deste. Enquanto no Gravity o final é claramente uma celebração da raça humana, o final de Ender's Game leva a debruçar-nos justamente sobre o (ridículo?) pressuposto da superioridade humana.

Acompanhamos a história de Ender (Asa Butterfield), um rapaz recrutado pelas Forças Militares Internacionais para fazer parte dum exército, que visa derrotar uma raça alienígena genocida, que anteriormente invadiu a Terra e quase nos levou à extinção. 

Os métodos de treino liderados pelo Coronel Graff (Harrison Ford) são muito pouco ortodoxos, questionáveis inclusivamente pela sua parceira Major Gwen Anderson (Viola Davis). 

Este exigente e incansável treino militar que jovens adolescentes recebem é um interessante exercício de análise sobre o controlo e a resistência.

Cada passo faz parte dum elaborado plano para confrontar os jovens (e em particular Ender) com as suas capacidades de estratégia e comportamento em guerra.

A missão desta equipa é criar líderes implacáveis, capazes de dirigir um exército que derrube o inimigo.

Quer o treino dos jovens, quer os objectivos da missão são temas bastante fortes. 

Os jovens são guiados de modo a desenvolverem o seu máximo potencial, mas ao mesmo tempo são como que robotizados pelos métodos implementados. Uma espécie de lavagem cerebral em que cada ponto não é dado sem nó.

Os objectivos da missão estão bem delineados: dela depende a sobrevivência da Terra e a maneira como se atingem poderá ou não ser questionável.

Ender's Game levanta questões muito curiosas sobre o sentido da vida e sobre a maneira de nos relacionarmos (entre humanos e não só).

"It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be , is every bit as strong as ours-arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additions existence. Life, in short just wants to be."

Debruça-se também sobre a manipulação e o que se está disposto a fazer em defesa da sobrevivência da espécie. Sobre como as nossas decisões afectam outros seres e sobre como podemos e queremos usar a nossa "supremacia". Sobre a sobrevivência - a qualquer custo.

"I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.

But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. It's an unnerving thought that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea-- really none at all-- about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to about some six hundred per week. (That's extinctions of all types-- plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure ever higher-- to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-- while allowing that this was "almost certainly an underestimate," particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated.

The fact is, we don't know. Don't have any idea. We don't know when we started doing many of the things we've done. We don't know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: "One planet, one experiment."

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-- and by "we" i mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings-- that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities-- have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks."

Uma análise muito interessante e inovadora. Ideias bem desenvolvidas e um filme que adapta muito bem para o grande ecrã todo esse universo, quer em termos visuais, quer em termos filosóficos.

As sequências visuais são estonteantes.

Como seria de esperar dos veteranos Ford, Davis e Ben Kingsley estão bastante bem nos seus papéis. Asa Butterfield como Ender está perfeito. Uma interpretação muito segura e comovente, que dá bastante credibilidade a toda a história e faz com que o espectador se sinta muito ligado a tudo o que vai acontecendo.

Ender's Game é um filme espacial poderoso que, para além da visualmente bombástica viagem galáctica, nos leva a percorrer um caminho muito curioso em termos filosóficos.

And last, but not least: another though about life in space:

"We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs--people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.”

Todos os excertos apresentados neste texto são de A Short History About Nearly Everything de Bill Bryson.