Saw it.
I was pleased with what they did with it. As I had hoped, they made it more a coming of age movie than anything else. It does bring up moral questions but, I think that is one of the things good Sci-Fi should do.

I recommend the movie.

*not endorsing the author, just the movie.

I'd agree. I brought my son, who had also read the book. He complained that the movie should have been longer, to explore more of Ender's internal struggles, but at 2 hours, it seemed the right size to me. (Of course, this is a common complaint with movies from books, and this may be the first time he's experienced it.)

My son and I both loved it. We'll probably go see it again.

And yeah, it "should" have been longer. And harsher. One of the big changes I noticed was that, while it did a lot of talking about making Ender's life rough, you didn't see much of that on screen. Mostly he spent his time supported by people who liked and respected him.

But what you did see, the thing the film did make paramount and visceral in a way the novel wasn't able to, was the pressure he/they were under to get this thing done.

My general feeling all the way through was that this wasn't Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, but rather a different vision altogether. All in all I thought it was a wonderful adaptation.

I thought it was an amazing and immersive experience. I'm not sure it could have been done any better than it was.

I thought they did a great job of visualizing what was hard to visualize in the battle training, and the acting was very good.  The moral questions were also very well done.  My main complaint was that the battle training seemed rushed and skipped over a lot of meat because they only had 2 hours.  It should have been longer, or even split into two movies, because the battle training is where we grow to appreciate the genius of Ender and how he can get those under his command to support and care for him.

I was very disappointed in the Bean adaptation.  Anyone who's read the later books about Bean probably understand what I'm talking about.  He's supposedly the smartest kid who ever went there, thanks to genetic tampering, but he comes off as a doofus.

I read the book ages ago, so as someone only slightly invested in it, I'd say that breaking it into two books would have been a mistake. Remember, movies aren't books, and aren't supposed to be books. 2 hours was sufficient to tell the story, quickly, and wrap it up nicely, even if that requires cutting some things.

My only complaint was how they ended the movie. The last five minutes were, IMO, a mistake.

I believe the last five minutes were there to appease the author.
Remember this is a 3 book series so he is vested.

I don't believe it harmed the movie but I would have preferred the time to be spent with the training instead.
=

In reply to GreenTongue (msg # 6):

It's a four book series, actually. At least, the series that focuses on Ender is four books. The series that focuses on Bean is five books (including Ender's Game).

I thought there could have been another twenty minutes or so without hurting the overall thrust of the film. But I love how-to in any movie, so the minutiae of training and battling would been fascinating to me anyway, even if I hadn't read the  books.

EDIT: Apparently Card has written one more novel in the Bean series, and is planning one more that will link both plot-lines. So ten books all told.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:06, Tue 05 Nov 2013.

In reply to katisara (msg # 5):

I tend to agree, though the last five minutes obviously ties into the Speaker For the Dead sequel and shows how the Mind Game is important.  (The Mind Game also later develops into an AI, but that's outside the scope of the movie.)  The last 5 minutes is really Ender's rebirth and redemption in the messianic archetype that is being developed throughout the book/movie.

I'm not saying to add more from the book just to see it out there.  I'm saying more from the training would help the movie because that's really where the audience begins to see how Ender is not just a military genius, but how he wins the love of his troops and is a great leader as well.

(It's sort of like when you see Anakin Obi Wan Kenobi turn from good to bad in just a few scenes in Star Wars.  It didn't get the audience there through enough finesse.)
This message was last edited by the user at 19:04, Wed 06 Nov 2013.

Obiwan?

Don't you remember the scene where Obi-wan killed a bunch of kittens and landed a Corellian Corvette on a bunch of handicapped grandmothers? I'm surprised Alec Guinness agreed to it...

:-p

One very important question:  Was it filled with lens flare and shaky cam?

If it was, I think we've had a sneak-peek at Episode 7...the reboot...*grin*

Oops, sorry, I mean Anakin.

Obi-wan made it funnier :-p

...and me stupider.  ;)

But is the film done with shaky cam?  No one has answered that yet!  :(

No, there's no shaky cam in Ender's Game.

Woo-hoo!  Time to go see it.

After I see Thor.  :)

It's directed by the guy who did Wolverine: Origins, so I can see some of the same styles with camera work and movement of characters through space. (Think of the scene where Wolverine flies up from his motorcycle at the helicopter.)  It actually is one of the few movies I think that would have been better in 3D, similar to Gravity.  (Probably would make more money too.)

Seeing the commercials I did not think it would be as good as it really was. It was quite captivating and I am glad I spent money to go and see it in theaters. The one thing I really did not like was the last part of the movie. I have not read the books so I do not know if he did that in them and it was an opening to make a second movie, but personally I did not like the ending.

(*#$ing AWESOME movie.  And I am a bona fide movie snob.  Enough said.

That ending is spot on with the books with one exception - his sis is with him afterwards.  Other than that, it's exactly the same (or near enough not to matter).
This message was last edited by the user at 04:25, Sat 09 Nov 2013.

I seem to recall the book ending being less optimistic.

I think the movie, overall was really really good, but it wasn't amazing.

I think they did a great job of writing the persona in a way that worked on the big screen; I think the visual experience was enthralling and captivating, and I thought the acting was pretty good.

What I think they got off was the pacing.  I think they could have introduced a lot more stress, and timely suspense in the story.  I think that they had a very different plotting focus than I remembered from the book, and so while the end result was the same it kind of missed the mark if that makes sense.

I agree that a lot more time should have been taken in the training sequences.

All in all though, I loved the film.

In reply to katisara (msg # 22):

No, the book ended in somewhat of the same way. Although, to be honest, all the formics were dead when Ender found the Queen formic grub sleeping away in stasis. Lead by the dreams of a repetent race he'd helped to kill, of course.

And I think it was an okay movie. This coming from a guy who has always loved Ender's Game, and found something new in it every time I read it. As much as I would have hated the concept, it probably would have been better served broken into two movies. Of course, I couldn't pin a point to actually break; Battle school would take too much time to build, and command school went too quickly to be a second half.

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As it was, however, one missed why the little quotes were important, or how Ender broke the entire game by exploiting expectations or shifting perspectives. 'The enemy's gate is down'. 'Your father would be real proud, Bonzo'. Etcetera. One also never saw his journey through the other teams, from the overly controlling Salamanders to the looser, almost worthless Rat army - whose wins are specific to a small, specialized group within the main army, who pull off stunts and aren't afraid to think way beyond the box. And, finally, given Dragon army with all the rejects no one else wanted.

Command school missed an opportunity to show Rakem's genius as well. How he twisted Ender's expectations, and forced the boy to adapt or suffer before he ever even saw the final console. Or how the human ships moved and responded as fast as - if not faster - than the formic hive-mind ships.

Or, perhaps, a bit more about the world? A unified military controlled government churning the whole mass of humanity towards the annihilation of another species? That religion is abolished (Making the greeting 'Salam' a heart touching secret between two friends), along with the right to have more than two children, making Ender both unique and setting him apart to begin with as a Third? There were quite a few nuances lost in the movie due to time constraints that would have gone a long way to explaining why Ender was important, how he evolved, and why his siblings failed, rather than Harrison Ford's 'He kicked a kid in the stomach? BRILLIANT, COMMANDER.'

Still. It was an okay-ish movie.

I really should stop seeing movie adaptations of my favorite books.
This message was last edited by the user at 15:07, Tue 12 Nov 2013.

In reply to MisterBook (msg # 24):

You're totally right, of course. The thing is to try to appreciate a film and a novel as two completely separate pieces of art that happen to share some similarities, rather than think of one as an adaptation of the other.

Even though books and films both tell stories, the two are so different that there really no valid way to compare them.

I always point people to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when they despair about all the details in a book that didn't make it to the film...because HHG started out as a radio play.  It was so popular that Douglas Adams wrote the books.  They were so popular that Adams agreed to help them with the movie.

And all three are HUGELY different.  Adams pointed out that each version is telling the story in a different medium--and, therefore, different elements of the story had to be highlighted or minimized (or left out entirely) to capitalize on the strengths of that particular medium.

Yes, there are a lot of details that would make the story stronger, more poignant, more nuanced...but they're details that were highlighted in a few pages of a several hundred page novel.  As such, given the time frame of film, there's really no way to present them as narrative elements without pulling focus from the core story.  Yeah, they could give us an intro monologue explaining all these details...but then people would be thinking about all of that for the first ten minutes of the movie, if they didn't tune out immediately (I always hated the fact that they started Underworld with Selene spoonfeeding the audience information...I think it's the biggest weakness of the film).

And, while I haven't read it, I'm sure the original short story that inspired the novel skipped a lot of those details, as well (I mean, it's a short story...by definition, it's going to be missing a lot of what you'd find in a novel, and I don't mean just the length.)

I haven't seen it yet...but I already know (and did from the day I heard they were making the film) that this would not be the entire novel adapted to the screen.  I'm grateful to hear that they didn't decide to pad the story with a bunch of manufactured details so they could turn it into two films (I'm looking at you, Peter Jackson, with your 'Iditarod run by a team of giant hares' sequence...)  The more I see here, the more intrigued I am to see what they actually chose to put on the screen.

In reply to facemaker329 (msg # 26):

You forgot the Hitchhiker's Guide text game (think Zork).  :)

I like Misterbook's analysis of Ender's Game.  What they did is turn a thought provoking book with many subtleties into a Hollywood action movie that stripped it to its bones.  But it was probably as good as they could have done, given the limitations.

The breaking point between two movies seemed pretty obvious to me.  It would come when Ender was taken to meet Valentine at the lake after he had rebelled and decided not to fight.  This became a turning point that could break up two movies.

They could also have done two movies easily by using scenes from the crossover books related to Bean, which really expanded and gave perspective to the scenes.

Plus, they should have done it in 3D.

The visit with Val is a good breaking point in the story, true...but it would make a really poor ending for a movie.  Yes, people that knew the story would be ready to come back and see the rest of the story, but people who didn't would be like, "What?!  This kid is the hero of the story and he just decided he's done?  Fine...so am I..."

LOTR had the benefit of being able to break from the action for the end of Fellowship, just for the simple fact that everyone knew that the story was already a trilogy and the anticlimax there did not mean that the story was about to implode.  Ender's Game doesn't enjoy that advantage.  Those of us who know the story would be like, "Relax, the best is yet to come," but that doesn't always bring an audience back to a second film.  I can easily understand why they felt they needed to do it in one shot (although they could probably have argued for an expanded length, since the traditional Hollywood taboo against movies longer than two hours seems to be weakening over the past several years).

There is a valid point made above, in regards to hitchhiker's guide. I'd forgotten how much was warped. Or, for an even more heinous example, Eragon; Where the only thing matching between the movie and the book were the character names. And occasionally not even that. Urgal's are squat, slightly overweight mini-orcs rather than massive, eight foot tall horned monsters with a brutal sense of honor?

Wha...? And that's not the worse atrocity done to the story. I honestly felt pity for the author, which is a rare thing; Usually, I wave away empathy with a 'they signed the contract, didn't they?' bit.

Perhaps there shouldn't be conversions. Don't get me wrong, I am not an anti-film snob; Quite the opposite, I have a deep and abiding love for movies. Fifth Element, Pi: Faith In Chaos, Blade Runner (The Director's Cut, without the narration), etcetera. And there just doesn't seem to be a good way to cross the two without losing the essence of what made it interesting.

In reply to facemaker329 (msg # 28):

No, I meant break it after she talks him into going back in.  Then the audience knows the next movie will see him rising up to the top and that he has surpassed his own personal demons and fixed (I suppose) the enmity with Graff.  It's certainly no more a downer than Empire Strikes Back, and that was considered probably the best Star Wars movies.

Also, the point about splitting it into two movies is exactly so more could be added in the first half to give the audience the same kind of awed expectation they had in LOTR.  Sure, without adding the extra scenes, you're right that it would fall flat, but I don't think it would have if they had beefed it up with the battle school for another hour, including the relationships and the enmity with Graff.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:27, Tue 12 Nov 2013.

In reply to Heath (msg # 30):

The other benefit of ending a Part 1 after the Valentine scene is they could have started the 2nd movie with the voyage to Command School...a great scene that got no justice in the movie and would have been a great place to bring new viewers in.

And, though Command School was very short in the book, it didn't have to be that way in the movie.  Plus, it would have let the war itself run closer to the book's plot.  (That, for me, was where this movie let me down most.  If it let me down anywhere at all.)

The second movie would also have been a great place to have more Peter and Valentine in there, including all that's going on back at earth, and to give more air time to Bean.

Of course, Peter Jackson would have stretched it to three movies... :)

No kidding.

Though, it would be nice for the viewer to know precisely how much Ender hated/feared Peter, and how much he loved Valentine. The single the three had together just doesn't do that sort of hatred justice. Especially considering Ender's worse nightmare was becoming Peter.

In reply to MisterBook (msg # 33):

Actually, considering how little Peter was in the movie, I thought they did a great job of emphasizing how awful Peter is.  Every single mention of Peter expresses either that he is a hated, violent monster or that Ender is afraid of being/becoming Peter.

And, the very fact that Valentine was the only person Ender wanted to see on Earth (even excluding his own parents,) emphasized how close they were.  Plus, every letter he wrote was to her. (Even if they got through.)

Ender's Game (the movie) did a pretty good job of getting a lot of things expressed subtly and in a short period of time.  My girlfriend who didn't read the books watched with me (who had.)  She managed to get nearly all the book's themes understood with just the one viewing.

The only thing she didn't understand was why it mattered that Ender was a third child or why Ender assumed that Mazer would be dead.  She'd assumed, understandably, that everyone thought Mazer died when his plane crashed into the mother ship.  She didn't think much about (and they never discussed) the battle being 50 years before the movie started and he looked very young for that.

It's a fine line, when you're writing a script for something like this.  Too heavy on the exposition, and you lose everyone who isn't already a die-hard fan.  Not enough, and you leave people grasping for context and why actions are happening and what relationships are important.  I suspect they looked at the whole side-plot of Mazer Rackham and decided that telling enough of it to make sense would wind up killing the pace of the story.

Which isn't to say that it couldn't be done.  But that's not the story THIS director wanted to focus on.  Likewise, the concept of mandated birth rates, while an important point in the novel, really isn't THAT critical to the story...it gives us a solid reason to understand why Ender is already something of an outcast, but aside from making Ender 'special', it really serves no important purpose to the story.  So, why spend screen time explaining it? (Although, if they make reference to it, they really SHOULD have explained why it's important...)

I would not be surprised to see, at some point in the not-so-distant future, someone revisiting Ender's Game as a TV miniseries (like the Sci-Fi Channel did with Dune, back when they actually produced decent programming), and developing all of these plot points in more detail.  But a feature film director has to pick and choose what story elements he feels are important enough to put onto the big screen, what's going to be critical enough to be worth arguing with the guys at the studios who want the film to be shorter, cleaner, lower budget, etc etc.  But I really think that's the only way that the story can be done and still address all the details that people have brought up in this thread.

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They do, actually. Peter makes mention of Ender being a Third, and Ender himself actually makes that point later on in the movie. But they never explain why it's a bad thing.

And during the big planet battle, Bean just shouts 'the enemy's gate is down!' without any pretext or back story behind that phrase.

Now, see, that's just sloppy, in my opinion.  Using iconic quotes or story concepts without setting up the framework for them is a waste of the icon.  It's entirely possible, however, that they were there in the original script, and got lost somewhere in editing (sometimes editors are more interested in the overall pace of the film than they are in making sure all the references are kept intact...)

But someone, somewhere along the line, either dropped the ball or just never had a good handle on it in the first place.  The context for the 'enemy gate' quote really SHOULD be in the movie somewhere, as it highlights how Ender was so unconventional in his thought process and essentially revolutionized humankind's space tactics.

I still think the story stands pretty well on its own without needing to rely on the 'third' references, however...including that was sloppy writing.  When you're taking a several hundred page novel and boiling it down to a hundred page (give or take) script, you really shouldn't waste space on relatively trivial story details.

In reply to facemaker329 (msg # 37):

No, the context was there, it was just pretty cursory compared to the novel. They discuss the phrase when they first enter the Battle Room together.

The only part of the story that I felt was really shorted was Ender's development as a commander. What I really wanted at that point was a good montage. A solid six or seven minute montage would have gone a looooong way toward shoring up that part of the story and wouldn't have done too much to the running time.

They could have set it to Ender's voice narrating emails to his sister, explaining what was happening. Or some awesome music. Or both.

Everyone loves a montage.

In reply to truemane (msg # 38):

I admit, there were a few points where I felt a montage would have better served the movie than the scene they used to give info.  That said, the story did feel basically complete.

Actually, I think this phrase was used in the battle room earlier in the movie by Ender, similar to how it was int he book, so Bean's reference to it was supposed to complete the circle for the viewer of the importance of Ender's coming up with that.  They just didn't make it as clear as they probably should have.  As mentioned above, it's pretty iconic.

I agree with facemaker that the "Third" issue was trivial to this movie and could have been eliminated as to the "adventure" element of the story, but it was important to the psychological part of the story because it shows that Ender really had to live up to a high expectation put on him since birth.  It's important to the story, and probably could have been focused on better in the movie.

Precisely. Ender was born to be a perfect killer. Not of a single person or a small group, but of entire civilizations and cultures. With no thought given to what he'd become afterwards. The world government basically twisted and broke their own law specifically to get their hands on another genius child from the parents. It's a lot of pressure to put on someone who isn't even born yet, much less a child you've decided will be the perfect tactician.

Someone who can get into another's head, understand them, love them as no one else can - then murder them in every manner that he knows will hurt them deepest.

It'd be nice to see some emphasis put on the bigger picture. At least, that's my thought on it.

Again, Ender's Game: Glad I watched it in the theatre, very unlikely to go twice or to rent it. Okay-ish. My fault for having high expectations, I suppose, or comparing it to the book.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:14, Thu 14 Nov 2013.

Yes, despite our criticisms, I still thought it was a good movie.  I'd watch it again, especially if they come out with some interesting deleted scenes (a la Peter Jackson).

It's just more of an adventure, science fiction with a morality play involved, rather than the depth of the book.

In reply to Heath (msg # 42):

I think that's exactly it. It isn't Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It's a different vision. But I've seen it twice so far and enjoyed the heck out of it both times. I'd probably see it again if circumstances merited.