Ender's Game (Post-release)

Went to see this over the weekend. I finished reading the book about 3 weeks ago. I know the old "book was better" argument is tiresome, but it REALLY does apply in this case. Don't get me wrong, I found the movie quite entertaining (which is why I see movies to begin with...), but the book is BRILLIANT. And I realized up front that the film would have to condense the story to make for a manageable viewing time. BUT, I thought there were several changes they could have made that would have REALLY improved the entire experience.

Firstly, I liked the actors/acting, & the film started off very solidly; I felt they were ramping up into the story extremely well. And I figured they would omit the political subplot with Peter & Valentine, I was on-board with that. It doesn't change the overall story.

Complaint #1: I felt they went too far pacifying Ender. Like in the film, Ender didn't ~want~ to fight, but in the book he was far more ruthless when he was forced into a fight. There was no calling for help, & anguishing at Bonzo's bedside for days after the confrontation; in the book he INTENDED & succeeded in maiming him (& unbeknownst to him, ended up being the second schoolmate he had killed in self-defense). Yes, he felt some remorse later, fearing that he might be turning into Peter, but that doesn't change the fact that his fights were always very calculated & vicious; which was ultimately what the brass were looking for in a fleet commander.

Complaint #2: I would've like a few more minutes of training footage. That part in the book, was where you really saw Ender developing tactical skills that none of the other recruits had ever thought of. It would have made Bean's repetition of: "Remember, the enemy's gate is DOWN", during the last simulation, much more poignant. I also would have preferred that they play up how extensively Ender was isolated by his superiors.

Complaint #3: I would have liked the Command School "simulations" to have been much LESS advanced, like vector-style graphics or something. I thought that the photo-real "simulations" ruined the big reveal that Ender had been leading the fleet into combat from the moment he arrived at Command School.

Complaint #4: After the final "simulation", Ender & his group, turn to the brass, & they're all like "Yeah, get you some of that!!!", & the officers are in the room, just standing there, muttering back & forth, then they finally give the kids a golf clap. In the book, Ender thought he was cheating the system by destroying the planet, & smugly turned to the officers assuming he was about to be reprimanded for disregarding his mission, & when he looked up, the brass were all losing their minds, cheering, crying, praying, & celebrating. Ender was confused, & it was only then that the reality of what had happened (destruction of the aliens' homeworld) was realized. Now that part WAS in the film, it was just handled WAY less effectively.

+1 :thumbsdown for the egg being within walking distance from the base. It also would have been cool if they had revealed that the aliens had no real intention of attacking again, & how when they first attacked Earth, they didn't realize that humans were even sentient lifeforms, because they could detect no communication among them.

But again, I did think the movie was good, & I wish I had followed DRBJR's advice & NOT read the book ahead of time. I know I would have enjoyed the film A LOT more. So yeah.
 
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I agree Nexus, well put. For me, concerning point #4 of yours, I still think it worked great. With the pacing of the film, and the audience presumably not knowing that it was not a simulation I think they played it off well. Movie version Ender was definitely a shadow of his book self. I don't think it was out of line for the boy to just have a feeling of "they want me to play this game, ill show em". They were exhausted, as Ender said all the training exercises, and exhaustion. He just wanted to end it in the most lethal way.

For me, although it could not possibly have the same impact that the ending of the book had on me so many years ago...it still worked. You could see and feel the shock and disgust of what these poor children were made to do.

The fact that I am still talking about it with friends says a lot to me about the overall success of this film. Granted, I seem to be in the minority of my friends who both like the book and film version.

I'll definitely be buying this film. I only hope it makes enough for them to do a sequel. Maybe a combination of Enders Shadow and Speaker of the Dead would work.
 
Bedroom doors with windows? It must be the future!

....wait. Why is Ender the first person to have attacked the giant in the game? I've played dozens of games with both free control and choice in the past and if the obvious solution doesn't work, I always go for the not-so-obvious solution. Have these game developers ever played classic point and click adventure before? Gamers would practically wave their cursors around the screen waiting for an object to be highlighted, even if the object doesn't look like you can interact with. But this game, where you appear to have full control over a mouse with no limitations, no one ever thought to interact with the giant in any way? These are kids who tell each other to shoot at them just for laughs and giggles.
 
I first read the book in 2008 and have since devoured everything I could get my hands on from that universe. 13 books in and I still want more.

I enjoyed the film. It was nice to see the book brought to life that way. I expected it to be different. There were only a few things that really bugged me and I'm quite sure those were because I've spent so much time with the story. I'm far from objective! lol

First up, it was like watching the story on fast forward! Fast paced is good and all but I wanted to scream at them to slow down! I think the character that was the most lost in all of it was Graff. So much of his torment over what he was putting Ender through was lost.

I would have liked to see Ender a bit more diliberate in his battles and a little less happenstance. He was very deliberate in the novel.

But the one that gets me most...Bernard. WTF!!!
 
(Mild Spoilers, but nothing that hasn't already been brought up in the thread)

On the whole, I liked the movie. It was not without flaws, and I certainly think there were parts where the focus of the film should have been adjusted, or they should have spent more time on particular plot points. That said, what *was* in the film was handled well, the effects were awesome, and visually the movie was more than I could ask for when it comes to relating the pictures in my head to the screen.

At a running time just under 2 hours, I feel like it was ambitious to try and fit 6 years of story into the film. By no means do I think they should have taken the Peter Jackson route and made it a trilogy, but the story would have benefited from an additional 30-40 minutes. In the right spots, of course. We'll come back to that.

The most jarring divergence from the storyline in the book revolves around the age difference between Ender's character in each medium. In the book, Ender goes to battle school as essentially a toddler, where the movie has him as a young teen. This is important both because it allows for the actor to play his role through the entire stretch of the timeframe, and because finding a bunch of 6 year olds to do this kind of acting work would be damn-near impossible, as well as make the characters more difficult to relate to. While it does change the tone of the story (there's really no need for a veiled sexual tension between Ender and Petra, for example), it's a positive change for the biases of a general film audience. The major oddity from the change is the strange dynamic between Peter and Ender in the opening scenes, where Peter is nearly an adult playing a children's game with his brother, and pretty much beating him up. By the time Peter reaches that age in the source canon, he's basically the leader of most of the world.

Speaking of Peter, leaving out the pieces of the book related to Peter and Val was a good decision. Those parts are important for the later books, but not critical to the Ender storyline.

The end of the movie is also solid. Again, there's a time crunch involved, and they have to narrow the scope of some of the battles and the progression of learning the simulator is lost, but those are willing sacrifices, and not all that important to the overarching themes. The twist has reasonable punch, and though I think they kind of give it away early (needlessly), you still get the impression that Ender is devastated by the thought of being personally responsible for Xenocide.

Where my personal issue arises is the whole middle section of the film. It's important to know why Ender is special, and there's as much to learn about that in the Battle room as there is in the interactions with bullies or at Command school. The meat of the story (in terms of the themes) is really the relationship between Ender and Dragon Army - him teaching them how to fight, how to out-think their opponents, and proving himself to be the smartest tactician the "game" has ever seen. We really needed to see a progression of events through the course of a bunch of battles; not just the army's name moving up the list of ranks.

Were it my movie, I would have shown three battles, instead of one - the first battle, where he throws all pretense of "formations" out the window and reassigns his toons as 5 sets of 4 instead of 4 sets of 5. They allude to this decision in the final battle room sequence when (i think) Fly Molo says "we've never done a formation," but we don't know why that's special or odd. A second battle should encompass the battle where he and Dragon arrive late, use the human shield to take out the army around his gate, and then Ender embarrasses Bonzo by asking Bean what he'd have done differently. Parts of this battle made their way into the final battle room scene, but we don't get the arrogance and superiority of Ender, where he KNOWS he's better than everyone else, and isn't affraid to show them. The third and final battle should be where Bean uses the rope to see around the wall of stars, and Ender finally says **** it and beats two armies at once by essentially ignoring the rules - and at the end of the battle he tells Graff that he beat him, which allows you to see that he understands that the opposing army isn't the real enemy in this game, but rather the game itself (or the teachers) is the actual opponent. It's at this point (and not just when they're forced by timing reasons, ready or not) that Ender "graduates," as the school can't teach him anything and Graff has essentially broken the game permanently.

Despite the fact that I would have handled Battle School differently myself, I think the film did a very good job of translating the book to the screen. I'm satisfied with the resulting movie (though I'm hoping for some serious bonus features on the DVD), and it's serviceable as a representation of the novel. As I said, it isn't without flaws, and there are certainly things to pick apart if you're the kind of person who looks for those things, but as a fan of the novel I am also a fan of the film. I think, were it not for my relationship with the source material, I would likely have been much more dismissive of the movie. There are a lot of important pieces that are glossed over for time, relegating it to a more generic Sci-Fi movie than what it could have been. However, because I have the ability to parse the text in my head into what isn't said on-screen I am biased toward enjoyment.
 
I agree. What was there was good. I knew they would have to trim a good deal down. The books spends so much time developing Ender's journey to becoming a brilliant commander at the Battle School that they would have had to turn it into a series like Game of Thrones to do it justice (which I think would be AMAZING!)

I'm wondering where they would go with a possible sequel. That time line gets pretty tricky!
 
Am I the only one who thinks that movie was lame? I like stories where the audience is thrown right into the action, but got bored pretty fast on this one.

I left the cinema with the thought I just watched a pure children's film. A lot of eye candy, but the whole mess felt constructed and the cast acted kind of wooden. No sympathy for the boy playing Ender, the rest of the teens or the brass.

It is rated PG-13 in the U.S., but I felt it would be appropriate to invent a new guide: "for audiences up to 13 years"...

I do not hate it, but I wish I could get these two hours of my lifetime back.

Oh, and it was nearly unendurable for me (as kind of fan of Harrison Ford) to witness his "art" in this movie... I do not know, it looks like he can only play himself now, an old grumpy man lacking all the astute charm he had in older films. I am pretty certain I do not want to see that face in the new Star Wars pictures....
 
I hate to be the "but in the book" guy all the time with this film, but if they had followed the book it would have been a pretty solid "R" rating. It has only been marketed as a young adult book in fairly recent years. Before that it was considered adult science fiction.

Your comment about sympathy is what got it for me. Because that is a HUGE part of the book. That and empathy.

I went to see the movie a second time and I liked it much more. I was able to separate my love for the books a bit more this time around and enjoy it for its own merits. Graff needed a bit more weight to how his character was written in the script for sure.
 
Pros:
-Visually appealing
-Somewhat cool storyline
-The adult actors were great.

Cons:
-Child actors were horrible
-I've never read the book and I could tell they were rushing it
-How does a game of freeze tag equal tactical genius? They could have used the simulator type combat to train them.
-Didn't explain much of anything i.e. why is his brother was such a ****, why is there a weird love tension with his sister, why is it so horrible that he was a third child, why use children instead of seasoned soldiers. They had 27 years to train someone.

All in all, it was a decent flick. Makes me want to attempt the books again. I don't see the point in not making this a mini series or something. The writer already said that the sequels are un-filmable and he doesn't want them made, so why not beef up this storyline and make it something incredible. The problem with child actors os that they aren't that good. You get some rare cases where they are, but you can't expect blockbuster quality acting from a kid. So they could have at least gotten some older kids in their later teens to play the characters. Yes, that changes the plot a bit, but not really considering that the book training takes a span of years.

I'm thinking that they could have given this the reimagined Battlestar Galactica treatment and I would have liked it a lot more.
 
Saw the movie today and loved it. I thought all of the actors (except Ben Kingsley) did an outstanding job. I thought the story was well represented on film, and I thought the effects were amazing. The only knock on Kingsley's character was that I could hardly understand a word that he said.

I think they could have done a better job showing that all the simulations were real battles, and could have handled the reveal a bit better. Otherwise, I had no complaints. I haven't read the book in about 10 years, but now I'm going to dust if off and give it another go!

Lonnie
 
For all of us (seems like) we all know ender well enough that the fast forward approach worked for us because we didn't need to be filled in, it was great just to see it on screen. My relationship with ender is 13 books deep so I didn't need to see all of the details, I've relived them Countless times on audio book and on print, the drawback is only for people who got introduced to Andrew Wiggin on the big screen, they can't understand like we do. Overall, awesome movie but I never expected it to live up to the book/books in any way.
 
I REALLY want to go see it (love the books) but that kid... so far in every trailers just gets on my nerves.

I can't stand him... get that 12 year old kid out of there... Plenty of good actors out there!

So from what everyone is saying... don't waste money on it... so $5 Tuesday here i come...
 
Yeah, I think the child actors actually did a great job. At some points better than a few of the adults. Any of the quirks that I saw just helped show that they are just kids!
 
Just came back from watching Thor and it ended at the same time as Ender's Game. The people leaving Thor were happy and laughing but the people leaving Ender's Game had this face going :facepalm :unsure

Is it really that bad? I really want to go see it, but at $20-$25 a pop (x2 so $40-$50 plus taxes...), id hate to waste money that could be put toward another movie this month...
 
Ronan87 said:
Just came back from watching Thor and it ended at the same time as Ender's Game. The people leaving Thor were happy and laughing but the people leaving Ender's Game had this face going :facepalm :unsure

Is it really that bad? I really want to go see it, but at $20-$25 a pop (x2 so $40-$50 plus taxes...), id hate to waste money that could be put toward another movie this month...
Click to expand...

Good lord, what theater do you go to that charges $25 a ticket? I thought $6.50 matinee was a lot.
 
Sandman0077 said:
Good lord, what theater do you go to that charges $25 a ticket? I thought $6.50 matinee was a lot.
Click to expand...

Here it's $17.50 cheap, $24.50 normal, $29.50 expensive.

There's a $10 one near my place but it's horrid... go there and come back with a damage neck... IDK what they were thinking putting those torture chairs.

We do have cheap-tuesday at Guzzo (about 50 mins from my place) which is around $8 but the lines are insane... everyone from Montreal goes there throughout the day and last time i went... oh man i think i did 1.5 hours of line LOL
 
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