ENDER’S GAME is an epic adventure starring Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis and Abigail Breslin. Based on the best-selling/award winning novel
Man, do I love this film, but I can’t tell if it’s because I loved the book so much when I was younger or if it’s actually a good film or not. There’s so much that they skipped over or changed, I really hope they get the opportunity to remake this into an HBO mini series. Maybe have some Arrow style flashbacks of his brother and sister taking over the known world while he’s out on his own doing his own thing?
I was really excited to see this film was coming out. Next time I thought about it, I looked online, and it had come out 4 months earlier, and disappeared after like one weekend. No idea why it did as poorly as it did (made just a bit above its cost to make).
The movie itself is quite good, although apparently it is annoyingly complex if you have not read the books.
While there are the expected number of stylistic alterations between the book (or books) and the movie none of them destroy the story, setting, characters, or context so there is nothing to complain about.
I loved the original book and the ones after were ok too. Not as good but ok.
The movie was also ok. I was disappointed at the changes that were made to be honest. I don’t want to go into all my problems with the changes but there were many that were just dumbfounding.
I was a bit disappointed in the movie, but the book as well.
The tactic of having a mass of expendable soldiers act as a shield is by no means a revolutionary tactic. Not when it was written, and not today in the era of Zerg rushes.
That is one of the differences from the movie and book that bothered me. By the time the fleet in the book made it to the bug world there were only a total of 80 ships. Unlike the movie every ship had a little doctor, not just one massive obvious ship. In the book they started out in formation going into the bugs who parted and allowed Ender to enter so they could cut them off from escape. Then Ender’s ships broke apart from the formation and started random attacks to distract that a dozen ships were trying to break away and reform into a formation again. His goal was to get one ship to the planet and fire the little doctor at the planet. He was taking advantage of the bugs ability to focus on one thing at a time. It worked and he got one or two ships through.
But hollywood being hollywood they had to make it bigger and dumber. Flashier.
That is one thing I feel the movie failed at. To really get across Ender was tired of all the tests. He saw the last test as cheating and so he planed cheating himself by blowing up the planet. He hoped that would end his career.
I agree on your point about what they failed at. The sense of time and how much had past was really lost in the movie. Also, the fact that they sent him off to the front lines seemed like a mistake, it really opens up a big plot hole, or at least a very unanswered question of what happened during that time he was in FTL. In the books, FTL in their universe still results in time dilation, so by the time he got to the front lines the buggers would have been able to build up their defenses that much more.
I appreciated the book’s line of thinking, every battle they had that got closer to the bugger’s homeworld, the ships they were using were older and less technologically advanced, because they were the ships that were sent out immediately after the original invasion of earth. by the time Ender got to command them, nearly 200 years had past since they were launched.
Yeah, that is something that bugged the hell out of me too. In the book he went to an asteroid that was in our solar system. The whole going to another planet many light years away made no sense.
Another change that bothered me was how he handled the Bonzo fight in the movie. In the book he planed the whole thing out. The only thing that was the same was that he killed Bonzo by mistake and didn’t know for sure he had because of the adults saying he was still alive.
The book was an amazing tale of a world at war with an alien species and the lengths the society went to training children to be soldiers. The mental and physical demands and abuse that destroyed innocents to save a race.
The movie was barely the cliff notes version of the story.