Ender's Game

Ender’s Game is in theaters and it is awesome!

Yeah, I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out ever since I first read it in high school, and many others have been waiting much longer.  The story about a kid being brought into space to be trained as a military commander has stuck with me a long time and to see it come alive is exciting.

Battle School is gorgeous.  It’s been a long time since we’ve had a genuinely unique space station and they accomplished it in flying colors.  But I was especially impressed with Command School and the simulator.  The simulator might be the most breathtaking part of the whole show.

So, for the spoilers:

The pacing is much more condensed than the book, which only makes sense considering how much time the movie has to work with.  Instead of watching Ender grow from 6 to 11, he’s roughly 11 for the entire film; instead of years of training, it’s been condensed down to months.

The Battle Room is the main setting throughout, but only two battles actually take place in the room.

The subplot with Ender’s siblings is gone.  Peter only has two appearances in the whole movie, and while Valentine is given significantly more screentime, her role is still the same as Peter’s: they influence Ender but they have no relationship with him.  Which is how it is in the book, but we get no glimpse at what they want and what they dream.

With their subplot gone, the colonization theme that is so crucial to the entire Enderverse series is nonexistent.

I agree with every decision made thus far.  They decided to make the movie entirely about Ender and not only how brilliant a tactician he was, but about his most deeply cherished beliefs: that when you know someone completely and you can’t help but love them completely, even your most hated enemy; and that it isn’t enough to win one battle, you have to win all the future battles.  The only way to stop an enemy is rob them entirely of their will to fight you.

His leadership is believable.  The danger in this film was not just to accept that kids would follow him, but making us believe the adults would trust the fate of their species to this young, young child.  I bought it, not only that they would trust him but that they would love him.

I only have one quibble: the thing that got condensed were character personalities, specifically among Ender’s friends.  Fair enough, they didn’t have the time to develop everything relationship.  So what they did was combine several characters attributes into one.  In this case, Petra took over the roles that Dink Meeker and Bean played in the novel, and that does bother me a bit.  What makes Petra’s character fascinating to me is that she is Ender’s mentor and friend, but she’s also extremely competitive and really jealous of Ender’s talent at one part in the story.  There was always a distance between the two in the novel.  It was always Bean that was closest to Ender; they thought alike, they were treated alike, and there was nothing Ender knew that Bean didn’t.  And considering the role Bean plays, not just in Ender’s Game but in many of the sequels, I was hoping that they would give him a much larger role.

Oh, well.  This movie’s good.  I hope it makes enough money to put out not just Enderverse sequels, but more Orson Scott Card adaptations.  There are stories that deserve to be on the big screen.