Ender's Game movie - anyone seen it? (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

::whew:: finally saw it, and liked it.

That right there is a minor miracle. I read the book when it first came out, and have re-read it dozens of times (more than any other book). I was sure they’d screw it up, and had always been relieved whenever OSC would reveal the latest reason he’d scuttled yet another movie version (usually for making Ender a teen heart-throb).

Saw it with a friend who’d never read the book, and he was captivated. He couldn’t stop saying how emotional an experience it was for him. it was fun to see it through a newbie’s eyes.

22

Mahaloth: Definitely minor - shoulda used a smilie. It’s no biggie, I was just confused. I saw the movie today and really wanted to discuss it, and the spoiler tags are kind of a pain. So I just wanted to make sure what’s expected in the thread.

I’m a big fan of the book (though not the author!), and I was disappointed in the movie. Others have touched on some of my problems with it, so here’s my small contribution:

What the hell were they thinking with Bonzo? It’s as if they found an actor that looked and acted perfectly like Rose the Nose, and slapped the name Bonzo on him. Bonzo is supposed to be tall, good-looking, aristocratic. It didn’t affect the story much, but why change that at all?

23

Not to mention finding an actor that looked about a foot shorter than Ender (it seemed he barely come up to Ender’s shoulder)?, which somewhat undercuts the relative power position and stakes in the fight.

24

It’s been a while since I read the book, so I don’t at all remember the original physical descriptions… but I thought that the actor playing Bonzo was great. Sure he was short, but there was no doubt from his intensity and confidence that he thought he was the Alpha male, and probably would have been if not for Ender’s Ender-ness.

25

I thought the movie pulled a lot of it’s punches compared to the book, maybe making it slightly more family friendly but losing some of the magic that made the book such a cultural touchstone for a generation of adolescents:

  • The film never made me feel like Ender was ever in any real danger. The fights with Stinson and Bonzo had Ender as being clearly superior and in control of the situation at all times. I remember quite clearly in the book, Ender kicked Stinson in the balls to end the fight. Even at that young age, I understood what a transgressive act that was. The movie sanitizes the scene into a few stomach kicks and completely erases any suggestion that Stinson died.
  • The movie significantly mutes the sense of adolescent rage at authority that is present in the books.
  • One of the dreams of the Enders Game movie, ever since the book came out was seeing Battle School gloriously rendered on the screen. I feel like the movie lost it’s opportunity to create a truly memorable Battle School sequence. Even if the rest of the movie were mediocre, a faithfully rendered Battle School (admittedly, perhaps an impossible task) would have redeemed everything. Instead, the Battle School scenes were perfunctory, hard to understand and underplayed.

Overall, I think it was a fairly fine movie, but I believe it had the potential to be a great one. Mainly, I’m disappointed because this movie might close the door on anyone else attempting to make Enders Game again.

26

Saw it Saturday. I felt it was one of the most inane, implausible movies I have seen in a while. Everything seemed a bit ridiculous to me.

  • The most brilliant military strategist is a young boy - no reason is ever offered - maybe the boy is a super genius that is smarter than the smartest (remaining) military strategist? (So we have scene after scene of “military drills” involving 8 year olds, complete with fights in the quarters. :smack: Just like them marines.)

What exactly would have been taken away from the story if all the kids had been replaced with adults? Atleast the stomping around in the barracks would have been a little less hilarious.

  • For some reason the “battle school” operates in zero-gee, when an actual fight with the bugs would happen in either earth gravity or the gravity of the bug planet. Maybe an excuse to throw in the slick FX that is the only redeeming feature of the movie.

  • The scenes depicting Ender’s maturation as a battle commander are poorly fleshed out. The entire battle setup is toyish and the contending teams are playing a high-tech hide-and-seek. There is just no tension, the kids are having fun shooting each other with toy guns.

And all of a sudden Ender is proclaimed to be ready for the onerous task ahead. Awesome.

  • If they had a planet-busting weapon, why the hell did they need Ender at all? They just had to get the weapon up close and open fire and it’s game over. Couldn’t one of the adults have done it and spared Ender all the trouble?

  • A planet busting weapon? In the hands of a bunch of kids? Oh I forget, these are battle-hardened, trained kids. :rolleyes:

  • Finally Ender gets to throw a tantrum and give us a moral sermon. After that he gets promoted and “left to himself” conveniently - with a pulsing egg in his possession. You would think they would be more careful about these things. :smack:

  • Then the little guy leaves by himself “journeying across the universe” to find a planet to plant that little egg and presumably lovingly raise another telepathic monster bug. (Let’s talk about the odds of finding a planet by randomly launching into space. With a monster bug egg in your pocket.)

Utterly hilarious.

Some books are not meant to be made into movies. The original book by OSC was a meandering inanity that I couldn’t get myself to complete.

I have not seen something this stupid in a while. The last one I hated was Prometheus and that was far better-made than this joke.

Thankfully I saved a few bucks by not seeing the IMAX screening. Wasted money on popcorn and soda though.

27

Sure, but it diminished any sense of peril when they fight if Ender outweighs him by 30 pounds when he’s already been shown to be good at hand to hand.

It relies on the book to care but I do think it suffered by losing the emphasis on Ender being years younger than anybody else once he moved to the form team.

28

Why do you say that when no actual battle with them took place in gravity?

29

Funny you say that. In the book, the kids were much younger – six to twelve, instead of teenagers. It’s actually one of the better changes the movie made, since the kids in the book talk and act so much like adults, it’s hard to picture them as younger than 12 anyway.

This is one of those Fridge Logic questions that even the book has trouble explaining. The best interpretation is that the army leaders don’t want to confront the moral decision to destroy an entire alien species, even one that nearly destroyed mankind, so they trick a platoon of children into doing it while thinking they are playing a video game. In essence, all that “child soldier” propaganda is one giant con game.

What, you’ve never sneaked a pizza into a movie theater before? :smiley:

30

I was amazed at how well rendered it was. The future technology all seemed real and was amazing. Battle School was beautiful and real at the same time. The plot was rushed and the book was so interior that most of what made it great was unfilmable. Really well done.

31

Saw it yesterday with my fifteen year old son, who has not read the book. He actually enjoyed it. Got past the moral dilemma of paying for it buying a ticket for Captain Phillips, at the same time, but going into the Ender’s Game theater.

I’ve only read the book once, a long time ago, and so only somewhat knew what was going to happen. I did think it felt rushed, but that’s the nature of films.

32

The first - and only - battle with the Fornix (or whatever they were called, I forget already) took place in the atmosphere of Earth, subject to Earth gravity. Some Air Force dude (who later shows up with a painted face) plugs a missile into the mothership and downs the entire invading force.

I would say this is one of the more forgiveable plot holes - we did get to see cool battle station FX.

33

Well, they should have made the change even better. If your story requires the use of 8-year-olds, invent an ecosystem that makes them look natural in that setting.

If you take young children and insert them into a military-like environment, complete with a screaming drill sargent, fist-fights with other tender children, and load them with ridiculously adult-sounding dialogue, utter hilarity ensues.

So the adults were too chicken to defend the human race themselves, and so they trick a bunch of kids to do it for them? Awesome.

34

Um… didn’t Razor Makem (sp?) fight the Formics near an asteroid belt in space? He knew it was the mother ship by the way the other aircraft were flying around it. He didn’t guess the significance of killing the queen, with respect to their group think. That was dumb luck. I’ve only listened to the audiobook (twice), which is why I may be spelling everything wrong.

The notion of training and fighting in zero gravity was to simulate fighting aircraft in space. That you have to think in 3 dimensions, in a place where up and down have no real significance. At least that’s how I took it.

35

The movie was alright. As much as Graff & Co. were rushed to get Ender to Command School in the book, the movie was even more rushed to get there. I know that in an era of stretching stories out far beyond what is necessary, it seems this might have been better suited for two films.

Stylistically, I understand why they made the Battle Room a clear sphere - but when there is so much emphasis on the difficulty of orientating in space, it’d be pretty easy to do so with a giant planet right outside the window… Oh well, that’s pretty niggling. The biggest offense was the fact that there were just two Battle Room scenes (well, three if you count Ender training with Petra, which I do not).

Not nearly enough exposition to show that Ender was under the impression that he was training against Mazer at Command School. That, I think, was a big missed opportunity to add some weight to the big reveal.

I was pretty impressed by their ability to add in the Mind Game. I was pretty sure they were going to completely cut that, as well as the queen’s egg at the end. The graphics weren’t too terrible, and it seemed to make sense to my wife. (Though it would have been good for them to show other students’ versions of the game.)

And yet the advance party was well aware that every subsequent battle would be taking place in space, because they were, you know, out on the front lines. Of all the things to be bothered by, this is pretty illogical.

36

Mazor Rakem.

37

I enjoyed it myself, my wife thought it was so-so (not being a big fan of science fiction, and having a hard time connecting to movies that lack significant female roles). A few things bothered/confused me about the story (both relevant to the film and the book which I read years ago)

-The book and short story it was based on presented a ‘twist’ to the reader, in which all this ‘training’ in the simulators is actual battles being waged. But I thought the film telegraphed it way too much; the Colonel seeing the looming enemy fleet on the screen, moving them to Command School located on a former Formic outpost, having their ‘Graduation battle’ be right before they get thrown into the meat grinder. My wife knew right away when they were fighting the Formics for real, and I feel the movie didn’t give enough ambiguity to what they were doing leading up to the finale.

-Ender asks if we’ve ever tried to communicate with the Formics, and its suggested we have no way of communicating with them. It seems weird that in fifty years of fighting an alien species we (and them apparently) are completely in the dark about each others’ motivations. In fifty years they only attempt to contact Ender telepathically? Not, you know, Mazer, the guy who probably got their attention that we were an intelligent, sentient race?

-Harrison Ford’s character spends the whole movie talking about how they need different kinds of commanders, to think in a way to overcome the Formics. But the world Command School is located on is one liberated from the Formics 26 years prior- the movie trailers would have you believe after we barely beat them on Earth we’ve been barely hanging on by a thread until someone like Ender comes along. But the reality is we basically cornered them back to their own homeworld, Ender takes command, and finishes them off.

-The nature of the story puts a great emphasis on tactics, primarily these ‘carriers’ and fighter drones. The idea of why the Formics are supposed to be so formidible is before Mazer figured out their ‘weakness’ it was assumed they fought/flew randomly. But aside from the Little Doctor very little emphasis is placed on technology itself, which I find kind of weird since obviously Earth had 50 years to adapt to fighting the Formics.

-I found it a little unnerving the ships they were commanding were actually manned. Its been a long time since I read the book, but I assumed all the ships were remotely controlled drones. If you are using Child Genius Commanders to fight your wars, why even need a guy behind the wheel? Also, it must really suck for those 1,000 crewmembers on the Carriers that ender abandoned :eek: .

38

I’m pretty sure that was in the book, too, but that sacrifice was only a sidenote to Ender finding out he had just committed an act of genocide.

39

If they showed a battle in the asteroid belt in the movie, I totally missed it. Maybe I was microsleeping.

The only actual battle footage that Ender (and we) got to see over and over was the downing of the bug mothership with a single missile fired off a warplane in Earth’s atmosphere.

Maybe, I but insist on seeing this as an excuse to sex up the movie with FX. (And that’s hardly a bad thing.) But Ender’s team’s pirouettes in the zero-gee battle station did little for them in the final video-game-for-real battle. It’s not that they had to swim through space or anything.

40

The movie had the original battle fought in Earth’s atmosphere, but by the time the movie was taking place (50 years later), the Earth leaders knew future battles were going to happen in space. As, indeed, they did.

Part of the point of the battle room was to adapt the kids with the mental notions necessary to be able to ignore a fixed frame of perspective.