I’ve only seen the film, so maybe the books explain it better. But why did they have to go through that elaborate training and selection process to find some sort of strategic savant?
First of all, everyone’s treating Mazer Rackham like he’s freakin Alexander the Great. All he did was crash his jet into the alien mothership. That’s like “Alien Invasion Defense: 101”.
Second, the “grand strategy” at the end basically consisted of pointing a superweapon at the alien’s planet and obliterating it. One hardly has to be Napoleon to work that out. (Admiral Solo should have known this already).
Third, since Mazer Rackham seems to be the standard by which everyone else is judged, why not make him Supreme Admiral? I mean Patton didn’t spend most of his career finding a 12 year old to replace him as general of the Seventh Army.
Fourth - how does playing zero-G laser tag prepare you for interstellar strategic warfare? Being a good tactical squad leader doesn’t necessarily equate to being a good general.
5th - The Earth fleet is mostly drones. It seems to me that what they need is not so much the next Hannibal, but 15 year olds who are really good at StarCraft.
Finally, it’s been 50 years since the last invasion. Instead of a program designed to identify a gifted pre-teen Julius Caesar and sending them through some crash course, How about developing a more traditional program that takes talented recruits, trains them, and then develops their skills through continued training and experience building over years and decades of progressive advancement to develop an entire corps of talented officers? You know, just in case some clever alien decided to Mazer Rackham into Ender’s mothership.
I guess that’s it. Maybe the book’s different, but the film didn’t really do a good job of presenting why there was any strategic urgency to this program, why it had to be Ender or why this war required a commander who was particularly gifted in the first place.
In some respects, the book IS very different. So much better than the movie! It has answers for some of your questions - I suggest you read it. I’ll just touch on the easiest of your questions:
In the book, Mazer Rackham didn’t win his battle by just taking out the “mother ship.” There was no obvious mother ship to take out. His flash of genius was to realize that there was a bugger “queen” there directing the battle, and to figure out, by analyzing the movements of the bugger fleet, which ship contained the queen. Then he destroyed the queen’s ship. When the queen died, all of the bugger “drones” under her control just went lifeless.
One of many (many, many) things that movie doesn’t really explain is that the earth is, and for many years has been, on the verge of a massive global geopolitical war. The battle school takes these kids away from earth where they can be removed from any potential influence by the major superpowers who are themselves looking for the next ‘great general’ to take over the world.
Ender isn’t really just some kid who happens to be good at video games, either. IIRC, the book implies that he’s the product of several generations of strongly encouraged eugenics. He himself was only even conceived because his sister and brother were both unsuitable for battleschool (too empathetic and too brutal, respectively).
Really though, just read the book. It still holds up after all these years and and the movie was pretty bad. Half the genius of Ender’s Game is the pacing.
The movie is like reading the back cover of the book - the story is actually very detailed and meticulously constructed. If you found the movie engaging, it’s definitely worth your while to read the book.
They tried to walk the tightrope between the deeper story of the book and the shallower movie interpretation (tried too hard, really). If you look closely, in that scene, there’s plenty of other ‘mother ships’ off in the cloudy distance - so they’re trying to satisfy both the “He killed the big ship and all the little ships died” and “How did he know that was the ship to take out?” narratives.
The earth ships were all crewed by humans. They’d set out years before the final attack. The reason everything was described as a simulation was so the kids wouldn’t know they were sending real people to their deaths.
I haven’t seen the movie. I’ve heard it was kind if “eh.”
Long story short in the book the children were much younger. I believe Ender was 8 the year he started Battle School, 10 the year he entered Command School. The idea was to create child soldiers with incredibly malleable minds who could be trained to execute the enemy with little thought for the ethics if the situation and who could be more easily influenced by authority and hierarchy. All the students at Battle School have shown an intuitive grasp of tactics; that’s how they got there. Ender is just particularly creative. The military authorities recognized that they could trick him into winning their war by framing it as a game or a test.
From the first I heard if it, I thought the story wouldn’t make much sense with older teenagers.
(Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the movie, and I’ve only read the short-story version of the original tale.)
That…doesn’t exactly seem like that hard a job, if history’s any kind of example. Or was this one of those ultra developed, overly-civilised future societies where they’ve gotten out of touch with the “primitive” arts? (Y’know, the type where they make the astonishing breakthrough that they can replace a starship’s guidance computer with a person who can actually do the mathematics himself. In his head!; or where a mild rhinovirus infection sends doctors into as much a panic as a plague outbreak?)
I think the real, fundamental reason the generals needed Ender is that they were moral cowards. They all knew that the war would be won by using the Matter Dissassociation Device on the bugger homeworld, but they didn’t want to bear the responsibility for that decision themselves. They didn’t need a genius; they needed a scapegoat. Note that, when Ender did it, he thought he was deliberately flunking the test, because there’s no way they’d accept someone who’d choose to commit genocide.
You need a child (not a “boy”, OP) in part because they’re malleable, but importantly because they play games ferociously. Ender wants to win–high drive and stamina, plus tactical brilliance, are required. However, the critical “kid” factor is a lack of empathy, because the adults are too concerned about the moral implications of killing a whole species, how they will face humanity afterward when the enormity of the act is known, etc. The irony and poignancy here is that Ender is a very sensitive and empathic child, who is warped and exploited by his government.
Plus, (spoiler about later Ender books), Ender is in fact ostracized and, given his empathy, spends the rest of his life in trying to “humanize” and revive the buggers, and more generally to speak in a balanced way of the dead. I actually like Speaker for the Dead more than Ender’s Game.
Learning to fight in 3D space instead of 2D land battles (remember: the enemy gate is down).
Learning how to command in action - in the book command of the attack fleet is much more split up in separate battle groups, each lead by one of Ender’s team (under Ender’s lead). The school battles in the book are also more involved (and evolve in tactics) than just the one or two in the movie.
That seems like a bit of a stretch. It’s not hard to find commanders willing to commit genocide against other humans, let alone an alien species of insects that had already invaded Earth and killed millions.
Never read the book, but it seemed plain to me that once you develop a weapon that can trash a planet, the immediately obvious application is to trash the planet, no strategic wunderkinds necessary.
It’s kinda like that scene in Starship Troopers where everybody hesitates with “Durr… what do we do now?” and Rico establishes his leadership skills by yelling the insightful “KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!”
The planet was surrounded by thousands and thousands of bugger ships that the human fleet (of a few dozen ships) had to get through to get within range of the planet. And the book also mentions that the human ships are inferior to the buggers because of the flight time from earth to the bugger homeworld.
It’s worth pointing out that, IIRC, the MD device was not intended as a planet killer, but rather as a space weapon - get the enemy fleet packed close enough, and take out a lot of ships at once. Using it on the planet was presented as another flash of brilliance on Ender’s part.
My gripe was with the ending (of the movie). We’re supposed to believe that an alien species that attacked us doesn’t deserve to be destroyed? Well too bad for them. You don’t want to be destroyed, you don’t attack other people. I understand they surely have difficult ethical systems, but we make decisions according to our belief structures, and it was not only morally just but prudent to attack.
Oh, and the rest of the movie was completely ridiculous as well. A giant ion-thrusted spaceship would have done the job just fine. Or would a nuclear barrage, or an artificial kessler syndrome, or any other number of ridiculous but still more practical ideas that what was shown in the movie.
I’ll just touch on the easiest of your questions: