re: Enders Game Review Thread

Overall, I enjoyed the movie although I hated the 20 minutes of commercials before they even started the damn thing.

The main flaw would be character development. The leaps from people not liking Ender to total buy-in was too fast.

Only problem is the movie would have been boring if they kept showing more and more and more zero g battles. Who would want to watch a potter film with 5 quidditch matches?

The effects were nicely done. They kept some of the violence in the movie. Maybe toned it down a bit but at least it wasn't removed completely.

The game sequence was never really going to translate well. Once again, it would have been a bit boring to have Ender spend 40 minutes of the movie playing a video game.

I think it was an admirable attempt at a difficult book to translate to screen.

How much if any was pulled from enders shadow for the movie?

If they're going to move forward I think that's the way to go. Shadow of the Hegamon would be an opportunity to get into a lot more peter background than what it sounds like they had.

Saw it last night. Never read the book.
It was a strange concept. But it was a weird ending.

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You are often condensing the story while bringing to life the core of the book.

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This was the biggest failure of the movie. There was nothing gray about the movie - Ender didn't kill either Bonzo or Stilson. He didn't even intend to hurt Bonzo. Further, Graff plainly didn't care about the boy and had zero nuance. They also didn't really portray any tiredness, exhaustion, etc from Ender - they tried to say he was burned out and upset, but there was no indication beyond getting up early one time that he was under any real pressure.

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I'm really interested to see how they handle bean

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They don't handle anyone. That is the problem. This should have been a 3 hour movie but they cut it short thus almost no development.

It didn't bother me too much because I read the books and my brain filled the missing pieces but I could see some people thinking the movie is more than a touch hokey with the fast shifts in emotion and relationships.

I just got done watching it.

While I didn't have overly high expectations of an adaptation, I was very glad that someone warned me not to expect much from Bean.

PROS:

I though they did better than I anticipated with the Fantasy Game.
Anderson was good.
Command School was very well executed.

CONS:

-Ignoring the Jeesh. I understand time constraints, but I think they could have done more to make it clear that these people were not only Ender's buddies, but also exceptional talents in their own right.

-Changing the rules of the game in the Battle Room. The Battle Room makes more sense as prep for the battle with the Formics when it takes place where victory is only determined by achieving the objective of the enemy's gate, rather than the individual scoring stuff that they threw in there.



After seeing it, I don't think there is any intention of turning this into any sort of franchise. They changed/ignored too many very very important characters most notably Bean, Val, and Peter to move forward with the story. All in all it was solid, and very enjoyable, but it made me want to read the books again so that I could get the more rich experience in them.

I know nothing of the book. My son had read it so we went to see the movie yesterday and enjoyed it. I thought the twist at "graduation" was awesome. I thought it did a good job dealing with all the ethical undertones of war.

Good movie.


The main things that stuck in my head were the unnecessary changes to the book that opens up holes.

Why wasn't Command School on Eros? I suppose you can cut them slack because they wouldn't be able to go the ending plotline otherwise (which was stupid IMO)

Why condense the first and second Invasions?

The first invasion was only one ship that scoured China.

The second invasion (With Mazer) was something more similar to what happened in the film, except Mazer wasn't a fighter pilot and it was set in the asteroid belt. The original story was an scouring ship to cleanse the planet of current life and start introducing Formic life (with current technology), the second invasion was 50 years later, after humanity learned from captured Formic technology and ramped up for interstellar war, and the events of the film curred around 70 years after that....

And most importantly.....why change the tactics of the final battle?

"Okay, first I am going to show you what I am going to do....and now I am going to do it to your planet...."

I laughed when Indiana Jones called it brilliant.



IMO, the biggest casualty to the story telling (which is due to the medium rather than any creative flaw), is the fact that they weren't able to portray the slow wearing down of Ender.

And they detracted from the whole damn point by not killing Bonzo and Stilson, and making the Bonzo attack more of an accidental result than Ender's killer instinct that he later shows remorse over.

Loved it. It was everything I was hoping for.