Ender's Game, the Movie

I don't know when I first read Ender's Game, nor do I know how many times I've read it.  But anyone who has known me over the last 20 years or so has almost certainly heard me talk about the book.  I had a review of it on my really awesome website back in the days of AOL.  I was loaning it out to friends since at least high school, and I've even mailed a copy to Brazil for a friend.

My history with the Ender's Game movie is nearly as long.  The movie has famously been tossed around and re-pitched for a long, long time.  Rumors have been flying about the movie since at least 1999, when I heard Orson Scott Card talk about casting Jake Lloyd (in the midst of his Star Wars Episode 1 fame) as Ender.  (For those who are curious, he defended this by claiming that Lloyd could act, and was simply saddled with terrible writing in the Phantom Menace.)  So, let's get around to my thoughts on the movie, which are many and of course, filled with spoilers.  But really, if you've avoided reading the book despite decades of me suggesting it, I'm not going to feel bad for ruining the ending for you.

From the beginning, the movie is was an impossible task.  No film is going to be able to compete with 20 years of my imagination.  Book adaptations are hard, and lots of cuts have to be made.  These general feelings were more or less universal among Ender fans, and some seriously questioned whether it was worth it to make a movie knowing that it couldn't live up to our completely unreasonable expectations.  Thus, my strategy was to lower expectations.  That was a good call.

I'm not an experienced movie critic. I'm not even an experienced movie goer.  I think the last two non-kids movies I saw in a theater were Harry Potter 7-2 and the last Pirates movie.  Let's talk about some elements of the film.

Pacing
The pacing of the movie was really rough for me.  The story is one of introspection about the nature of conflict and the weight of leadership, and the movie doesn't give you any time to think.  In a scene with Ender and Valentine on the lake, Ender and Val have to complete each other's sentences (E: In the moment when i understand them . . . V: You love them . . . E: And in that moment . . . V: You beat them . . . E: I destory them.)  I'm paraphrasing the dialog, but we don't even get time to have a deep conversation with good pacing. We have to throw out this bit of Ender's psyche and then get on to launching him back into space as quickly as possible.  I really feel like the movie would have benefited from being 20 or 30 minutes longer.  The first Narnia movie (2005) was 143 minutes and came from a book that is what, 120 pages?  EG is 300-something pages long, and they compacted that into about 110 minutes.  Ender's stay in battle school only seems to include 2 or 3 battles, which makes his stay there seem like it's only 3 weeks long.  (Not 4 years)  In the book, when Mazer shows up in Enders room, they have a waiting contest that takes a significant amount of time.  Hours perhaps.  In the movie, Ender asks him a question, gets no response, and quickly declares that someone will come looking for him and we move on to them fighting.  How much time would it have taken to hint at some passage of time?  It leaves Ender looking very impatient and impulsive, where his character out to be just the opposite.  I think someone should have reminded the director about how montages work.  The movie smartly chooses to completely remove the Val/Peter/Demosthenese/Locke story line, which is good, but still.  We needed more time.

Acting and Writing
EG is built around genius children between the ages of 6 and 12, which is what always scared everyone about the film.  Finding 1 good actor that age is hard enough.  Finding half a dozen is near impossible.  Historically, every time a kid had a good acting performance (Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense) Ender fans would get all atwitter about the prospect of him as Ender.  The obvious solution to this is to age up the characters to teenagers, which is what the movie did.  (In a more drastic approach, a script was produced years ago which shifted the story much more to the point of view of the teachers.)  I suppose this works fine.  Asa Butterfield does reasonably well with the part given him, I think.  It's unfortunate the he's as tall as all the adults, but growth spurts happen when they happen for kids his age.  The movie grabbed 3 significant names for the major adult parts in Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis.  I think Ford had the best performance of the three, which surprised me.  I had higher expectations for Davis based on prior movies (Doubt).  The rest of the kids did ok, I guess, but other than Petra, they didn't really call for them to act at all.  Bean, Alai, Dink and Bernard were reduced to cardboard cutouts that had a few boring lines.  They were generally given a flat delivery, but the way the movie was put together, the importance to their parts is very minimal.  (Every time Bean opened his mouth, I was hoping he might get to say "Two fighters against a Star Destroyer?")  In short, no one is going to be getting any oscar nominations for their work, but I don't have any complaints from the actors.

The writing was a little sketchy in places, specifically the battle room, where apparently the writers decided to let their 7 year-old kids have a shot on some lines.  I can't remember any of the specific offending lines, but it didn't feel like anything that anyone would ever say in real life.  Oh, wait!  I just thought of one.  How do they manage to produce a move in which Petra, upon first meeting Ender says "we can go to the battle room together and I'll show you some moves."  I about fell over at that line.  Surely there isn't a teenage girl anywhere in the world that would accidentally use the phrase "I'll show you some moves" when talking to a boy.  Right?

Characters and world creation
The world created by the film makers, and the characters within had some significant departures from the book that I thought were needless, and not an improvement.  The whole movie had a much more military feel than the book, with lots of marching, yelling and saluting.  Dap was turned into a drill sergeant, instead of being the one person who is actually instructed to be nice to the kids.  One of the things I really disliked was how they significantly shrunk battle school.  In the book, there are at least 20 armies of 40 kids each, plus commanders and launchies, which puts the minimum total population of battle school at around 900 kids.  But from what the movie shows, there's only about 50 kids there, maybe less.  The cafeteria where they eat is tiny, their launch group is 18 kids (but 3 disappear by the first time they enter the battle room - oh, while I'm thinking about it, the battle room DOES NOT HAVE WINDOWS!!!!).  Armies seem to be downgraded to the same 15 kids (16 including the commander, I suppose), though still divided between 4 toons.  What the toons are for isn't clear, as the battles seem to require about the same amount of tactical planning as the trench warfare of WWI, i.e. keep your head down and keep firing at the guy hiding behind the other star.  Anyway, getting back to topic, battle school should have had several hundred more kids in it, and I don't see why they couldn't get a bunch of extras in there for a few scenes with crowds in it.

I'll start with the characters that they did well on.  Graff was right, Anderson was good, though really only exists in both the book and the movie to give Graff someone to talk to.  Peter and Val are one dimensional, and they didn't mess that up.  As I've already mentioned, all the other kids besides Ender, Bonzo and Petra essentially don't matter.  Bean is just a body to fill a seat, same as the others.  We don't learn anything about any of them at any time.

Now the issues I have on the development of characters.  We'll start small and work up.  Ender's dad is kinda jerky, and I don't know why.  Petra does not love Ender.  She marries Bean.  And Peter.  Pretty much every major male hero in the series EXCEPT Ender.  But whatever.

Let's move on to Ender.  They certainly read the book, and they understood what Ender was supposed to be like.  They just didn't adequately show it.  Graff mentions Ender's compassion multiple times, but we never see it.  Instead, we see an Ender that is impatient, needlessly challenges authority, and is aggressive.  The movie got it completely backwards when they made Ender aggressive, but a pacifist who was angry about being tricked into fighting.  In the book, Ender understands the reasons for the conflict, and that humanity must defend itself.  But his lack of aggression is part of what requires the "trick" of the game at the end.  This balance within Ender's personality is very delicate, and that is what is the hardest part of the whole book to put into a movie. They sort of understood it, but not completely.  This is one of the areas where the movie needed more time to sort through these issues.  Instead, they decided to plow on, much as I will now.

Visuals
Visually, the movie was very nice.  The battle room and space battles looked great.  For some odd reason, in the future when you're weightless, your arms MUST float upward causing your elbows to stick out all funny, like you're somehow unable to move your arms into a different position.  As I mentioned, the battle scenes had a lack of movement, both from the students and the capital ships, which just sit there and fire during battles.  As we learn from Ender in the book, "There is no combat without movement."

Story
It's plot time.  There are a couple of plot holes that simply don't work.  First: The Bonzo fight.  In the movie, Ender more or less subdues Bonzo physically and then lets him go.  Bonzo attacks again, Ender kicks him and he falls back across the room where he manages to fall exactly onto the corner of a step which presumably fractures his skull.  In essence, it was a fight where someone accidentally got seriously hurt.  (Also, what's with the windows into the surgical room, where they let anyone watch who wants to walk by???)  Contrast that with the book, where Ender breaks his face with the back of his head, and then repeatedly kicks him afterward.  Ender does not mean to kill Bonzo, but he absolutely intends to inflict every bit of physical damage that Bonzo receives.  Ender believes in not striking unless absolutely required, and then striking with maximum force -- you don't trade blows with your enemy, you destroy his ability to ever strike back.  The intentional nature of the way the Ender destroys Bonzo is important, it's how Ender fights all his battles.  He doesn't win by accident.

There are also a few quick hitters that don't make much sense.  Where did all the buggers water go?  Despite what you may or may not believe about our ecological position here on earth, but we're in no danger of running out of water.  Clean fresh water, maybe.  But just water, not so much.  Also, there are many, many chemical ways of either cleaning or making water that are much simpler and cheaper than interstellar travel.  What does Petra do in all those battles, since her one job is evidently to pull the trigger on a singular gun, which they never use until the very end?  Why do the adults watching the final battle respond to victory with a golf clap?  Shouldn't they be a bit more excited than that?  Why do the formics look so much like the zerg?  Why is Bonzo so short?  Why does it take an extra soldier to escort a guy with a sprained ankle to the nurse's office? (Why does he need a healthy ankle to go be weightless and hide behind a star anyway?  Isn't a weightless environment the ultimate in elevating the injury?)  How dumb is the whole idea that Ender then gets two replacements for his army from the other army that they're fighting, and it happens to be his best friends from that army?  The army leader board shows about 10 armies, shouldn't they be grabbing some other random students?  Why do they have to travel to a distant planet to fight the buggers when they have an instantaneous communication device?

Now on to the biggest plot hole of all: how does the hive queen know to hack into Ender's mind game to plant the images of where they left the cocoon?  Never mind the technical problems of how the hive queen is hacking into the mind game in order to place information into Ender's brain.  Lets just try to answer the question of why?  At that point in time, Ender is a launchie in battle school, and yet she manages to figure out that he is vitally important to the formics survival.  Perhaps she is reading Graff's email? Or listening in on his conversations with Anderson?  Never mind that the entire message that the hive queen leaves requires Ender to have a room with the right view out the window (that he has to stand on his bed to even see).  For the film, they completely reversed this "communication" from the hive queen who is sending information to Ender which matches an already existent real place, long before he is a direct threat to the formics.  In the book, they construct a place specifically to mimic something that they find in his memories - memories that they are looking at because they can sense that he is at the center of the fleet that is currently attacking them.

Summary
Ok, this has probably gone on much longer than anyone really wanted.  I could go on for hours.  I feel bad that so many of my comments seem pretty negative.  Most of these thoughts have flowed from my fingertips as fast as I could type them.  (After some discussion with Shannon, too.)  I'm probably too focused on the details to appreciate the film as a whole.  It was a decent attempt, but it falls short of my hopes and dreams, and landed about where I figured it would.  The acting was a pleasant surprise, as I figured that would be a huge downfall of the movie.  The major plot changes were maddening, because they don't make sense to me.  And most significantly, the movie felt so rushed as they tried to pack everything in to 114 minutes.

As it turns out, the book was better.