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.

I like big books (and I can not lie)

It's been a while since I read something that was too heavy to lift, so I put on my back brace and lugged around a book that is holding down bookshelves all over America: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer.  You've probably seen the big book with the swastika on your parents book shelves, but has anyone actually read it?  Because let me tell you, it's 1147 pages.  Not including the bibliography or index.  Of course, if you account for the pictures, that brings it down to about 1147 pages, and then, once you take out the maps its down to 1147 pages.  That's right, 1147 pages with nary a picture or map to be found.  But don't worry, there are footnotes!

You all have a basic idea of the story.  Hitler starts up the Nazi party, gradually picks up some seats in the legislature during the 20s and then manages to get himself named Chancellor in 1932.  Over the next half dozen years he tells the same story over and over again, pushing around pretty much the rest of Europe.  Basically, he tells them, "Hey, I really need X, and if you just let me have it, then we'll be good, and we can all live together happily".  Over the 1930s, X happens to be, no more reparation payments over WWI, no more limiting Germany to a tiny little army, no more limiting Germany to a tiny little navy, Austria, part of Czechoslovakia, all of Czechoslovakia, and finally half of Poland.  It takes a depressingly long time for other European powers to figure out that he's got a never-ending list of stuff that he wants.  So, they have a big ol' war, he's pretty much crazy, he kills pretty much everyone he doesn't like (which is a lot of people) and finally he kills himself.  There you go, if you have small hand writing, I think you can get that on a 3x5 card.

The book was published in 1960, and extensively references captured Nazi documents, which provides interesting insight in to the fact that they were all crazy.  Page after page left me completely dumbfounded that 1) anyone could be so messed up and hate so many people, 2) he could find so many friends to help him in his cause and 3) so many people let him do it.

I made it through the book in about 8 weeks, and considering that I moved and started a new job during that time, I think that's pretty good progress.  It's interesting, though long and at times overly detailed, covering every conversation that every person had during negotiations, for example.  The best parts were when Shirer would quote his own journal or opinion, as he lived in Germany as a reporter from 1932 to 1940, and saw many important events first hand.

Birding

We went for a conference weekend walk along the Fox river (which runs through town here) this morning.  Near the end of our walk, we spotted a bald eagle circling over head.  Maybe he was looking for foxes or something.  (Fox River, ha ha.)  For me, it's the first wild bald eagle I've ever seen, except perhaps the pair the like to nest near the West Yellowstone entrance to Yellowstone.  Except with those ones, they don't let you stop as you drive past, so all you can do is stick your nose up against the window and hope that maybe one of them sticks its head out over the edge of the nest.  Anyway, it was neat.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that it was Shannon who spotted it up there circling.  I suppose I will have to give up my nickname of "eagle eye" for at least a day.

Strangely ILL

Shortly after moving to Michigan, I recorded a few thoughts differences that I'd noticed moving across the country.  They weren't terribly significant things, which is really the most significant thing about the list.   It's pretty much the same story with Illinois.  The country seems to be pretty homogeneous, at least from my sampling which now includes 3 of the 50 states. But here's what I've got so far:

Illinois likes to charge you for . . . well, whatever they think they can get away with.
- There is a $50 registration fee for kindergarten, which is only 2 1/2 hours a day.  If you want full day kindergarten, they have that, but it costs a few thousand dollars.
- They charge you to drive on their roads.  From our house, it costs a couple bucks worth of tolls to get into the city.  And a couple bucks more to get back out.  If you get a fancy electronic box to stick on your windshield, you don't have to stop to pay the tolls, and they are 50% cheaper.
- Property taxes are significantly higher here than they were in Midland.  (And people in Midland sure liked to complain about those.)  Of course, I don't own any property here, so this doesn't have a large direct effect on me.
- We haven't gotten new license plates or drivers licenses yet, but when we do, I'm sure they won't hesitate to charge us.
- Oh! How could I leave this one to so late in the list: they charge you to take away garbage.  Sure, you might say that every city does this, but in St. Charles, you have to buy their garbage bags, or but tags to put on your bags for them to take it away.  I suppose the upside to all this is that if we don't drive, or create garbage, we can save money!

It gets dark really early here
We only moved a few hundred miles west, but we went from the western edge of the Eastern time zone, to the eastern edge of the central time zone.  The net result is that sunset is about 45 minutes earlier than it used to be.  Today, that difference happened to be exactly 45 minutes, as it turns out.  Official sunset time in St. Charles today was 6:32 pm.  And we just barely hit the equinox.  And we haven't come off daylight savings time yet.  By Halloween, sunset will be at 5:48, and by Thanksgiving it will be at 4:24!  That's about where it bottoms out, which, is a good thing, because otherwise I'd go crazy.  Twilight will be before 5pm, so I'll be driving home from work in the middle of the night.  The other side of this is, of course, that the sun comes up that much earlier.  But that still doesn't motivate me to get out of bed.

New Kind of Unemployment

It's been nearly 4 weeks since we moved to Illinois, and things are settling down, I suppose.  I guess it's been a bit of an adjustment going back to work every day and all the things that entails - seeing the girls less, showering every day - you know, stuff that grown-ups do.  For me, the transition to a new place is pretty easy.  Other than living in a new place, my life isn't that different.  I spend all day at work doing things that aren't totally different than the other jobs I've had for the last half-dozen years.  Shannon and the girls have had much more adjusting to do than I have.

But there is one thing that has been pretty weird, and that's a new kind of unemployment: we don't have callings.  I suppose when we moved to Michigan we didn't have callings for a little while after we moved, but that was three years ago.  Since then I've been choir accompanist, Sunday school president, primary teacher and Webelos leader.  Playing for the choir carried through basically the entire time we were in Michigan, and the primary and scouts covered the last year.  So, I always had something to do.  Not tons to do, but something.  My primary class only had 4 kids in it, but I had to have a lesson every week, the ward choir practiced basically every week, and we at least usually had a plan for scouts.  But now, Saturday night rolls around, and I don't have anything I need to do to get ready for church.  (Brush my clothes?  Shine my shoes?)  Ditto for Sunday morning.

And then when church actually starts, I don't have anything to do.  I guess I just go to gospel doctrine and then EQ?  I just . . . . attend?  I feel kinda like a free loader.  Now, I know that they'll get around to giving us callings soon, and I guess I'm enjoying actually hearing a lesson (which I hadn't done in a year and a half), but it still feels strange.  Our ward has had something like 14 new families move in over the last 5 months, so there's probably a bit of a back-log on bishopric visits and callings.  (Shannon is probably very happy that this also means that there is likely a back-log on "ask the new people to speak in sacrament meeting," too.)

I admit to not knowing a whole lot of boring organizational details about other churches, but I wonder if this is a somewhat unique LDS thing.  My impression is that other churches have a lot higher percentage of people who attend, but don't have other responsibilities.  And, from what I understand, when people do have responsibilities, they tend to be a bit more on a volunteer basis.

Anyway, if this year has taught us anything, it is that unemployment won't last forever!

Chomp!

This is what Julia's leg looks like today after Ella took a bite out of her thigh Sunday morning. If you look closely, you can see 6 or 8 red tooth marks where Ella broke the skin through Julia's pants. Sadly, this is not Ella's first offense, and even worse she seems to bite harder each time.

Sticky special Ella

We got taffy from Aunt Kim a loooong time ago and finally got around to "pulling it out" yesterday. It was un-pulled taffy, so all three girls buttered up their hands to get to work. Ella was very much not impressed. She's always been a bit of a neat freak (often wiping her mouth and fingers after each and every bite at dinner) and so slathering on some butter wasn't exactly her idea of a good time. Adding the taffy and telling her to pull it didn't help much. This picture only begins to show her revoltion at the whole thing. It was pretty funny.

In other Ella news, in the last day or two, her prayers have gotten a lot more special. First she blesses each family member individually to be special, and then a separate round of "bless mommas bones to be special". We just bite our lips and hope that she remembers the food in there somewhere.

First day of work

What did people do before the internet? You can feel free to leave comments below, but since I'm still blogging from my phone, I won't see them for a while. The no internet saga is longer than I want to type withmy thumbs, but just know that ISPs all seem to be incompetent. So instead, I give you my first day of work picture.

It was a bit different going to work after a break that was far longer than any school summer break I've ever had. The first week is over now, and thengsare going just fine. First weeks are always a bit slow until you start to figure out what is going on. Monday morning I'll be at Northwestern for some metrology that should be my first actual positive contribution.

But today is the weekend. I went running without getting lost, and we're tired of unpacking boxes, so we'll have to find something fun to do, even if we're technologically living in the dark ages.

When we moved out of Wymount 7 years ago we reserved a 10 foot U-haul. They did

When we moved out of Wymount 7 years ago, we reserved a 10 foot U-haul. They didn't have any, so they gave us a 16 footer, which was a bit of overkill. We moved to St. George in a 10' truck and all our moves since then have either been in-town or professionally done. Until this one.

I've knows several people recently with 2-4 kids who have tried to move with a 26' truck, only to discover on loading day that they didn't fit. But 26' is as big as they come, so thats what we reserved and hoped for the best. Turns out that all our friends must have a bunch of junk. We fit just fine and were maybe 80% full. So I got to drive the monster 350 miles while pulling our prism behind. I figure we were 45' long or so. Shannon took the girls in the civic which was a whole different adventure. The drive went pretty well, other than the $150 of gas I had to put in, but I think I'll stick to driving little cars in the future.

Yesterday we said good bye to our house. It was a nice house and cleaning it up

Yesterday we said good bye to our house. It was a nice house, and cleaning it up and packing everything left us remembering all of our favorite things. The spacious storage, the swings (outside and in), the space, our manhattan mist bedroom, our big kitchen. Also, we realize that it will probably be a long time before we live somewhere that big again (if we ever do).

I started blogging a virtual tour of the house when we moved in, but never finished. I suppose we move more often than I blog! I realized this week that Ella just turned 3 a few months ago and we're already moving her on to her third state. Even my dad made it to age 5 before his 3rd state (I think).

We'll miss you, house! We hope someone nice buys you! (the sooner the better)