Review of Ender's Game (2013) by Philliesphan626 — 02 Nov 2013

First of all, let me say that I think this movie is OK as a stand-alone film. The acting is done decently well by most of the cast, and I liked what they did with the limited material that they had. Asa Butterfield does a decent enough job portraying Ender's emotion and his genius. I like Hailee Steinfeld, who plays Petra, but there isn't much conflict surrounding the character. Harrison Ford is good as Colonel Graff, but that's like saying that this chocolate tastes good, of course he's good, it's Harrison Ford. The Battle Room scenes are cool effects, which helped me out, as those scenes were difficult for me to imagine while reading. The way that it deals with the morality of warfare, manipulation, genocide, and repopulation do make it smarter than your average blockbuster.

Unfortunately, the film can never be a stand alone piece as it is an adaptation of an incredibly smart sci-fi novel, and is thus held to a higher standard. This is where the movie has its many, many failures. Now I understand that a movie has to be different from a book, as it needs to tell a 300+ page story in around two hours. However, when these changes serve to undermine the meaning or the themes of the source material, I start to get angry.

First and foremost, the characters are aged up to be into their adolescence, and the time period of the movie is squashed into the span of a year. I am perfectly aware of why they did this. Child actors make it incredibly difficult to make a good movie (ask Jake Lloyd), and to go through the course of the story, at least two actors would've had to play Ender and the other characters that age over the course of a six-year story. However, the absence of the longer timeframe takes away much of the impact, as in the book Ender lives literally half of his life under the thumb of Graff and the military. This largely undermines the impact of the child soldiering conversation raised by the novel. The relationship between Ender and Bean is broken, as Bean is the same age as Ender in the film version, removing the key dynamic of the characters.

One of the key forces that defines Ender in the book is his continuing isolation, first from Valentine, then from the Launchies, then from the friends he made at Battle School. Graff says his line directly from the book about this, and successfully does this on the shuttle. However, after Ender wins his battle with Bernard (in a far less clever way, mind you), he is accepted by the battle school. After Ender is named commander, however, he never has the estrangement from his soldiers that he does in the book. They simply enjoy having Ender (who they all like and respect), as their commanding officer, without any change in his relationships. Ender never faces Petra or Alai in battle, forcing him to destroy, humiliate, and therefore alienate them. They simply both end up in Dragon Army, something Colonel Graff would never have allowed in the book. Nonetheless, Ender, Petra, Alai, and Bean are all portrayed well, which is more than can be said about one of the characters.

Bonzo de Madrid is completely miscast in this movie, which ruins almost all of the scenes in which he's involved.

The thing that I hated the most, though about this film is their stripping of the roles of Peter and Valentine. Valentine and Peter, and Demosthenes and Locke, have one of the ongoing storylines in the book. They manipulate world politics and involve themselves in an impeding war with Russian Empire. This storyline serves as a complex development to both Valentine and Peter's characters, a change in the separated siblings character as opposed to their perception of one another, a commentary on becoming who you pretend to be, a political argument about the nature of the mob, an example of bad motivation leading to a positive result, an analysis of child prodigy, a view of parental and sibling relationships and how they develop over the years, and my favorite part of the book. Naturally, the filmmakers chose that NONE of this had ANY place in a Hollywood blockbuster, and cut ALL OF IT. It also robbed us of the drama of Ender's fear of becoming Peter, as Peter is on screen for all of FIVE MINUTES, so we don't know him as the audience.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Hollywood took something that was thought-provoking and clever, and made it into a marketable Hollywood blockbuster. All in all, I think it has some merit (Harrison Ford!), but fails to reach anywhere remotely near the novel's impact.