Review of Ender's Game (2013) by Snodog — 29 Nov 2013

Ender's Game, the novel, was thought provoking, philosophically deep, and psychologically amazing. Orson Scott Card brought characters to a level of connection between each other and the reader that few other authors can or will. He also has a wonderful insight to a future that could possibly take place and the minds of people living there.

Ender's Game, the movie brought all this to a 2 hour blockbuster hit that, quite frankly, didn't have anything blockbusting about it. Amazing ship design and man do I wish I could step into the command simulator, but other than that, it was a hollow shell of what it could have possibly been.

Ender didn't have anything special about him. In the novel he was a brilliant 6 year old boy who was a mix of Peter and Valentine, basically a critical and amazingly brutal tactical mind with the loving knowledge and understanding of the enemy. I can give them credit for attempting the bridge through dialogue but little else. In the movie, he was a 15 year old too susceptible to his emotions and nothing stunning about his thought processes.

Bean, while having a mind more brilliant yet less compassionate than Ender, so much so that they had an entire novel about him, was reduced to just another lackey. They might as well left him out for how much they changed him.

Graff, in the novel was a puppeteer mastermind pulling EVERY string behind battle school. In the movie, he's an overly militarized ****.

Dap was the bridge between home and battle school, instead he was a drill instructor.

The story was compressed from a 6 year epic to a 1 year laughable story.

So much character development that was left out and changed that it's just another space thriller. The screen writers understood nothing about the book and characters to make this movie. I would rather seen this as a trilogy, including all the character development, thought processes, and reasons for why the characters do what they do than watched what I watched in the theater.