very loosely based on the book

Rating: 7/10 (28 October 2014)

The Movie Enders Game is only loosely based on the book. The only similarity I could see was in a one line summary of the plot and the name of the protagonist. 10 year old Ender Wiggin in the book was a little bulldog of a kid, without remorse, introspection or personal relationships. Ender Wiggin in the movie is a skinny, delicate kid with a much more complex character, interested in strategy, seeing the world from the perspective of his opponents, flirting with any females nearby and cleverly assessing any possible advantages and disadvantages in any conflict. He is perhaps the most intelligent fighter in movies. The best parts of the movie are watching him deal with people attacking him. The actor Asa Butterfield is a little too delicate to be believable as Ender the fighter, but he projects the intelligence well. He has some of the magic of a superhero with an unusual power.
The movie starts with typical military brainwashing, lots of saluting, push-ups, insulting sergeants, racing to line up... This part bored me to tears. It has been done a million times before. The only difference was some uniforms modelled on the sexy suits motor cycle racers wear.
Ender, being younger and skinnier and bright, attracts some really vicious bullying. The administration encourages this. This is a school to learn mass murder after all. Ender deals with this with a combination of intelligence, philosophy and surprise. It is one of the more realistic depictions of bullying I have seen in movies.
Then we have the zero-g acrobatics. For what seems an eternity we watch people dangling on wires zooming about in a dome, sometimes clinging to each other. These exercises to me seem completely pointless. These shots obviously took a lot of time and effort to get, and the editor was reluctant to cut them down to reasonable length.
The movie is much more explicit than the book. The philosophical musings in the book are handled more with inference.
The music was composed by a relative of the guy who did the score for Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. It was syrupy and heavy handed. It made some otherwise exciting scenes come out silly.
Much of the movie is spent watching CGI graphics. No matter how good they are, pictures of planets and space craft blowing up get pretty old pretty quickly.
If I were the director, I don't know how I could make this feature film without introducing many more subplots. But I would do a lot of pruning. The director seems to think if seeing thing X is exciting, seeing thing X thrice is three times as exciting.
It is a thoughtful movie, about the necessity for restraint in conflict, and becoming too sure you know what you opponent is thinking.
I did not see this movie in the theatres, because I was boycotting Orson Scott Card and his anti-gay bigotry, which is not apparent in either the book or the film.