not bad. totally worth seeing if you like the book.

Rating: 7/10 (8 December 2013)

This had some good points, and some bad points.
The first few scenes were very promising. The stuff with the monitor.
The 'drill sergeant' scenes with Dap are where the movie started to lose me. They were just too much of a cliché, and not very intelligent.
The battle room visualization was pretty cool. Kind of beautiful, actually. Not much time was spent on strategy, but that was a little vague in the book also, to be honest.
Strangely, Harrison Ford's Hyram Graff seemed like a bit of a weak link. Bad writing and direction, maybe. His speeches seem just a little too speechy and on the nose. He's also present just a little too much in the movie, whereas in the book it's driven home that he's a somewhat aloof top-level administrator, rather than someone whom the boys see around every single day.
The relationships among the different Battle School cadets all got pretty garbled, but that's natural when you consider the challenge of condensing all that stuff into one movie.
I don't know why they made Bonzo such a little guy. He was supposed to be big and scary in the book -- a lethal threat despite being unarmed.
I like what they did with Ender's fantasy computer game. Maybe a plot hole here and there, but they condensed that whole plot line in sort of a neat, creative way.
He's in the movie for like five minutes maybe, but Kingsley as Mazer Rackham was a fun bit of casting.
The spaceship battle scenes are very pretty! Big payoff there.
All in all, I'm not quite sure why this movie did so poorly. I can think of a few points where they could have made the dialogue a little less ridiculous, but I don't know if that's the real problem. The book is popular as heck, so I would have thought that would have driven box office receipts a little more. Obviously the studio made the same bet, and lost. Certainly the special effects were nice, but maybe it fell into a weird no man's land by being not sexy enough for some adult audiences, without being a particularly suitable movie for children, either.
Anyway, I'm glad I managed to see it before it left the big screen altogether, which happened sooner than I might have expected.