A mess

Rating: 3/10 (23 May 2014)

I have no problem with movies that take liberty with the original source material if it makes a good movie. I don't care who the real First Class was in X-Men, it was a good movie. The Hunger Games was better than the book and it was a faithful adaptation. That said this movie is also very faithful to the book. Unfortunately this makes for a poor movie.
I've read the book by Orson Scott Card and I wasn't really impressed. It was fine but it didn't leave me wanting to read any of the sequels. The book was mainly about a boy and his ability to lead. I guess the movie is the same but it's done horribly. First of all more than half of the book is about Ender in battle school. It's about how he's being mistreated and despite it all he makes friends and persevere through tactical fortitude and good will. There is a bit of that but none of it is fleshed out. None of the characters besides Ender is actually a character. I can't even remember a single one of them except Bean because he was cool in the book. They're all one dimensional and when they all come together at the end, it doesn't have any impact since we barely saw any struggle for Ender to begin with aside from one other kid who comes across as a psychopath.
I watched this with others who have never read the book and they kind of had no idea what the hell was going on. Blatant exposition scenes didn't help much and there was a lot of random shots on the battle school floating around for no apparent reason. The ending sets up a sequel that no one wants to see and the whole movie is just a mess. The special effects are well done but that's about the only thing done well in the whole movie.