It should have been a TV show

Rating: 1/10 (11 December 2014)

Ender's Game is a science fiction book in a series. It is about a boy who lived at a time when Earth was at war with "buggers", giant ant-like aliens. Ender was sent to a space station with other genius children like himself to learn how to battle the buggers. While Ender is training, his brother and sister have gotten into politics and are slowly taking over America to unite the world and end a future war during peace time. With the help of his comrades, Ender kills all but one of the buggers and is sent to colonize the alien planets. His brother, meanwhile, has become hegemon and Ender's friends are rulers of their respective home countries. Ender's Game was great as a book, but the film adaptation was not. For a film adaptation of a book to be good, it must be accurate to the book. What happens in the movie has to be what happened in the book; whether something was cut out to save time because it was too much information or not important, the events in the movie are a visual version of the book's story line and plot. Ender's Game as a movie was not accurate to the book because many things were added to the movie or changed from the book in ways that made no sense and should have, and could easily have, stayed the same. One scene in particular is where Ender finds out about a virtual reality game and his friends do not know what the game is or what it does. It then goes to a scene where two people are arguing that Ender should not have known about the game. This scene was not accurate to the book because in the book everybody plays the game except Ender because he was not interested in it because he thought it was a waste of time. He later gets into the game and realizes that it knows about him and communicates with him in ways nobody could understand. The game was meant to get into the minds of the children and evaluate them. . This game was extremely important to the plot and the rest of the series later on, so there is not reasonable explanation as for why they made this change in the movie.
One reason I do not like watching film adaptation of my favorite books is because the actors do not do the characters justice and show no character development. The characters in this book were very dynamic and grow up so much because this first book, and all the others. The actors chosen for the movie in no way gave justice to their respective characters. Many of the actors were not even the correct race/ ethnicity of the character they were portraying. This was an extremely important aspect of the book that the children were from all over the world, because later on in the story they end up political rulers of their respective countries and this helps them be able to unite the world. A big example of this was how, in the book, one of the major antagonists was a bully to Ender and he was much bigger than Ender. This was mainly because Ender was extremely short, being the youngest to get into battle school in his group. In the movie, this bully was played by an actor noticeably puny and much shorter than the actor playing Ender. This, and the fact that the actor chosen to play Ender was not younger or shorter than the other actors, as he was in the book, shows that the casting directors did not even bother trying to hire actors that look the part. If I watch the movie version of a book, I expect to get the same story and plot line of the book, albeit less detailed. This is not the case for Ender's game. If someone were to watch the movie instead of reading the book for a class assignment, they would fail because the movie left out half the story and almost all the main characters. One of the main characters in this story was briefly shown in the movie and what was shown was important but it had no context so it made no sense. Much of the movie was like this. It was as if the director/producer read a sentence of each chapter and made a scene with it, not connecting anything at all and focusing only on action shots with no explanation of what was going on or why it was happening. The movie was also too short to show such a complicated story; much of what was shown was meaningless and you would not understand the significance of anything without having read the book. All of the things leading up to Ender's rebellion and breakdown was skimmed over or not even shown so that when they showed the scene with him angry at the adults, nobody understands this and he comes off as spoiled and throwing a temper tantrum for no reason. Without reading the book, movie goers would not understand the pent up frustration at the change of rules and the pressure put on Ender to be a perfect commander. I think that, for this to have been a better movie and to keep the timeline right, it should have been animated so there would be no issue of changing actors. One idea might be to show an age phase scene of Ender in the battle room getting older to emphasize that this story takes place over years and not just a few days, as the movie makes it seem.