This is a really cool sci-fi, but it doesn't match up to the book.

Rating: 7/10 (2 March 2014)

Ender's Game is a movie based on the book by Orson Scott Card. It's about a boy named Ender who is brought into this military academy to destroy an alien race. It's been a while since I read the book, but when I read it, I enjoyed it. It had a great story, interesting characters, and it was well written. When I saw the trailer, I got pretty excited. Was it as good as the book? No, it wasn't. Let me get that out of the way. However, I still enjoyed it. Let me start out with the acting. It was very good. Harrison Ford did great, Ben Kingsley did great; Asa Butterfield did a surprisingly fantastic job. He has a bright future ahead of him. Heck, all of the kids were awesome in this movie. Usually when there are child actors in a movie, they're usually terrible (Don't believe me? Watch The Last Airbender. You'll understand). Not this movie. There are a lot of terrific kid actors in their! A couple of them were hit and miss, but a good majority of them were great. The story of this movie is still the same as the book and it's still really good. It has heart, it has moral dilemmas, it has conflict. It has everything you want in a good sci-fi movie. What I like about this movie is that they kept a good chunk of it similar to the movie. I'm glad they didn't drastically change the story. I am very grateful. However, some of these changes come at a cost. One of those costs is Ender's backstory with his family. In the book, he had a long backstory about how he was distant from everybody except from his sister and the military was changing that to make him distant from everybody in general. The back story, in my opinion, was one of the best parts of the book because you really cared about Ender. In the movie, the backstory felt one-dimensional. The connection between his family didn't feel believable and there was no character development with his brother or his sister, which happened in the book. That kind of disappointed me. Now, there was a certain point in this movie where I thought, "Okay, this movie is starting to drag on. Let's get to something interesting." Yeah, it gets really slow at a point. The book has the same slowness, but it balances story development with training perfectly. This seemed to have more training sequences than it should have. I feel that they could've shortened some of those scenes to make them not as slow and more interesting. Just my opinion. Overall, Ender's Game is a solid movie adaptation of a book. It's well acted, the story is great, the CGI is awesome, and it's well shot. However, Ender's thin backstory and the moments of slow pacing bog the movie down from being amazing. Is this the sci-fi movie of the year? No, I don't think so. That award goes to Gravity, in my books. But, you should still go watch Ender's Game. It's very enjoyable and very cool.