Not perfect, but much much better than I could have ever expected

Rating: 9/10 (13 August 2016)

I have always assumed Ender's Game to be impossible to convert into a good movie, while at the same time longing to see it come to life on the screen. Somehow I assumed that it would be done sooner or later, and that it would inevitably fail, because the director wouldn't understand what the book is about.
Orson Scott Card (regardless of what views he holds) is an amazing storyteller. The book is full of long narrative passages and detailed, verbose dialogue, neither of which would lend themselves to be easily converted to a movie script. The book is also relatively long and contains several different subplots and subthemes.
As it turns out, the movie lacks one of my favourite subplots, and it overcomes the wordy dialogue and the narration by moving things around, and by condensing the ideas and concepts into much shorter lines, told by suitable characters whenever possible. This may sound like a recipe for failure, but for me it works just fine.
While I need to include a few caveats, like that the movie should have been at least six hours long, that the missing subplot should have been left in, and that I'll concede it might not work so well for anyone who hasn't read the book a few times, to me this movie is as good as I could have ever hoped, and significantly better than I expected.
Most importantly, everyone involved seems to have understood what the book tried to say.