The Game is Over

Rating: 2/10 (12 November 2013)

I saw Ender's Game yesterday, and if you have not seen it yet, don't bother. If you know the books, you will hate it, it's the worst movie adaptation of a novel since "Sum Of All Fears" and almost (but not quite) as bad as the "Dune" movie.
If you don't know the books, then you won't know what is going on.
Worst case scenario. First, they decided that it would be good if this movie could be more like the Hunger Games or Twilight series, making it into a 50% chick flick, which the original story is definitely NOT.
Lots of touchy feely hand wringing going on, particularly at the end, but without almost the entire story line regarding Ender's background or the reasoning and history behind drafting Children into the service, it all comes off as some lame plot line. And Peter has only 1 min of screen time, completely killing off that sub-plot and all of it's implications for the main story.
The heavy lifting for the plot is done by narrative, Ender's letters to Valentine, which, while it gets some badly needed explanations across, is a totally weak story telling tool, and very much a cop-out.
The Mind Game is also weakly handled, with only a few words of explanation regarding the Formic's influence on Ender through it.
At least the special effects were up to current standards, no complaints there, but making this amazing story material into something not much better than Battleship or Pacific Rim, is not something that I would be proud of as a Director.
They took a 700 page novel, made a 1hr 45min movie out of it somehow. They were forced to condense the first 600 pages into 3 or 4 spoken sentences of dialog between characters so that major (essential) plot points are at least mentioned (not that they help much). Then they take the last couple of chapters and go into more depth on that material, but by then, you don't care anymore. And if you have not read the book, at that point it will feel like some standard forgettable action flick. They go even further into the abyss by using material from the second novel to blatantly set up a sequel. It all feels so shabby and such a waste.
I originally had high hopes for this one, Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley usually don't get involved in much crap, but they must have needed money or something because this one is crap. This will effectively kill Ender's Game for the rest of time, nobody has ever made a second version of a movie from a novel, which is what this would take to make things right. We can only hope that 75% of the movie was cut out in editing, and may be released as a Director's Cut or Extended Edition, but failing major changes in future release versions, the Game is Over.
Very sad. Great Book(s)