A lot of good potential wasted

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2014)

Ender's Game is one of those movies that have been utterly destroyed during editing. If you've read the book you know what I'm talking about. In the book, Peter is much more developed and both Ender's siblings are as smart as him, just less or more empathic than him. In the movie, it's skipped to gain time. Peter is shown as a brainless bully, which is totally wrong.
In the same way, the Battle School isn't developed enough. One game and that's it ? He moves to real battles ? In the book he stays in school until he finishes first of all the teams, with a great development of skill, both from him and his lieutenants... In the movie you see none of that, and of course you wonder how those newbies make it as Ender's seconds in command, it just doesn't seem right...
The last one is the Mind Game obviously. Same thing, in the book it's way more developed. Ender had to struggle before deciding to kill the giant, he had to struggle to find the best way to deal with the serpent. In the same struggle of Ender's feelings, the first boy he kicks is actually dead in the book, they don't even mention it here, it added much more drama to the mix.
That's a shame because otherwise the casting is good, directing is good, special effects are good... I don't know if it's the producers' fault, who wanted a movie under 2 hours for maximum profit (it happens so often...) or if the director's vision was wrong, but all those problems were so easy to fix... Ender's Game isn't supposed to be an action movie. It's supposed to be a Sci-Fi drama, about the psychological state of mind of a growing boy. Instead they made it too much into an action movie, and that's the wrong direction. Same thing happened with Blade Runner by the way, the producers were afraid that the audience wouldn't understand everything, wanting a happy end etc... Well in the same way, maybe we'll have a good Director's Cut for Ender's Game, and it'll gain popularity as the years go by...
Oh and the last piece : why the hell did they remove the near-speed of light space travel ? Who can believe that a near destroyed Earth can have an orbital space training station for kids and a giant invasion fleet with the little Doctor only 50 years after fighting with obsolete fighter jets ? In the book it's hundreds of years apart, there are no fighter jets, and Mazer Rackham was kept in fast space travel so he wouldn't age and be ready to train his successor. Without that they basically shot themselves in the foot for all the potential sequels to the movie, as relative time and relative aging is a huge component of the story. It's weird, it's like some aspect are well preserved or adapted from paper to film by a competent team, and amongst all this somebody is trying really hard to jeopardize everything...