Very entertaining Sci-Fi story.

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2014)

My wife read the book and after we saw the movie, on Blu-Ray, she said the basic story was consistent with the book, just a lot of stuff in the middle had to be shortened to make a movie less than 2 hours.
It is somewhat in the future and the apparent overall theme is to defend remaining Earth from an alien species that had attacked at some time earlier. It builds on the idea that the present day and future warriors will be the younger generation, the guys and girls who grew up playing video games. Their vision and coordination can give them the superior skills necessary to defeat an enemy.
But there is another theme, relating to whether it is ethical to strike the perceived enemy in a pre-emptive manner, to destroy them before they have the chance to strike you again.
The story focuses on Asa Butterfield (of 'Hugo' fame) as Ender Wiggin. He is one of a number of kids who have been selected for their potential, but they still have to go through a tough training and weeding out sequence. Most of them wash out at some point, but Ender keeps showing that he has skills and insights that make him a leader, such as being put in charge of some misfits who eventually work their way to the top of the class. He eventually is chosen as "the one" who will lead the military force against the enemy.
Harrison Ford is Colonel Graff and Ben Kingsley is Mazer Rackham. Both of them appear to be top guys in the military planning, I was never sure which one of them was the top, but probably Graff.
Four of us watched it, and found it to be a really good story and the movie was interesting all the way through.
SPOILERS: After having a bad failure in an advanced training exercise, Ender's group was given one last "exercise" to see if they were ready, and they took a very unusual approach to sacrifice some of their space ships to protect the main ship and destroy the alien planet. Immediately after he learned that it wasn't an exercise, they had actually destroyed the civilization, of an intelligent species that looked like giant ants and communicated via thoughts. Ender felt great empathy for them because it was done not in defense and he thought trying to communicate would have been a better approach. In the end he meets with one of the queens and takes an egg, determined to find them a planet where they could continue their race.