About as Good a Movie Adaption Could Get of the Novel

Rating: 8/10 (3 November 2013)

If you have never read the books, this movie adaption will still be thoroughly entertaining as Asa Butterfield did an incredible job with conveying the emotions and character depth of Ender Wiggin as written down in the novel. Very talented young man. The special effects are also pretty spectacular, really immersing the viewer in the grim world of battle school and the Formics (the "Buggers" in the novels) and the movie plot is still complicated enough to be a fun ride to be on regardless.
If you have read the books or heard about it from someone else, you know that most of the novel takes place as internal monologue inside Ender's head. This is what made Asa's performance even more impressive as he had to act out these internal thoughts and emotions through the use of only facial expressions, tone of voice and eye movements. There is no constant use of a cheesy narrator speaking his thoughts which the director could have resorted to, but, luckily, did not.
For the given runtime of just under 2 hours, they did the best job they could adapting this novel to the silver screen, keeping exactly which was needed, spending more time on elements that were critical for the viewer to understand, and cutting/combining some characters to reduce confusion (otherwise the minor roles really would have gotten too little time and no development). An exceptional job was done developing Ender, basically giving him all the character depth found in the novel even under these time constraints.
That said, characters such as Valentine and Peter, who were major characters in the novel, suffered greatly due to the constraint of the 2 hour runtime, as their entire subplot was cut out. Granted, if they did this as a mini-series, it could have been much more comprehensive to cover some of these and other subplots in the book. But if one is given enough runtime only to focus on the main plot of this book (and, that of a book of mostly internal monologues), this adaption is about as good as an adaption could get of this novel under these constraints of time and medium.