A failure in every sense

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2014)

Ender's game, the movie, has nothing that made the book so popular and, after almost 30 years, still regarded as one of the best sci-fi novels of all time. Avoiding spoilers, you should know that:

characters are poorly developed. The entire movie feels like a rush, trying to tell too much in a movie too short. What is remarkable, considering that the novel is shy of 250 pages long

Ender's siblings get almost no part in the story at all.

The events that in the book take almost five years are rushed in a matter of months. The actor who plays Ender is very good, but considering that in the book the plot starts with Ender still at 6 years old, a lot is missing. The "isolation" in the movie is imperceptible, and Ender's trouble fitting in the battle school almost nonexistent.

Harrison Ford as Graff is so terrible I can't even write about, as he is a dear actor of my childhood

The buggers/formics are terribly designed, you can't even believe that they have spaceships by the way the movie depicts them and their cities

The film's coda makes no sense at all. Alas, everything they decided to change about the novel, they did for the worse - waaaaaay worse.

Summing up, it may be the worst movie adaptation of a remarkable novel I've ever seen, side by side with Starship Troopers as a great offense to the author. I really tried to find something good about it, but couldn't.
But if you have never read the novel, I recommend that you do. It's a great story told with an excellent prose. Afterwards, read Ender's Shadow (same story told by Bean's POV) and Speaker for the Dead. But if you decide to give this film a miss, you won't be losing anything.