Ender’s Game is the 2013 film “based” on the classic 1985 book by Orson Scott Card. It features Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, Abigail Breslin, and Ben Kingsley. The Ender’s Game novel is a classic Military Science Fiction story exploring the morality and impact of warfare on society at large and especially on those who participate. It asks hard questions and does not sugar coat the brutality of, not only war, but of preparing for war.
Ender’s Game is a great book. However, the Ender’s Game movie is a trivial piece of garbage that is not worth your time. It loses all of the nuance and tries to hit you over the head with a message that it has watered down so much that it becomes meaningless. Then it moves on to cool looking space battles and leaves you just wondering why they bothered to make this. It is NOT Ender’s Game. It is Star Wars Episode 1, without the story and without the charm.
I can understand compressing the timeline to a certain extent to meet the needs of a movie length, but they run through the story so quickly that they miss most of the story itself. Then they change the story enough to make it more palatable and instead turn it into pablum.
After listening to the audiobook of the other story that takes place in this timeline, Ender’s Shadow, there was an interview with the author at the end of the audiobook. He talks about incorporating aspects of both books into his planned screenplay for the movie. After hearing that interview, I was interested to see how the movie would turn out. Perhaps Orson Scott Card was cut out of the screenplay and it was rewritten by the director, because there was little left of substance from either book. I don’t know if Card’s script would have been better, but I don’t see how it could have been worse.
Sometimes you can excuse a bad movie that is just bad in and of itself, but when you have such an amazing book, you have to at least try to do it justice if you are going to bother. This movie does not.
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Heinlein “Anthrophobia” Challenge ends 3/31/2025
