Thoughts on: Ender's Game


How you view Ender's Game depends largely on whether you've read the book or not. As someone who's read it, it's difficult to imagine how the movie would come across to someone who hasn't, so this review might be a little biased.

I can sum up my thoughts in 2 points:
  1. The movie was as faithful to the book as a movie can be.
  2. The book is about the slow mental evolution of Ender, coupled with the methodical destruction of his emotional psyche at the hands of his teachers. The keyword here is "slow".

This left the movie with 2 options: either have 50% of the movie be montages, or accelerate everything by extreme proportions. Both options suck, but the former sucks more, so they went with the latter. This completely removed the impact of Ender's transformation over time, and left no room for even a single character to be fleshed out. When none of your characters carry any weight, all you're left with is the spectacle of the zero-gravity battles and the space simulations. If that sort of stuff normally interests you, then Ender's Game is no different. If not, then Ender's Game is no different.

Ender's Game is an amazing book, and the movie does the best job it could when only given 2 hours. If it'd been 3 hours, maybe the characters could have been fleshed out enough and Ender's extreme intelligence could have been demonstrated more, rather than simply having Harrison Ford tell us about it. Even then though, it wouldn't do the book justice, because that's just the kind of book it is.

If you're likely to read the book, avoid all spoilers and read it first. The movie will remove a lot of the impact that the book has if you see it first.

As a reader of the book: 5/10

Guestimate for non-readers: 7/10

Note: 5/10 doesn't mean "bad" - it means "acceptable".

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