Ender's Game -- or as the Japanese call it, Ender no Game -- finally opened in Japan, so I dragged my son along to see it, since sons are good for that sort of thing. Here's my mini review/rant. Note, DO NOT read further if you are a fan of the book and/or plan to see the movie. I am not kidding -- the book and film pivot on one of the most spoiler-able plot points in SF, and you don't want to be spoiled if you don't know the story already.
Ender's Game, of course, is one of those really special SF books, like Dune, The Forever War of the best books of Arthur C Clarke (2001 or Childhood's End, take your pick), are immensely important to serious readers of the genre. When I heard they were making a movie, I groaned and prayed that they wouldn't ruin it. While they did okay in some areas, mainly the mechanics of the Battle Room, I guess it was totally a foregone conclusion that they would royally screw the pooch in other, more subtle areas. Not a 1998-Godzilla level screwing, but a screwing nonetheless.
First of all, some praise for the staff. They made a movie that was basically well executed. The performance by Asa Butterfield was the high point of the film, and he frigging was Ender Wiggin. I commend him.
My first point of contention with the film: what was the point of having every single character in the movie (except Harrison Ford) be a minority, with black/dark hair? I get that one of the themes of Ender's Game is that the world is a much different place by the Bugger Wars, with more than just photogenic white people from California, and there are Indians and Africans and Armenians and Muslims and tattooed-faced Maoris doing stuff in the future. Gotcha. But why is every character in the story dark haired, with several characters of varying shades of darkness, to the point that the average audience member will likely be confused about who is who, especially between Alai and Bean? I don't recall seeing a single blonde character (okay, Peter was blonde), but no one in battle school. Bean is from Rotterdam, why couldn't he have been blonde? Maybe give Petra a red tint so she didn't look exactly like Valentine? They could have also managed some of this potential confusion by not removing Hot Soup, the Chinese character.
Next up. It's not kind but I have to say it -- what's up with all the fat characters? There were several characters who, it seems to me, were above the weight you normally associate with mainstream characters in films, including Valentine, Major Anderson, and Bernard. It's not nice to say, but when several members of your film have a higher BMI than Crabbe from Harry Potter, I have to wonder what's up. Maybe along with the minority issue above, the film's creator was sick and tired of stereotypes, and wasn't going to take it any more.
While I'm being potentially rude to my readers, how do they get off making Bonzo Madrid a full head shorter than Ender? Ender is supposed to be tiny, years younger than everyone and physically weaker than everyone except Bean, yet he towers over Bonzo in the film. It was hilarious to watch the shower scene.
There were lots of really annoying changes which didn't need to be made. The Buggers (a word never actually used in the film I think -- perhaps taken out because of Orson Scott Card's famed homophobia, and the nervousness around this as the film was released) need to invade the Earth because of our water. What is this, V? (And if you know what I'm talking about, welcome to middle age.) Some of the changes were cool. They seemed to move up the time of the arrival of the fleet to the Bugger worlds, which tightened the story, making it important to get Ender to Battle School within 28 days...then they talk about his training taking months, and negate that. They do little annoying things like, make Petra into a super romantic heroine when this isn't really part of her story.
Other changes were criminal. The most important aspect of the story is battle school, yet how many battles do we get as Dragon Army? Just one! Their first and last battle was against Griffin and Tiger armies. Thus, they had to mix the most enjoyable elements from all the battles into a very short segment, then boom, Battle School is done. No slow buildup of the legend of Ender, no realization that "Ender, if you're on one side of the battle, it won't be equal no matter what the conditions are." Our enjoyment, like the enemy's gate, is down.
Virtually none of the really important lines from the book made it into the film. Gone is, "They are entering into the mysteries of the fleet, Colonel Graff, to which you, as a soldier, have never been introduced." "You make it sound like a priesthood." Or, "When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: if one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end. Our genes won't let us decide any other way. Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't a will to survive." (Possibly removed so as not to annoy fundamentalists with a reference to evolution, since they're counting on Christians to make up for the people boycotting the film over the author's attitudes on gay marriage?) Ender's destruction of the Bugger homeworld as a specific way to get out of becoming a commander is also converted into so much flashy CG and ignored.
There were other pointless and stupid changes. Instead of the cool mystery about Command School being on Eros, we get...impossible instantaneous travel across the galaxy instantly by Ender, negating the whole point of "we're running out of time, we need to train Ender as our commander now." The ansible, one of the most amazing and mysterious devices in the original story? It's mentioned once, then totally neutered by saying "we had to move to this advance base near the Formic's homeworld, so we could communicate instantaneously with our fleet via ansible." Do you know what a fucking ansible is? It's a device for communicating with any ships, anywhere, and the writers didn't have the slightest idea what it was or why it would be kind of cool to have one.
Instead of the book's excellent ending, with humanity going off to the stars to take over the Bugger homeworlds, Demosthenes (Valentine), Ender and Mazer Rackham leading the first ship...we get Ender going off alone in a ship (which shouldn't exist) with the queen egg. Naturally all the cool "his two books were called the Hive-Queen and the Hegemon, and they were holy writ" is totally gone, and Peter, one of the most interesting characters in the Enderverse, never mentioned after the beginning of the film.
A final thought: I sincerely hope that someone paid a lot of money to option for sequels, greedily thinking that this will be a new ongoing franchise like ther Terminator movies, only to have wasted their money when no more movies are made. Cause someone deserves to be punished for this movie.
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