Sennadar Forums

So, I just went to a 10am Sunday showing of Enders Game. It's only just opened (on 5th)
A few observations: There's no 'gold class' (adult/small cinemas/serves alchohol/food/etc) showings near me, like Despicable Me 2, and there's few showings in the larger theatres.

This indicates they're not expecting adults to go to it, despite it being based on a book that's close on 30 years old now (1985). They're also obviously not expecting it to compete well with the other movies that are on.

The book contains quite a lot of politicical wrangling - Lock and Demosthenes manipulating the world. They show how fragile the whole International Fleet situation is - brought together out of necessity, held together by the threat of annihilation - and how Graff has to wrangle and scheme to get things done.

By the end of the book, after the defeat of the Formics, Ender is left a broken wreck, and sending him and Valentine off to the colonies is really his only option - cementing permanently the aloneness and inability to ever go home.

None of this is present in the movie - sure, at the end Ender's a bit broken, but he leaves "off to explore the galaxy" for a new place for the Formic Queen to live. Something he can't bring himself to do until he's written Speaker for the Dead on the colony world.

Other issues - they told, rather than showed (mostly) that Peter was a sociopath. None of the killing neighbour's pets, etc, nor the complex relationship between all three siblings - Peter making Valentine ignore Ender at times, starting the isolation process.

The position of the battle school was secret, but was still in our solar system - some former-Formic asteroid/moon base around one of the gas giants, as I recall, that they took without a fight.
I thought the idea was that the graduate(s) from the battle school would travel with the fleet, and so the reveal of using the Ansible in the 'simulators' at the end was even more of a shock - that all along they'd been spending human lives with no regard.
Instead, in the movie they're sent "to a forward base near the enemy's home world" so that can maintain real-time control via the Ansible.

All up - it was an okay movie, but a little disappointing.

I agree it was a tad disappointing that Peter and Valentine's part got essentially taken out. I think they were trying to focus on the action parts so as to appeal to a younger audience who probably hasn't read the books. Also the movie was already at approximately 2 hours and a lot probably was cut for time constraints. I can only hope that some of the ones who saw the movie and haven't read the book(s) decides to give them a try afterward and see what they missed out on.

I kinda loved it actually. I know the two things that I love about the book - Ender's experience at the academy and his emotional condition after the last battle were poorly represented. But still the book itself is quite extensive and laborious as far as story development goes. There was no way to cram it all in one two hour movie. I knew that going in so I tried watching it as someone new to the whole plot. I'm kinda happy they glossed over the "Peter and Valentine take over the world" part of it all. For me it's the most ridiculous part of the book despite the effort to make it logical and believable. Overall I wasn't disappointed which is a lot more than I can say for most movie-of-a-book experiences.

Havent read the books since i was a kid .Haven t seen the movies either.So Guess its all new kinda to me.

If you hadn't read the books and didn't look to deeply, thus not noticing all the cracks in the story it wasn't bad. If you'd read the first book, which I had, many a year ago... it was just plain "eh".

I thought it should have been two different movies. Battleschool and then command school. The beginning felt like a movie trailer. They depicted the battleroom well though.