Enders Game: A review and comparison of the new hit movie and the bestselling novel

             Enders Game:  A review and comparison of the new hit movie and the bestselling novel.

   I finally got time to see the movie version of my favorite book of all time, Enders Game.  Because of how important this film was to me, I am going to do this review in two parts.  First I will review the movie by itself and secondly I will do a comparison of the film to the book, its short comings and what I would have personally preferred to have seen.  The second portion will be  almost 100% spoilers both of the film and the movie so if you have read the book but not seen the movie, vice versa or not seen or read either you might want to avoid that section.

                The film Enders Game takes place in the future on an Earth that has survived an attack by an alien species know as the Formics.  Our victory was secured against all odds when a pilot named Mazor Rackham got off a lucky shot that destroyed their entire fleet.  With our victory being so narrow and the threat of a second invasion of the Formics looming, the governments of the world decided to start training the most elite commanders Earth has ever seen.  Recruiting children while they are young and controlling every aspect of their training in a battle school that orbits Earth in space, but time is running out.  Andrew Ender Wiggin is one such child who seems to be Earths best and maybe last hope in the battle to come but  in order to reach his full potential he must be pushed to his limits both physically and mentally. Every challenge he faces is a test designed to train him to be the leader our world needs him to be.

                The character Ender is played by Asa Butterfield, best known for his amazing performances  in Hugo and the Boy With the Striped Pajamas.  However his performance here is a little underwhelming. The pace at which the movie moves gives very little time for him to develop properly but he does a decent job at keeping up.  Making up for this however is the supporting cast which includes Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, and Nonso Anozie.  They provide a much needed sense of drama around the child actors balancing things out rather well.

                Enders direct commander is Col. Graff played by Ford.  He provides much of the depth in the movie as he is seen as the holder of secrets or maybe more of the puppet master of battle school.  He is the one that designs  all of the challenges for the students and secretly guides them to reach their potential.  The yin to his yang is Maj. Anderson played by Davis who plays a very stern yet caring teacher who is torn between the mission to create the future savior of the human race and the reality of what they are doing to children.

                The main fault to the film is that it seems to break down underneath  the weight of itself.  There seems to be a massive amount of story that they tried to fit into a mere hour and forty five minutes. This causes several really choppy transitions between scenes and character development as well as a lot of very underdeveloped characters and concepts.  The stunning eye candy provided by the special effects and the tone set by the cinematography is truly amazing at times and does a decent job of balancing out the rushed tone of the movie.

                Overall I think it’s a pretty decent movie.  Not the best I have seen lately but not horrible either.  I don’t think the depth of the book gets translated as well as other recent movies based on novels.  For example the solid cores of the Hunger Games were all well translated onto screen whereas most are missing in Enders Game.

                                                                *****SPOILERS AHEAD******

                Ok, you were warned so here it goes.  Compared to the book this movie is horrible.  All of the most amazing and compelling points from the book were removed or glossed over. There was no time taken to develop any one character correctly,  nor was there any time to really delve into the duality of Ender  growing into a cold calculating leader who is so isolated and afraid inside.

                The opening scene has a quote that is attributed to A.E. Wiggin.  Andrew Ender Wiggin.  Face meet palm.  Enders middle name is never mentioned in the book. Ender is the name given to him by his sister Valentine almost mistakenly because she couldn’t pronounce Andrew correctly as a child and the nick name stuck. So 10 seconds into the movie the readers of the book already know that story hatchet is probably going to be swinging heavily and often.  The rest of the opening shows the Formic invasion and the lone pilot Mazer Rackham saving the world, the only real differences is they are combining the two invasions that occur in the books into one which isn’t that bad. This leads to the first scene of Ender in school on Earth which is pretty close to the book. In fact the first 15 minutes or so are all really close to the book except for one thing.  Ender is 12 years old instead of 6.

                Now this is something I was aware of while the film was still in production and as someone who likes to write in both novel and screenplay form it was a decision that makes a lot of sense to me.  The logistics involved in getting an actor young enough to play an extremely mature 6 year old and carry almost half of a movie until transitioning to an actor who has to be able to look like the 12 year old version of the younger actor and carry the rest of the movie is way too much work for too little pay off.  So I agree with the decision to cut the age down and the length of actual time at battle school. However they didn’t really know where to stop.  Instead of listing everything that was different I’ll say that the director picked out specific things that he seemed to like and ignored other necessary story lines until they were absolutely necessary and then threw them on as an afterthought. Which kinda sounds familiar so I looked up the director Gavin Hood who just happens to be responsible for  X-men Origins: Wolverine. This is making a lot more sense now.

                The core of the novel was that Ender was just a child and you felt so much empathy for him.  In the first chapter you fall in love with him because he is just a scared young child with a fire deep inside of him.  He knows it’s there but he resents it because it makes him feel like he is turning into his tormenter Peter, his older brother.  The only thing he wants is to be normal and when he is hiding in his bed and crying you feel just like you did when you were a child who felt alone and bullied.  This theme caries for maybe half of the book as Graff uses this isolation to guide and fuel his training. Even at the end of the war he still feels alone and because of who he is must remain in isolation. In the movie as soon as Ender is on the shuttle he meets Bean and Alai and even though Graff tries to single him out, Ender is able to make friends with everyone in about 5 minutes.  So you never really get that sense of isolation with Ender.

                You also don’t get what makes him what he is. The movie never really shows that he is a better commander or how he wins. It just keeps setting up single challenges that once he completes them they graduate him to his next level. This gets really ridiculous when they rush the story so fast that suddenly he is in command of his own army and facing what looks like his first real battle. It’s a battle against two armies. One of his soldiers hurts his leg because…..well the script told him to that’s why.  When Ender gets to the battle room both of the other armies are already inside and ready for him and he is short handed but wait, Graff sent a substitute to be on his team, Petra. This is where the continuity director should have been shot because Petra was on one of the armies that is already in the battle room.  But this is part of a story line not in the book that the director really wanted to push which was a special relationship between Petra and Ender. The thing is at the time this battle takes place in the book Petra is a commander of her own army and no longer on team Salamander, in fact she even tires to help some of the bullies at the school attack Ender around this time in the book.  But in the movie they never progressed that story line so you have to assume she is still on Salamander. As soon as the battle is over they seem to have decided he is the best thing since Rackham and promote him out of school….after he turns his nemesis into a vegetable. This was the second battle shown but in the book Ender had maybe a hundred battles over the years and many of them were described.  Each battle was a lesson for him, he learned, grew and became a master commander.  All of that was thrown away. 

                In the book you see the world through Enders eyes.  You see the way he looks at things and how his thought pattern works.  You get to see him make plans to get what he wants and then follow through on them. Most importantly you see what truly makes him great and that is his ability to think like his enemy and do the exact thing that they would not be able to defend against.  His strategies change the entire way that every battle is played. But the stress that they put on him by making him battle every day rather than month crushes him and again you realize that he is still just a child who feels alone. His fight with Bonzo comes before he battles the two armies and is very significant because he tries to avoid it but gets caught off guard. Seeing he has no other choice his instincts kick in and he does what he does best which is finish the fight so there will not be another one.  He doesn’t know that Bonzo is dead, at least not consciously yet, but it breaks the last of his will and after the final battle he believes he has truly become his brother and loses the desire to go on. Since the movie cuts so much out you don’t get the same sense that these aren’t really kids, more like immature adults. They are so intelligent and being put through so much they mature faster. So when Bonzo goes to fight ender it really is a mortal feud.  In the movie it feels like more of a afterschool scuffle until Bonzo trips and hits his head. This is a first of a few cop outs the movie makes for Ender, not making him specifically responsible for the injury when in the book he very intentionally kills him.

                This is also where the huge difference between book Graff and movie Graff starts to show. Movie Graff seems hell bent on getting Ender to win at all costs, not caring about what will be left of him.  But in the book you know that Graff really cares for Ender and is conflicted about what he is doing but continuing regardless because it is his duty. He goes with Ender to command school in an unofficial capacity, knowing that once he goes there he might not leave do to secrecy concerns regarding the location of the school.  He does this willingly because he cannot force Ender to do it alone; he wants to be there to bear what he can for him.  His role does get a little deeper if you read Enders Shadow but that shouldn’t be considered here.

                The command school section of the movie is identical to the battle school portion only with even less time spent on it. He shows up and gets a new teacher, the legendary Rackham, and meets all his old friends and they start battling in simulations.  They vaguely make reference to there being a lot of battles but it’s not shown, Ender says the stress is hard and you have to go with him I guess. Then there is a simulation for graduation.  Ender seems almost more concerned that soon he will start real battles then with the upcoming battle but he soon has to put in everything he has to win one last battle. And it turns out that it really is the last battle as he has been in control of the real fleet the entire time and just destroyed an entire race.  He seems a bit offended for a minute or two but then the director remembered that he forgot there was a whole rest of an ending to tack on and has Ender run outside and grab a Formic queen egg and then literally just get in a ship and say he’s going to travel the universe. Because storylines, fuck them right, let’s just give this child sociopath we’ve created a ship and let him go wherever he wants.

                In the book command school is a whole different animal.  Ender is reenergized and more mature. He is out of his element but is taking on a new role where he only really answers to his teacher Rackham. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge anyone else as having authority over him. He studies strategy with Rackham for months and learns to use simulator to command what he thinks is a make believe fleet. Eventually he is given commanders to control the smaller armies in his fleet and it turns out they are his old friends. The main difference is he never sees them; he can only talk to them in the simulators, leaving him still isolated.  The battles start and they are covered with decent detail.  At the same time Ender starts having nightmares about the Formics leading him to become more exhausted and stressed.  But he keeps going and unlike in the movie it is Petra who breaks down not him. Eventually the lack of sleep and the stress of multiple gruelingly long battles each day catch up to him and he finds himself back where he was at battle school, not wanting to continue anymore. Barely able to walk he is put in his simulator and is told this battle will be his final test. The screen comes on and the entire Formic fleet is there in front of him and he has the smallest fleet he has ever used. He sees that also for the first time there is a planet in the field.  Deciding that he doesn’t care he makes a kamikaze run at the planet and destroys it, the entire Formic fleet as well as his own. Graff and Rackham then tell him what he has done.

                The realization almost kills ender.  The knowledge that he destroyed an entire species simply crushes him. That night there is a revolution on the base and Earth as the governments vie for control in a post war world. But Ender sleeps through it all in a quazi coma. When he comes through he finds all his friends are there with him.  With them and Graff and Rackham, who are now not his teachers so they can show feelings for Ender, he makes a recovery but he cannot go back to Earth because the governments want to use him because he is a hero and a threat now.  Valentine travels to him and convinces him to join her and go to the formerly colonized Formic planets to start human colonies. It is on this journey years later that Ender finally finds the last Formic egg and starts his new journey of finding a home for it to grow and reform the species he once destroyed.

                So what could have been done to improve the movie?  Obviously the chances of ever getting a movie to be as good as a book are slim but it has been proven time and time again that getting close enough can be good enough.  In my opinion the best way to have done it would have been a darkly lit anime.  It would have been infinitely easier to transition Ender from a 6 year old to a 15 year old like the book if you just had to augment the voice actor a little. Envisioning the Battles would have been smoother  and it would have added the drama needed to make it more tangible.  However that probably wouldn’t get a green light as a blockbuster which is what they wanted so the next logical and probably the best overall choice would be to split the movie into two parts. Make the first film 2 hours long and end it as Ender is finishing battle school.  This frees up so much time to really develop the secondary characters and add all of the nuances of Enders training that really defined his character.  Enders character would be beaten mentally and on a ship back to earth with Graff and you could end it either with the reveal to the audience that Bonzo is dead or with Graff commenting something along the lines of no matter what Ender decides to do it won’t change the fact that the war is coming and maybe cut away to the enormity of the Formic army.  Release this one at the end May or beginning of June and then in October you release the second film.  This one starts on the lake with Ender still in purgatory.  Now the same thing can be applied to the command school. Add a ton of detail to Enders training, include the ansible machine,  and move the story line regarding the governments getting ready for a war forward. This would give plenty of time for the real resolution to unfold in which Ender is able to find peace with what he has done which is way better than leaving him as a borderline sociopath with a mental breakdown, an alien egg and a space ship.  But as long as you don’t go all Peter Jackson and turn the 300 page book into a three part 12 hour movie it would be fine.

                So that’s my way over winded review of Enders Game.  I know it was drawn out but like I said it is one of my favorite books and I did have high hopes for it.  All in all I do still like it, it is just not what it could have been.  Those who are new to the story (shouldn’t be reading down here!!) will still like it as well as fans of the books.  My next piece I should be doing is going to be an “everything you need to know” for the upcoming comic book movies set for release in the next two years.  Pretty much it will be a fill in guide for those who have not read the comics or just want to know a little more back story about the upcoming films.  Also I plan to break ground on my novel any day now and will be posting it chapter by chapter as it is written and I would love any and all feedback readers have on it. Thanks for reading to the end!