Jimmy Akin

Long time blog readers know that I’m a fan of the Ender’s Game series of books by Orson Scott Card.

Well, many of them. Some of the later books following Ender become unbearably tedious, but the original is very good, and the books following Ender’s buddy Bean are good as well.

The two best books in the series are the original novel, Ender’s Game, and its parallel novel, Ender’s Shadow, which follows the events of the original novel from Bean’s perspective.

According to what Card said a few years ago, the movie was going to be a fusion of these two books, so I’ve been really looking forward it.

Now it’s out, and I’ve seen it.

I have a good bit to say about it, so I’m going to structure this review in a way that won’t bore people who are new to Ender’s Game and that won’t spoil people who don’t want to be spoiled on what happens.

Here goes . . .

 

If You Are New to Ender’s Game

Here’s the basic premise: It is set in the future, and mankind has been invaded by an insect-like alien race.

We beat them back, but only barely, and now we’re preparing for a rematch. If humanity has a hope of survival, we need to find a genius strategist on the order of Alexander the Great.

To find that genius, the world government is testing children to find those with military potential and train them.

They hope that they’ve found the child they are looking for in a young man named Andrew “Ender” Wiggin.

If that’s all you know about the movie, if you’ve never read the book, then I think you’ll find it an enjoyable science fiction outing.

It will be fun—assuming you like science fiction in the first place.

I don’t think, though, that you’ll rave about the movie the way long-time fans rave about the book.

As often happens, the movie isn’t as great as the book, but that’s normal.

 

If You Are a Long Time Fan

Many fans will enjoy watching it. I did. But I didn’t think it was anything special, for reasons I will explain.

Other fans will hate it, and that’s understandable. That’s the case with any adaptation.

No movie can capture every aspect of what a fan likes about the book, and depending on which elements you are most fond of, your experience of the movie will vary.

If you are a long time fan of the book, the movie is a mixed bag.

On the one hand, you get to see things you read about in the book visualized on screen.

That’s good. That is, after all, why a fan of the book would want to go see the movie in the first place.

Sure, things may not be exactly the way you imagined them, but if you’re going to obsess about that kind of thing, then you’d better stay home. (I’m thinking of you, Sheldon Cooper.)

In terms of how the film visualizes the book, it does a good job. I was happy with it.

On the other hand, I think that the movie doesn’t have the emotional “oomph” of the book.

Not even close.

It felt rushed, the danger wasn’t set up fully, and—most importantly—Ender himself doesn’t come across the way he does in the book.

To explain why, I’ll need to introduce some minor spoilers.

Proceed beyond this point only if you don’t mind that.

 

Minor Spoilers Ahoy!

At the end of the audiobook adaptations of the Ender’s Game books, Orson Scott Card has some afterwords in which he discusses the prospects for a movie, which was then years in the future.

Early on, he wrote some drafts of a screenplay for the movie himself, and he quickly identified a problem with them.

If his test reader knew the book, they thought the screenplay was fine, but if they hadn’t read the book, they didn’t find it emotionally satisfying.

The problem, he discovered, was that the book relied too heavily on Ender’s introspection. Card writes heavily introspective novels, but we can’t get inside Ender’s head in a movie the way we can in a book, and so the intense emotions Ender was feeling weren’t coming across through the screenplay.

The solution to this problem came, he said, when he was told he should fuse Ender’s Game with Ender’s Shadow, so we could feel Ender’s emotions through Bean.

Card said he realized this was exactly what was needed, and so he wrote a draft that way and it was vastly better. The Ender-Bean relationship became the crux of the movie and it turned into a sort of buddy picture, where Ender could be drawn out of himself and show his emotions to Bean.

Problem solved.

Unfortunately, Card explained, Hollywood would never trust a never-before-screenwriter like him with the screenplay, and so he expected that someone else would do the filmed version.

They did, and they should have used Card’s solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

 

How Faithful to the Original Is Too Faithful to the Original?

I was amazed at how faithful the movie was to the original. I expected much bigger changes than they ended up doing.

Some changes were merely cosmetic. Major Anderson is now an African American woman? Big deal. Dink Meeker is no longer Dutch but, apparently also African American? So what.

Bean is on Ender’s launch shuttle? Fine.

Armies are now sixteen people instead of forty-one? That’s probably a good thing. Having eighty-two people in the Battle Room to follow would have been too confusing.

Ender is no longer the shortest, youngest kid (other than Bean) in Battle School? Bonzo Madrid is shorter than Ender? We’re starting to lose part of the dynamic of the book, but neither of these makes a crucial difference.

What I was amazed by, though, was the tiny things from the book that they preserved. The opening sequence of the movie plays out very much the same way that the opening of the book does.

It’s abbreviated, but we’ve got the monitor, the fight with Stilson, the scene at home with Valentine and Peter, Peter making Ender play buggers and astronauts with him, the parents’ reactions to Ender being taken away by Graff, etc.

Even lots of the dialogue is lifted from the book.

In my amazement at their including all this, I found myself thinking, “What are you going to cut? You can’t be this faithful to the book the whole way through. You don’t have enough time in a two-hour movie. If you keep all this stuff, something has to be cut.”

One of the things that went right out the window was any hope of doing an Ender’s Game/Ender’s Shadow fusion.

There simply was no time to do the kind of Ender/Bean relationship that Card envisioned, and—I hate to say it—Bean is barely in this movie!

That means we’re staring the problem that Card identified early on right in the face: The movie cannot capture the power of the book because Ender has no way of showing us his emotions without the relationship with Bean.

The emotional depth and texture of the book’s version of Ender is simply gone.

What’s worse, so is his brilliance.

 

Informed Attributes

Don’t get me wrong. The movie still hinges on Ender being the greatest commander since Alexander the Great, and we have characters in the movie telling us this.

They also tell us Ender is a freaky good strategist and leader. Han SoloCol. Graff tells us Ender is “perfect” over and over, but that’s the problem: We’re being told, not being shown.

This is a significant problem, which is sometimes called informed attributes.

Merely telling the viewer that someone is super-awesome is not enough. We have to be shown that they have this attribute, not merely informed of it, in order for it to feel emotionally real.

And that’s not what happens in this movie.

Ender is still playing vulnerable kid up until the point he becomes commander of Dragon Army. We don’t see almost any of his brilliance (though we do get a flash of it in the climactic Battle Room game).

We also only get a faint glimmer of the other students warming up to him—and then for very little reason. We are not shown how he builds their trust and earns their loyalty over time.

They make gestures at this, but they’ve spent so much time on other things that they basically rush through this part of the novel, and that’s bad, because it’s the necessary emotional set-up for the climax.

We have to believe that Ender is a genius, that he’s a born leader, and that he’s emotionally anguished for the ending to have the needed payoff.

And we don’t get that.

What I need to say next depends on major spoilers, so bail now if you don’t want to be majorly spoiled. You can come back and read it after you’ve seen the movie . . .

 

Major Spoilers Ahead!

One of the things that takes the punch out of the movie is the way it tones down certain events.

For example, there’s the bit in the book where Ender sends the desk message from “God.” There’s a version of that in the movie, but the messages that are sent are different, and Ender’s isn’t signed “God,” which deprives the officer present of the ability to do the clever smackdown that happens in the book.

The core idea of the scene is there, but it’s so toned down that it’s nearly pointless.

Far worse is what happens with the two fights Ender gets in—with Stilson and with Bonzo.

These are crucial points of character development, since they reveal just how committed to winning Ender is. In the book he kills both of these characters.

But at the same time, these scenes establish Ender’s vulnerability: Although he kills these characters, he doesn’t know that this is what he has done and could not bear it emotionally if he knew, consciously, that he had done so.

That’s the central character point of the book.

Ender unknowingly killing Stilson and Bonzo is what sets us up for the climax of the story, when Ender unknowingly kills all of the buggers.

But the edge is taken completely off of that in the movie, because neither Stilson nor Bonzo is established to be dead!

Indeed, we see an autodoc working on Bonzo—still alive—after the fight, and Ender later states he’s been spending time by Bonzo’s bed on earth, hoping he will wake up.

What???

I guess that they took the edge off these things because they thought it would be too dark if Ender actually killed other children, but this just sucks the drama—the fact that Ender is able to unknowingly kill people—right out of the situation.

They also take the edge off of other things, some much more minor. For example, the buggers are never referred to as buggers in the movie, just “formics.”

This is just misguided P.C.-ness. I’m sorry, but when insect-like aliens have killed millions of humans, it’s okay to call them “buggers.” In fact, that’s what we’d do.

 

Fan Confusion

The P.C.-ness of calling the buggers only “formics,” is only a tiny example of things in the movie that will confuse long time fans.

There are much bigger ones.

For example, there is significant ambiguity in the film about who the good guys are. At a certain point in the film, we start getting indications that the buggers aren’t hostile now.

We’ve actually got them “surrounded” in their home system, but Graff is determined to have Ender proceed to “train” to kill them all.

Ender doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with this, but the long time fan is going to be going, “Wait a minute! This is just making us look like the bad guys! None of this was in the book! Yes, we were invading their space, but we didn’t—already—have them ‘surrounded’.”

There are actually two moments in the movie where I was thoroughly confused: One was when Ender, instead of being taken to Command School on Eros, is taken to a planet near the buggers’ home world!

So much for faster-than-light-travel and communication not being possible!

At this point I thought they were going to completely re-write the final act of the movie, but they didn’t.

Now it’s just that Command School is on a planet near the buggers’ home, and the story proceeds more or less as you’d expect.

But for a long time fan, this is a deeply confusing moment, as the lightspeed barrier and the secret existence of the ansible were major factors in the books.

They were, in fact, the key things preventing Ender from realizing that he was really commanding a fleet.

In the movie, we’re thus put in a position in which FTL travel and communication are possible and we’re on a planet just outside the bugger solar system (only one), running “simulations” of an invasion of that system, with the expectation not that Ender might some day command a fleet but that he will start commanding an invasion fleet right after passing his “graduation test.”

Then there’s a moment in the final “simulation” where they fire Dr. Device and, for the sake of a cool special effect (apparently blowing up a bunch of rocks around the planet that aren’t in the book), it looks like they just destroyed the bugger home world.

At this point, I found myself saying, “What? That’s it? They end the battle before it’s even begun?”

But then it becomes clear that it was just a special effect and the planet is still there and needs to be destroyed.

 

The Wrong Notes

The film continues to hit the wrong emotional notes in this act.

Unlike the book, Ender does not go into the final battle at his wits’ end. He doesn’t give up at the unfairness of it all. He isn’t rescued from cluelessness at the last moment by Bean’s remark that the enemy’s gate is down.

He’s positive going into the fight, and at the end of the simulation, he and the other members of his jeesh are jubilant.

And suddenly the adults watching are somber. They aren’t weeping and praying with joy, as they are in the book. They just stand there, showing little emotion.

Then they show the children an ansible connection revealing the devastation of the bugger homeworld (which hasn’t actually blown up, just become uninhabitable).

Not. Exactly. The. Best. Way. To. Tell. Children. They. Are. Xenocides.

Only then does Col. Graff come up to Ender jubilantly telling him he’s a hero—after this weird silence of the adults.

And Ender immediately leaps to the fact that he’s going to go down in history as a xenocide.

We don’t get anything about joyful masses on earth realizing they are finally free of the bugger threat.

Instead, Ender has a fight with Graff, stalks off, and is then drugged and put to bed for no apparent reason.

 

The Postlude

The final part of the movie does result in Ender getting the hive queen’s egg, and it does so in a way that I thought was okay.

It’s not the same as in the book, but it’s similar, and I was able to accept it.

I was disappointed, though, that Val doesn’t end up going into space with Ender at the end.

He goes alone, promising to come back to her (apparently possible due to FTL space flight).

If there are future movies in this series, it is hard to see how they will resemble the later volumes Card wrote. They may take elements from them, but they could not be as faithful to them as this movie was to its original.

It’s also hard to see how they could make books like those of the Bean arc, since Bean has not been established as a significant character in this movie.

So it may be just a one-off, and not a brilliant one.

 

What Should Have Happened

If they were going to try to be as faithful as they were to the original book then they should have done to this what they did to Lord of the Rings.

The audiobook version of Ender’s Game is 12 hours long, and they should have made three multi-hour films out of this.

That would give them the space they need to flesh out Ender’s character and emotional situation, and show us his brilliance and leadership rather than just telling us he had them.

If they didn’t have funding for a multi-movie project then they should have lengthened this one to two and a half hours and been less faithful to the book, cutting out everything not necessary.

Val and Peter should have gone, for instance. When space is short, they aren’t necessary. They were not, for example, in the original Ender’s Game short story.

In either case, they should have used the solution of making the movie almost as much about Bean as about Ender.

The dynamic between the two would be the best way of pulling Ender out of himself and letting the audience experience the emotions of the two characters.

Unfortunately, they wasted these opportunities.

 

My Summing Up

I’m glad that I saw Ender’s Game—once. That may well be all I see it.

I enjoyed seeing a visualization of a favorite story of mine, one that I have read many times.

However, I felt it was a profoundly flawed adaptation, because it was faithful when it shouldn’t have been and also unfaithful when it shouldn’t have been.

In a way, I feel about this the way I feel about J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies: They have enjoyable aspects, but they aren’t really Star Trek. They’re action movies with Star Trek trappings.

This isn’t quite as remove from the original book as they are, but it’s similar.

The situations may be much more like what we have in the book, but the main character is not the same person—not by a long shot.

He’s a different character in Ender trappings.