Ender's Game Movie Review

The husband and I watched Ender's Game last night.  And overall, it was meh...

The main problems with any movie based upon a book, especially young adult movies, is that they merely take the action parts and use those to make a movie, figuring that the characters are less important than the plot.  This may be true for Twilight, but it's not true for Ender's Game or any science fiction novel/movie.  Science fiction is all about character and without out, as in Ender's Game, the characters are flat and generic.  This was also the problem with the newest Star Trek movie.  Science fiction is not the same as action and its fans expect more.

They removed the character development, which is what makes Ender and the whole book compelling.  Without knowledge about Ender, you have a flat character who is going to win, but there is nothing tying the audience to him.  Not one thing.

Two parts of the movie were especially poorly done.  One, the death(lack thereof in the movie) of Bonzo.  Bonzo dies.  Ender, an 8 or 9 year old in the book, kills him.  I understand that part of the reason they chose not to kill Bonzo is that Ender, in the movie, is around 12, not 8, and we have no prior character development of Ender to trust him.  But after Bonzo dies, Ender secludes himself on a lake and is just a child for a while, but in the movie, Ender and Bonzo return to Earth and Ender sits by Bonzo's bedside, hoping that he will wake up.  Ender doesn't know, in the book, that Bonzo died and he never finds out, which serves to illuminate his character and Graff's.

The second part was the end.  In the movie, Ender finds the egg and is now setting off to find a suitable home or do his diplomatic duty.  He is all alone.
In the book, Ender and Valentine and a whole bunch of others head off to form a new colony.  And we see what Ender can do at peace and it is brilliant.  I turned to my husband, after the end, and said, why didn't they just use the original ending?  There's no reason not to.

Without the time that the book employs, the movie cannot hope to fully develop any characters. And the plot that it uses is barebones at best.  For example, of the tens of battles in battle school, they show two, in the movie.  That's it.  From two, we are supposed to know that Ender has tactical skills.  But we don't.

Overall, Ender's Game does not translate well into a movie.  There just isn't time and they didn't spend the energy converting it well enough.  Where the book thrives is in the downtime and the movie essentially removes all mentions of peace.