Z/Web

I wanted to wait to see this until I’d finished re-reading the book, but didn’t quite make it. As usual, the book is definitely different — and better — but the movie is good. If you haven’t read the book, you’ll probably think the movie’s excellent.

If you aren’t familiar with the story, it’s brilliantly simple: it’s set in the future about 100 years after mankind was devastated by an alien invasion and we only just survived. Since then, earth has been preparing for a return of the invaders, seeking a new brilliant battle commander who would be capable of defeating the aliens once and for all. Ender is a little boy genius who’s shipped off to military school to play wargames and learn strategy while high-minded adults basically manipulate everything around him to toughen him and turn his brilliance into a ruthless military leader. It’s an amazing story of psychology.

Some of that ends up in the film, but sadly not all. The acting is decent, though not as dramatic as it should be, and the visuals and special effects are excellent. The ending is particularly moving and makes the whole movie.

But frustrating for those who love the novel, the film essentially misses out on two of biggest features of the book. Both of these are puzzling omissions.

The first is that the book really gets inside Ender’s head: we see what he sees and feel what he feels. That’s completely gone in the movie and is a horrible miss. Ender isn’t the same character; we don’t really know or understand him. He’s not really drawn any more deeply than any other character, and the rest are just sketches. Ender’s the most fascinating thing about the book: a character of contradictions and confusion, a boy pretending to be a man, a boy asked to make adult decisions, a ruthless killer who doesn’t want to hurt anyone. We lose all that in the film, reducing Ender to a mere child prodigy.

The second thing is a change that I can understand why Hollywood did it, but I disagree vehemently with the decision. If I’d been involved, I wouldn’t have made the movie with this change since it is such a fundamental part of the story. In the novel, Ender is just six years old at the beginning. That’s a huge detail. Not only does it make all of his accomplishments and genius all the more impressive, but it makes the dangerous things he’s encouraged to do more dangerous. It’s one thing seeing a petite teen beating a bully to a pulp, but it’s quite another seeing a six-year-old do it.

Sadly, Hollywood chose to use the same actor as Ender for the entire movie, meaning that we almost completely lose out on the shock of his youth. This also has a side effect of compressing the timeframe of the entire story: instead of it taking place over half a decade of training, everything seems to happen within a few months. This is a small detail, but it has ramifications throughout and it diminishes one of the novel’s most powerful aspects. Seeing six-year-old Ender utterly humiliate 12-year-olds in simulated battle is just amazing, and it helps explain his isolation and loneliness. We don’t get that at all in the film.

There are other flaws in the film, but they are more scene-specific. Some are understandable — combining multiple characters into a single one in order to save time — but others are strange. For instance, while the bullying character of Bonzo looks great and fits the role perfectly, he’s a full head shorter than Ender, which is just absurd. Sure, the lead actor is slight of build, but when he’s looking down at a sneering Bonzo it feels like their roles are reversed and Ender’s the bully.

Another scene that annoyed me is the first fight scene. The way it’s done in the film is so rushed we never get any sense that Ender was actually threatened, we never feel Ender’s pain at having to hurt someone else just to protect himself, and we totally miss out on the ruthlessness and devastation he causes when he finally defends himself. It’s a baffling scene that I bet most people would barely understand (and if they did understand, they’d probably have gotten the point of it wrong since it was so mismanaged).

Yet somehow despite all these flaws, the film is still fairly decent. It’s different from the novel, but hints at the basic story’s greatness. The ending is powerful and moving, asking a lot of profound questions about the nature of war, and that helps make up for a lot of the shallowness of the earlier parts of film. Overall it’s definitely worth seeing, though I’d recommend that everyone read the novel, which is a classic and must-read.