Ender's Game

The following critique of the film Ender's Game comes from the perspective of a hardcore fan of Card's Enderverse.

All in all it's a decent to good film, there's  much eye candy in the form of CGI and they got most of the essential parts of the book into the film. There are, however, differences. Some were surely the consequences of time and budget shortages and thus more or less necessary but there were some unnecessary as well.

If you haven't read the book and haven't seen the film yet, you should quit reading here for possible spoilers.

The more or less necessary differences include the compressed timeframe (to save money  for quite some actors) and the nearly inexistent background of earth's society. Also, the family scenes only last a few minutes. There's much missing in the Peter/Ender relationship.

The Battle School part of the film is much too short as well, leaving no room to properly tell the story of the launchies. This is especially sad because I enjoyed the banter parts quite much. It's nearly as trying to film Harry Potter without Hogwards. Needless to say that many dialogues that were a highlight in the book didn't make it into the film. As a consequence many of the secondary characters aren't well represented.

Ender's development and Graff's motives and character are present but quite a bit lacking in details. I concede though, that it is probably hard to turn so much thought content into speech/dialogue. The effect was, that these characters seemed a bit stereotypic and it was hard to connect with them.

What really angered me was that they changed the whole Enderverse by leaving out the relativistic effects which take a great role in the books, although not so much in the first book. They also relocated the command school from an asteroid to the first formic colony. Probably to save screen time. For me that was a big no-go.

All in all, it was a bit much to make the book into a 90 min movie. Another half hour with the right content would have made the difference between a decent/good and a spectacular movie.

What really interests me is, if reading the book first actually increases the value of the movie because one automatically adds content and evens out the edges or if it decreases the value because one finds so much lacking. It would be nice if other fans would comment on this.