Movie Review for Ender's Game

What it's about (for those who haven't read the book): Earth was attacked by aliens called Fomics (commonly referred to as Buggers because of their appearance), within a very short amount of time, they had killed millions and scorched a lot of Asia. A hero emerged and, in one battle, did something that caused humans to win the war.

In preparation for our next encounter, the International Fleet was organized and started searching for, testing, monitoring, and recruiting children from around the world to go to Battle School (a space station where they begin their military training).

The story follows Ender Wiggin, humankind's best hope, and maybe last hope. As well as being brilliant, he is chosen because he has both a ferociousness and an advanced sense of empathy. The powers-that-be hope this combination will allow him to understand the Buggers enough to defeat them.

In Battle School Ender quickly distinguishes himself and rapidly becomes a leader of an “army” with faithful followers. This is one of the most major areas where the movie is lacking, in the book you learn why those under Ender come to trust him and love him enough that they say they would follow him anywhere, but in the movie this whole time period is rushed. With a few words and gestures of Ender, they did a fairly good job hinting at these things, but I didn't feel it was enough.

Time is running out, so Ender's training is increasingly sped up and he soon finds himself at Command School, the last stop before he is put in charge of humanities military forces.

Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are two of my very favorite books, I've read them both three times. Despite this, I tried my best not to have expectations going into the movie, but of course I couldn't avoid some.

First off, because they couldn't find any real kids who were young enough to fill the roles appropriately, they basically aged all the Battle School students by about 3 or 4 years, as compared to what their ages were in the book.

As always, in movies taken from books, there were a few small things that seemed unnecessarily changed that wouldn't have been hard to keep the same and, as always, those small things bugged me.

I am huge on character development, I don't care if it makes the movie two hours longer, I would rather the characters be well developed. For the sake of time and courtesy to those who don't want to sit an hour learning about a character, they didn't let you get to know everyone; which I thought was a loss, but others may not agree. I'd be interested to hear an outsiders' (aka someone who hasn't read the book) view who doesn't know all the back stories, did you feel you got to know people well enough to get attached to them?

If you read and loved the book, it kind of felt like they had the whole story on fast-forward. Saying that, I think it was a fairly good “abridged version” and stayed true to the basic story. As a stand-alone movie, not compared to anything, I think it was quite good. It was exciting, had cool special effects, fairly good acting, and a good and surprising story.

As with other movie reviews, you can go look at content rating for yourself.