Ender's Game Orson Scott Card

This popular book was turned into a movie in 2013, and visually it is stunning. The story, however...

It missed out a lot on the parallels to racism. The attitude towards “Buggers”, the wars, their extermination, was only really addressed so that the plot would make sense. The movie lost touch with one of the major points of the novel, and it disappoints me. They didn’t include the fact that humans had stolen technology from the aliens, had used it against them, had ruthlessly attacked them even after the “Buggers” had called for retreat. Also, by aging Ender up, the question of child soldiers and of how children are affected in war was less called into question. I liked the actors, but having a six year old become part of the military is very different than a fourteen year old joining the military. You don’t see how growing up in that environment can affect you. Enders depression after he unwittingly committed genocide, killed an entire fleet of people, and personally killed two of his classmates was realistic and eye-opening. It didn’t glorify war, like many similar books do.I also missed Ender’s siblings. Watching children take over the world by outsmarting adults is quite enjoyable.  The ending, in which Ender tells the truth to the people of earth by writing about the “Buggers” and Ender’s brother, who became leader of Earth was a hopeful but indefinite way of ending the story.

The movie, however, didn’t show how he matured after the Bugger War. Actually, his emotions in general were not touched upon. In the ‘simulation game’ in the book, he is isolated from his friends, and kills his entire fleet in the final battle in the hopes of being expelled. Also, because all he sees of the battles are blips on a map, it’s reasonable that he did not know his battles were actually being fought. While I understand that the tech needed to be updated from the 1985 version of ‘high tech’, it still seemed odd and hard to believe that Ender had no idea the simulation was real. In the book, the weapon used to destroy the “Buggers” had similarities to the atom bomb. It was used to end a war, completely obliterated the population rapidly, and had a similar moral dilemma. This was lost in the movie, because not only was the weapon only briefly spoken of, when it was fired, the destruction of the planet was slow and dramatic. The reactions of the adults in charge were also extremely different. In the book, they were joyful, but in the movie everyone was somber as always.

This movie missed out on all the sensitivity and emotion of the book, swapping it for drama and cool visuals, and I think it suffered for it.