Review: Ender's Game

Directed by  Gavin Hood

Partial cast list
Asa Butterfield as Andrew "Ender" Wiggin -  Jimmy Pinchak as Peter Wiggin -
Abigail Breslin as Valentine Wiggin -  Harrison Ford as Colonel Hyrum Graff  -
Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham

Even if you are just lightly interested in Science Fiction it is likely that you have in passing heard the name Orson Scott Card or at the very least the movie based on the first book in his Ender series called Ender's Game.   Well the movie is out on DVD/Blu-Ray so I thought I would give it a go.

Taking on this project, the producers HAD to know that Ender's Game and the Ender Series is one of those Sci-Fi sacred cows you hear about.  But it did not seem the final product was in any way.  So we headed into the experience and ultimately felt that the effort worthwhile.

You see, Ender's Game is devilishly convoluted without seeming to be.  50 years ago an alien race called Formics (because of their resemblance to ants) attempted to set up a colony on Earth.  We managed to chase them off at great cost and they have never returned.  However the space military think it prudent to train and equip a standing fleet in the event of a recurrence .     Andrew Wiggins is the youngest of the family's children and like the others before him, he applies to battle school  and is accepted, but unlike his older siblings, he continues to advance. 

But as in a lot of movies not everything is as it seems.

So what did I think?  Well there was piles of stuff left out...Most only touched on.  This meant they took what could have easily been a three hour movie and managed to cram it into less than two.  Most of the sets are claustrophobic.  I do think that the cast was spot on for the most part....and overall I think that the film followed the book well enough, there were no glaring discrepancies which I was worried about.  They didn't do very good at setting up the second in the series and from what I hear is not a shoe in......damn.

So how would I rate it?  Well if you are into sci-fi and you know the series its a clear ehhhhhhhhhh n n n nine...?  Maybe 8.5.   However because the voice over really doesn't  do a great job of explaining anything, and if you had never heard of Orson Scott Card your going to be in the dark then and that/s an 8 and that.s a shame.

Ender's Game movie still a possibility?

Have you noticed that there seems to be some pretty steady news about O.S.Card's Ender's Game lately?

Last April we reported that Wolfgang Peterson was off the Ender's Game live action project.
A short while ago I found out that Card was rewriting the ending of his novel Ender's Game.

Well the news just keeps on perculating. Along with it some spicy speculation as well. According to a new article in IO9, Card, according to one of the films producers, in an LA Times interview this week regarding the film said:

• “[Card] was not interested in a ‘tough-hero action film’ and refuses to condescend to green-screen Hollywood. Card imagines a ‘film where the human relationships are absolutely essential — an honest presentation of the story.’”

Producer Lynn Hendee insists that the "project is not dead."

Ender's End Gets Rewritten

Hey O.S. Card Ender fans - just got a news flash from IO9!: Orson Scott Card has written another novel starring Ender Wiggin, telling what happened to the character after Ender's Game...

The new novel, Ender In Exile isn't just a sequel to Card's classic novel, according to the author:

Actually, Ender in Exile replaces the final chapter of Ender's Game. The story as it was told in EG was exactly right in its tone and speed. It was denouement, winding down the story and setting up Speaker for the Dead. In fact, it was for that chapter that I rewrote the short story "Ender's Game" in novel form in the first place—so I could show Ender's first personal contact with the hive queen. But that's all that the novel Ender's Game required. Since then, I've grown older and came to feel the need for a new story—the story of the soldiers who survive the war yet could never come home... I finally realized that I wanted to explore Ender's post-war story in far more detail than was possible or appropriate in that last chapter of Ender's Game.

<- more ->

Wolfgang Peterson Off Ender's Game

Well it seems, not all is going smoothly in the pre-production universe of the live action movie based on the award winning novel by author Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game". Director Wolfgang Peterson, previously attached to the project, has moved on, producers told io9 blog personnel. Chartoff Productions is busy meeting with potential directors with the hope that they will be able to start filming by early 2009. Producer Lynn Hendee has reveiled though that author Card has finished a draft of the script and is well into rewrites already.

Ender's Game is set in Earth's future where mankind has barely survived two invasions by the "buggers", an insectoid alien race, and the International Fleet is preparing for war. In order to find and train the eventual commander for the anticipated third invasion, the world's most talented children, including the extraordinary Ender Wiggin, are taken into Battle School at a very young age.

What's The Game In Ender's Game?

In IO9 I read that Chair Entertainment Group is planning on developing a series of games based on Orson Scott Card's novel. It is unclear yet if they intend to emulate the games played by "Ender" or that they will tell the story contained in the novel in game form. The company does say that the first game will be based on one of the games that Ender plays during his training.

Humm, sounds interesting, I would be interested in trying something like that out, just to see their take on that portion of Ender's "training"

Card: dealing from the bottom of the deck.

A War of Gifts. By Orson Scott Card.
Reviewed by Ron Huber & Paul Cole.

There are some novels so good, so well written, by such universal acclaim, that the authors should be barred from publishing sequels. Just as with great lithographic etchings, the stone is broken after but a few uses, lest increasingly blurred and imperfect additional versions arise, so it should be with great works of literature.

Such a murky scan is A War of Gifts. This brief tale by Orson Scott Card is set somewhat precariously in the early stages of his magnificent novel Ender's Game, and deals with the warping, then rewarping of protagonist child soldier/refusnik Zeck Morgan's mind, which, having first been twisted into alienated pacifism by the sermonizing and physical abuse (called 'purifying') wrought by his father, a self-ordained fundamentalist preacher, is then reshaped by Ender-to-be Andrew Wiggin who, in several several cameo appearances, overpowers Zeck with superior logic and Christ-like verve, lancing his boil of pacifist righteousness and bringing Zeck into the killing fold.

There are internal perturbations within this short (126 half-sized pages) text, that will disturb Card-ophiles, that suggest A War of Gifts may have started life as a stillborn sequence of Ender's Game, one that, for any of a number of reasons, has resurrected from the cutting room floor 22 years later.

There are anachronisms. Andrew Wiggin didn't receive his nom de guerre Ender until rather later in Ender's Game than the time period described in AWOG. Would his mum really have called him Ender and not Andrew or, dare we say, Andy, during the rather testy exchange between she and her co-wiz kid son Peter that takes place once Andrew is aboard the Battle School? What prescience! She wouldn't hear from him for years; how'd she get his jeesh tag? The otherwise unmemorable sequence does its duty, however, as a let's-fill-in-the-blanks vehicle for AWOG readers unfamilar with Ender's Game.

Certainly by the Battle School standards of Ender's Game, Zeck's utter refusal to cooperate with his military trainers, coupled with his willingness to 'rat out' his fellow students, should have speedily had him washed out and planetside a third of the way through AWOG.

Despite these whoopsies, and the brevity of the book, and the annoying one dimensionality of most of A War of Gifts' characters, and the feel of it being a thrown-together-for-Christmas product, that combined make AWOG a sort of throw-away book, it is nevertheless charming to revisit Ender, Peter, Valentine, Ma and Pa Wiggin, the imperturbable Colonel Graff and the gang aboard the good ship Battle School, to get an exposition on the Dutch origins of Santa Claus, and to read Card's depiction of the repressed rage and sexuality of neo-primitivist Christianity, of a form found in the Carolina mountains.

Spiced with a dash of militarism-uber-alles preachery to make the book attractive to that vast readership of American enlisted men and women who voraciously consume sci-fi during the interminable waits in the hurry-up-and-wait life of active duty personnell, or while recuperating in veterans' hospitals,

It is interesting that for all the warring and wargamery of their books, Orson Scott Card, like Robert A. Heinlein, never served upon a battlefield. Card sensibly refrains from detailed war scenes; he is less cautious, though, with penning pro-miltarist rhetoric. Perhaps he should heed trench poet Wilfred Owen's warning to non-combatant warfare-fiction writers, that if they had actually taken part in combat:

"..... you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori."

Overall A War of Gifts is a charming but forgettable story that will add little to the Ender Series Canon, nor, likely, to its author's bank account.