Ender On The Big Screen

As I mentioned last week, we went and saw the movie version of Ender's Game and it was totally worth it.  I had read the book to my Hubbin on our daily commute (yep I married a guy who lets me read my favorite books to him all the time, I think he's a keeper) so he was just as excited and nervous as I was to see what they would do with it.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD.

I am going to assume that if you are reading this you have either read the book or watched the movie or both so I am not going to go into a lot of plot details.  In fact lets start with the plot.  I thought that the movie did an excellent job with keeping the important parts of the plot of the story completely intact.  In fact the only thing they really left out was the political shenanigans of Ender's older siblings, which in all honesty we figured would happen.  It makes sense in the context of the movie because a) it does not have a direct impact on the rest of the plot (for this book) b) it would be boring to watch people typing on the internet for hours at a time c) if you are not interested in obscure philosophical ideas it's kind of pointless and boring.  They did however leave in Peter's cruelness and Valentines bond with Ender which I thought was well done and necessary.

They used Petra as Ender's besty instead of Bean, which irritated me a bit 'cause I loved Bean in the book, but I understood they were trying to add some femaleness to the male dominated story again nothing that altered the plot. The ages of the kids that went to battle school was raised, but I understand that they can't show 6 year olds beating the crap out of each other and get a decent rating...though it did take a smidge of some of the horror of what they were doing to these kids away. They also altered the ending a bit, making it more of a complete movie and less open ended, again worked perfectly for the movie.  Onto the casting.  I think when it comes to making a movie from a book, especially such a well known book that has been around for years, casting is key.  The wrong person in a part can be distracting and irritating and just wrong (I'm looking at you Josh Hutcherson as Peeta). This movie got the casting dead on.  Asa Butterfield was a genius choice as far as casting goes, he was by turns tough, smart, lonely, angry, scared all while maintaining a weird genius socially awkward calm that was perfect. I can watch Harrison Ford in anything and his turn as Colonel Graff is no exception.  I liked the change of Major Anderson to a female for the film and Viola Davis was wonderful to watch in that role.  My favorite (other then Ender) casting choice may have been for the role of Bonzo, the older, competitive boy who feels the need to prove himself against Ender, Moises Arias was superb for that role.  In some ways I am glad that they waited for so long to make this movie as the visual effects were stunning.  The landscapes, the space battles, the school, all done beautifully.  I especially loved seeing the scenes in the Battle Room come to life and wish we had been able to watch even more battles.  As you can probably tell I loved this movie, it did justice to one of my favorite books, not glossing over any of the difficult points which make it such a discussable story.  I would recommend it to anyone who has read and loved the original book. I give it 8 out of 10 Asteroids.

What did you think of the movie?  Do you ever read a book and edit it for a movie in your head?  Are you shocked that I actually approve of a movie of a book?