As in the book, Dragon Army's "Let's try a formation" is a critical Battle Room moment
Actually, I felt it had zero impact in the film. In the book, by the time we get here we've seen them all practicing and fighting a bunch, and we know that Dragon Army does *not* do formations, that their strength is their flexibility and formations don't fit into that. And then when they suddenly do a formation we see how the two opposing armies just fall apart. In the film, this is their first battle that we see onscreen, we have no context for the surprise of doing a formation.
What you think of the change that they have FTL travel (instead of only the ansible), instead of the asteroid Eros in-system they're going to another planet, and Ender finds the infant Queen on that planet and is gifted her after an encounter with a live Queen? I really don't like the addition of FTL, it weakened the thesis that they had a deadline of when the ships reached the bugger homeworld. Disregarding that though, I feel like the buildup to it with Petra on the surface, having Ender meet the Queen in person, and having it be soon after instead of an epilogue years later, all worked well within the movie format. I also had the impression from the book that he found the Queen on the first planet he went to (though one of my friends disagrees), which made it to me either a strange coincidence that he happened to land on the only world that made the playground, or else every world had one, and the film version fixed that.
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Date: 2013-12-10 03:33 pm (UTC)Actually, I felt it had zero impact in the film. In the book, by the time we get here we've seen them all practicing and fighting a bunch, and we know that Dragon Army does *not* do formations, that their strength is their flexibility and formations don't fit into that. And then when they suddenly do a formation we see how the two opposing armies just fall apart. In the film, this is their first battle that we see onscreen, we have no context for the surprise of doing a formation.
What you think of the change that they have FTL travel (instead of only the ansible), instead of the asteroid Eros in-system they're going to another planet, and Ender finds the infant Queen on that planet and is gifted her after an encounter with a live Queen? I really don't like the addition of FTL, it weakened the thesis that they had a deadline of when the ships reached the bugger homeworld. Disregarding that though, I feel like the buildup to it with Petra on the surface, having Ender meet the Queen in person, and having it be soon after instead of an epilogue years later, all worked well within the movie format. I also had the impression from the book that he found the Queen on the first planet he went to (though one of my friends disagrees), which made it to me either a strange coincidence that he happened to land on the only world that made the playground, or else every world had one, and the film version fixed that.