No, I agree with you that it had no impact, but in terms of its position in the story, it is a critical moment. It represents the moment when Ender 'beats' the Battle Room. It is his graduation. It's just that the way the movie films it, it makes no sense. And when you add to it the fact that high school football teams perform more sophisticated formations than what we see, it's even less impactful.
I didn't even notice that they had FTL in the film! Are you sure about that? Mazer Rackham is still impossibly young, suggesting time dilation, so I had assumed that it was still ansible + no FTL. You are right that they weakened the importance of 'timing' Ender's maturation to the arrival of the ships, but there was still a sense of enforced urgency from external factors- Graff tells Anderson that they're running out of time, that they're out of time, etc...
I didn't mind the changes to the Hivemind discovery sequence, really. I was actually kind of glad that a lot of the Earth politics stuff was eliminated. I liked that part of the novel, but didn't miss it in the movie.
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Date: 2013-12-10 04:29 pm (UTC)I didn't even notice that they had FTL in the film! Are you sure about that? Mazer Rackham is still impossibly young, suggesting time dilation, so I had assumed that it was still ansible + no FTL. You are right that they weakened the importance of 'timing' Ender's maturation to the arrival of the ships, but there was still a sense of enforced urgency from external factors- Graff tells Anderson that they're running out of time, that they're out of time, etc...
I didn't mind the changes to the Hivemind discovery sequence, really. I was actually kind of glad that a lot of the Earth politics stuff was eliminated. I liked that part of the novel, but didn't miss it in the movie.