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I finally saw the Ender's Game film. I... mostly didn't like it. I have the book read many many times, and it is very high on the list of books I know best. As I watched, I was very cognizant of how closely it hewed to the book. That was not really what I wanted from the film, though. I would have preferred thematic fidelity over fidelity to specific scenes, and the movie, by nature of being a movie, often sacrificed thematic fidelity as it sacrificed complexity.

For example, they removed the Demosthene/Locke plot. This is unsurprising, and if I were rewriting Ender's Game for the screen probably would have made the same choice because it is added time that doesn't add to the main plot, and it is hard to film well. But then they repeated exactly a scene on the water when Ender confides in Valentine that he is afraid that he is just like Peter and Valentine reassures him that he isn't. In the book, Demosthenes/Locke gives that scene an important dimension: Valentine knows, though she can't explain to Ender, that Peter's monstrous ambition has more potentiality to it than they had guessed as young children. And the reader knows this, too. So as we follow Ender's path for the rest of the novel, it's nothing so simple as a question of whether Ender must become a monster to destroy the buggers. There are choices, unfolding branches on multiple moral axes, that in the end will turn Ender into an adult. (At risk of going on a tangent, this is perhaps Card's most sublime irony. Ender and all the kids at Battle School talk and act like adults, so the emotional journey they take to adulthood is carefully disguised and in places inverted. They play 'games', but the games have lethal consequences. They attend school, but their teachers don't care about their schoolwork, only about how they do in the games. Through inversions like this, Card takes the trappings of childhood and creates new meanings for them, but I think he suggests that the process of going through these milestones still constitutes a progression toward adulthood.)

In the movie, because all we see of Peter is him torturing Ender as a kid, it is precisely as simple as Ender understands his conversation with Valentine: He is terrified that they are making him into a monster like Peter in order to beat the buggers. This ties into a second significant change: Bonzo does not actually die immediately, and Ender is allowed to see this. The import of this is a softening of Colonel Graff's pedagogy that book-Graff would never allow. Ender is being allowed by those in charge to believe that there is still a possibility for his redemption. In the book, this kindness is not required because the redemption is not required. Speaker for the Dead in the book is not an atonement Ender performs for his sin, it is a labor of love he performs because he loves the Hivemind, and Card ties it together with Peter, in The Hivemind and the Hegemon, because Peter's path is validation of Ender's path.

And I am far less interested in the simple question of whether Ender will or won't become a monster.


The book is centrally about the Battle Room: In his introduction to my 15th anniversary edition, Card writes that the Battle Room was the first part of the concept of Ender's Game to come to him. The movie barely pays any attention to the Battle Room. Two kinds of shots predominate: wide angle shots of the entire, vast Battle Room, and tight reaction shots. As in the book, Dragon Army's "Let's try a formation" is a critical Battle Room moment, but the photography doesn't make it very clear what synchronicity goes into the creation of this formation. If I were filming Battle Room scenes, I would try to make them look as much like football game film as possible. Football cinematographers have gotten very good at establishing exactly the right range and exactly the right shots to make the action comprehensible and meaningful. And I would have tried to fit at least a bit of Remember the Titans or Friday Night Lights into the movie, with some narrative to Ender's relationships to his players both as team member and later as team captain. The Battle Room story is very much akin to a Matt Christopher novel, but with clever trope inversion emerging from the deadly serious, if temporally distant, consequences of success and failure.

And I swear my bitching about this isn't ONLY because they cut Rose de Nose out of the movie. Rose is one of my favorite characters in the book, true, because Jews in Space are kind of a thing for me, but I would have been fine with Carn Carby or Dink in a larger role or someone else serving a similar function, as the captain whose leadership methods Ender learns from, but from whom he also learns equally what not to do. I did feel that as a lack in the film, because Ender becoming a leader of people is so critical to the Command School sequence and it isn't quite sold. (Or if it is sold, it's only sold as forming a bond with his Launchie class + Petra and Dink, so that we don't think of Ender as a person who can understand how anyone thinks and therefore lead anyone, but as someone who can achieve great military victory when everyone else believes in his mythology. And that makes his success seem almost accidentally engineered- Ender stumbling into the people he needs to lead, rather than selecting them unconsciously as he progresses.)

That being said, Bonzo Madrid was perhaps the best casting in the entire movie. I loved how they made use of his physical presence- more massive than Ender, and much more adult seeming, but not taller at all. I loved that they showed him surviving a challenge to his authority as Ender walked in, because it did a better job than almost anything else in the movie of showing why he had other things at stake besides just winning the game. In the book Bonzo attacks Ender because Graff manipulates him into doing it, essentially. In the movie, Bonzo attacks because he has something to prove, and this is one of the rare cases where the book's answer is inferior, because in the movie, the attack is something that Ender could have avoided, it is actually a mistake he made, and he pays for that mistake quite severely. Though the movie does pay a price for this, in that it compromises Anderson's character severely. I was so excited about Viola Davis as Anderson. I've loved her since Century City in the early '00s, and I knew she could do great things in the role, but the role was mis-written. In the book, Anderson is obsessed with the integrity of the game. We can speculate about why this is- he believes that the game's integrity is part of what helps these children grow into men, he believes that fairness should be taught as part of building the cohesion of their future military units, he is just a sports fan who happens to be in charge of the Battle Room- the book isn't clear on why, and it's valid to pick one rationale and develop that in the film. But he is not upset because Graff is abusing Ender by misusing the Battle Room and setting Ender up to be attacked by Bonzo, he is upset because Graff is risking the blowing up the whole system that has the potential to train others if Ender fails, putting all his eggs in the Ender basket at the risk of destroying the Battle Room that Anderson has come to love and hold faith in. And Viola Davis could have made that such a compelling position to hold, but instead the film sets her up as being motivated by her compassion for Ender, and her apology for risking him in the fight with Bonzo is where this misogynistic rewrite of Anderson's character comes to a head. (In a sense, Anderson's failure in this moment substitutes for Petra's failure in the book's Command School sequence: It represents the way compassion and what we would term 'humanity' are the things that the people controlling Ender cannot afford to teach him, and yet depend on him to discover anyway on his own. Card does this better than the Petra moment in another scene the movie removes, when Mazer Rackham berates Ender for sacrificing too many pilots, pilots Ender doesn't know were close friends of Rackham because Ender thinks it is still a simulation. This is the scene where the lie that Rackham is unable to command because of his reflexes is tacitly revealed. Rackham is unable to command because he cannot make the strategic sacrifices that Ender can, and yet Ender's ability to sacrifice is suspended on a massive lie, because Ender is too compassionate to make those sacrifices, even of people he doesn't know. )

I thought Petra was wasted, given how good an actor we know Hailee Steinfeld can be, and how central Petra can be to Ender's narrative, but I appreciated a lot of the way she was represented. I liked the shippy dynamics to the Ender/Petra relationship, that it was intimate and flirtatious but ultimately innocent, somehow without any of the charge of adulthood that marks Ender's other relationships, both with adults and with other children. I wouldn't have said no to the inclusion of other aspects of their friendship, particularly the way Petra and Dink are the ones who teach Ender that the reason the game doesn't matter is because it matters too much, but I was reasonably happy with what we got. And I was profoundly grateful that she did not fail Ender in the Command School sequence, and that he trusted her not to fail.

About Harrison Ford's Graff I have mixed feelings. I think my final assessment is that he was better than his writing, but his writing wasn't very good. There were a number of Graff moments that I couldn't quite make sense of what he was thinking, and I missed those insights into what he was thinking. Card's Graff is ironic but not opaque. He hides meanings and feelings in jokes rather than in emotional constipation. He speaks his mind. Thus Card gives us a bit of a solvable puzzle, which opens up room for Ender to solve the puzzle. Sometimes Ender does. Sometimes he doesn't. Graff doesn't really care whether Ender does or doesn't solve it, as long as Ender keeps playing his game-. Because Graff is all in on his game, and he cannot afford to lose, he's almost playing with house money. Either Graff wins, Ender destroys the Buggers, and he is a hero, or Graff loses, Ender is destroyed, and all of humanity is destroyed by the Buggers. Ford plays Graff as a man who is bottling up his emotions in order to maintain morale and his authority of command, and perversely the amount that Graff keeps hidden reveals more than we want to know about what he's feeling. Ford's Graff has intermediate concerns, political worries, moral doubts- things that concern him in between now and the existential threat to humanity that weighs on his soul. Perhaps this is more human, but it restricts the game, restricts the methods by which he can manipulate Ender, and weakens the starkness of Ender's aloneness.

Mazer Rackham is less important to the story than Graff, and perhaps that's why I have less complaints about Ben Kingsley's performance. I liked that after teaching Ender his first lesson about enemies, he treats Ender not as a student but as an equal. Nobody else can see this pattern, he says immediately, and thus he puts Ender on the same level as him. You and me are in this together, partners in the war that has consumed my life. Both of us have sacrificed more than any man should have to sacrifice. We are both Speakers for the Dead.

Um... I'm open to any other discussion of the book and/or movie in the comments.