Review: Ender’s Game

BY RACHEL CALLAHAN

Enders Game was an action packed film, which included a brilliant cast, with names like Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfield, and Abigail Breslin.  The film was based off Orson Scott Card’s novel of the same name, and it follows young Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, as he goes through “battle school” to become the commander that leads an invasion to rid Earth of the alien threat they’ve had for years.

I was glad to see the film start exactly as the book had, with Ender checking his monitor, the device that had been monitoring everything he thought and saw to see if he was ready for battle school. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. While entertaining, the movie was not by any stretch of the imagination a great representation of the book

A lot was cut from the novel. As a book, Enders Game isn’t all that long and makes for a quick read. At first glance it looks like a perfect book to make into a movie, a quick, action packed story with a dense plot and character development.  However, these things didn’t translate well to the big screen.

It was disappointing to see so much from such a short book still not make it the film, like Ender’s siblings Valentine and Peter, who were important characters that should have had much bigger roles. It is difficult to condense an entire novel into 2-hour long movie, especially when that novel’s main character starts at age six and by the end of it is twelve. The movie did a terrible job showing this passage of time. Asa Butterfield, the actor portraying main character Ender Wiggin is 16, and he barely passed for 12, much less 6. Still, while I was disappointed that the ages of the characters in the book had been completely disregarded, the casted actors did do a great job with the script they were given.

In addition to that, the “fantasy game” that was a key part of the book was represented fairly well.  Like the other plot elements, it was stripped down to essentials but was incorporated nicely into the film, and the CGI used for game and battle scenes was surprisingly phenomenal.

So, putting the book aside, Ender’s Game was a fun film, which at times was quite well done, but sadly, it did completely butcher the book it was based on.