Ender's Game

Right, they tell you a bunch of exposition rather than showing you hims being a greater commander than the others. The movie suffered because of that. Harrison Ford and the chick from The Help telling you "Ender is the one!" is not nearly as powerful as showing him consistently dominate. They give the impression that he participated in 2 mock battles and was then put in charge of the entirety of Earth's forces.

chaos_sl said:

Right, they tell you a bunch of exposition rather than showing you hims being a greater commander than the others. The movie suffered because of that. Harrison Ford and the chick from The Help telling you "Ender is the one!" is not nearly as powerful as showing him consistently dominate. They give the impression that he participated in 2 mock battles and was then put in charge of the entirety of Earth's forces.

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They should have included a good old 80's style montage. Instead I felt it was all due to him kicking the first boy while he was down. Some how they decided to focus on that and it was enough to show them he could do what they wanted.

Probably would have worked better as a cable mini series. Like just about everything these days.

Did anyone read the books following this movie? i got the impression they kinda of fall flat.

I thought it was pretty good and i sure got the impression he was head and shoulders above the rest, the twist seemed pretty damn predictable.

The following books with ender in them are kinda weird. Some of them focus on his brother and sister and he isn't in them. I read two of them and after that I had lost interest in the 'series'.

The whole premise is off. Young people are better at precisely 2 things: processing speed and figuring things out on the fly. Commanding ability is gained from experience, not ones skill at playing tetris

Dabamf_sl said:

The whole premise is off. Young people are better at precisely 2 things: processing speed and figuring things out on the fly. Commanding ability is gained from experience, not ones skill at playing tetris

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I think the "processing speed" was needed for the fight in the end? Certainly looked like it.

Having read the books, I knew this wouldn't be as good. Just glad I didn't pay money to see it.

It wasn't conveyed as well in the movie as the books, and you have to suspend your disbelief a bit, but all they needed from Ender was the ability to use the Fleet in battle extremely well, and more importantly for him to think it was a game. So he would do anything to win, and not realize he was sacrificing actual humans with his crazy tactics. There's also the bit about being able to figure out where the Queen was by watching enemy ship movement, but it wasn't handled very well.

It's been a while since I watched the movie, but I think they also didn't touch on the fact that the ships that were used in the final battle against the alien homeworld were the first ones sent out, and were much less advanced than the rest of the fleet. Slower, crappier weapons, etc.

They needed a genius mind flexible enough to combat the fact that buggers instantly adapted to tactics used against them. Which is why whathisface's victory was a one-time fluke.

Plus, someone who was aware that humanity's fate was in their hands probably would have cracked under the pressure.

What I was always confused about is why the Wiggun kids were all geniuses. Were they engineered?

Kreugen_sl said:

Plus, someone who was aware that humanity's fate was in their hands probably would have cracked under the pressure.

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That wasn't the issue. The issue was that Ender had to be able to do whatever it took to win each battle. He thought nothing of sacrificing half his available ships (or all) to win a single engagement, because they were just game pieces to him. He had no idea there were hundreds of people (or more) manning those ships.

Actually you're both right.

From what I remember, and it's been a while since I read the book, it wasn't even so much hinted at. It was flat out explained that that's why Andrew Wiggin was even allowed to be born as a 3rd child. The children were engineered / bred for genius and while Peter was unsuitable for being too cynical, Val(?) was unsuitable for being too idealistic, Andrew was exactly the right sort of malleable. So he was the child genius, the centrist, the outsider, the everyman all in one. For the adolescent male audience that book was written for at least.

A real straight and unapologetic rip of Goldilocks. Card does that kind of thing.

His sequels get progressively more and more Mormon and moralistic. I've read a fair amount of his stuff and they're all morality plays. But at least he has the decency to frontload his series and some of his stories (The Worthing Saga comes to mind) are genuinely interesting on their own merits.

I read the book two weeks ago. It never says he's engineered in any way, at least not in Ender's Game. Just that his parents had two kids that went into the program and didn't work out so they were allowed to have a third.

Logically, there had to be something going on for two ordinary people to produce 3 geniuses. It's just never mentioned. There's nothing about eugenics or genetic manipulation anywhere. There's nothing that says why his parents were able to produce the Kwisatz Haderach.

So I was just curious if it comes up in a later book since Ender is so impossibly intelligent and wise.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, the implant device also could have been more than just a monitor and more like something that enhanced development. Again, it's not mentioned, but it's logical.

In the "Shadow" series that follows up the events of the Bugger War from Bean/Peter/Petra's perspective the Wiggin parents flat out tell Peter that the kids weren't genetically tampered with and that the parents themselves spent a lot of time pretending to be average so that they/their kids didn't have their lives completely consumed by Bureaucracy and the world governments. I guess they did a good job because both Peter and Ender thought they were completely moronic cattle.

dioblaire_sl said:

Having read the books, I knew this wouldn't be as good. Just glad I didn't pay money to see it.

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pretty much sums up my thoughts, its worth watching for a scifi fan just to see the last 30 minutes of space battles, which is pretty goddamn epic, but its all just CGI candy like a wing commander or eve stream. Just too much yanked out that makes everything not really fit together very well.

It wasn't a box office hit either and will probably end up losing lots of money even after DVD sales, so hopefully we won't see the sequels. I recently read about 3/4ths of the books, and they get REALLY REALLY bad, so don't bother reading anything other than the first book if you really have to.

can't really be mad at em, its hard to see how this woulda really been a great movie and it wasn't terrible or anything, just slightly above average. a tv mini series would have been so much better, agreed.