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| Enders Game (2013) Summit |
It’s hard to explain my feelings about this movie because I
have waited close to 10 years to see it made correctly. I have waited patiently
because I am a fan of the book series and I happen to enjoy great film. For me I
love to read books because the capture a wide breadth of story and character
development. If you read books you will already feel smarter than most of your
friends and colleagues because you get to see viewpoints amassed by those with
more experiences. This gives them great depth of character even if they are
fictional and it is hard to look at the world in the same way after seeing from
the viewpoints of others for so long.
This book series has helped me learn a great deal about
myself because often times I find myself thinking like Ender. I weight the
options of the greater good and I view humans as if they were an alien species.
It helps me to understand a great deal about cultures and why people act as
they do. I find Ender very accessible as a character because I emulate a larger
strategy plan like he does. I may not have the eidetic memory of a Sheldon
Cooper, but some of his quirks are shared with me.
I will say that the movie did not do well with the critics
and it certainly failed in the box office numbers. This is depressing to me
because again it is a far cry from what critics were writing. This movie had
some political implications before it came out because the writer of the book
is against gay marriage. I feel like that was a major contributor to the demise
of this film. Many boycotted the film and the critics didn’t give it a fair
assessment. The people who saw it did enjoy it.
This being said I will take up some of the petty grievances
or complaints I have become accustomed of hearing when critics and friends talk
about the film.
1.
“It wasn’t as good as the book”
·
Granted.
A movie rarely possesses the same complicated themes a book can describe in
detail and very few movies have a director that is able to condense the sheer
size of a story into a cinematic format (unless they are named Peter Jackson
and get unlimited budgets and runtimes).
2.
“It was rushed”
·
Of course it was. It’s hard to name a book
adapted movie series that actually wasn’t rushed besides LOTR i.e. Harry
Potter, Hunger Game, etc. Movies that are based on characters with mostly inner
dialogue always lose the majority of their characters in the movie because you
can only see their conflictions and not hear them. This brings me to another
grievance.
3.
“Ender doesn’t seem that smart”
·
Agreed to an extent, they failed to convincingly
show that Ender was constantly being watched and didn’t want to show his
feelings very often. It didn’t show how much he hated Graff even before the
Bonzo event. It didn’t show how he brilliantly out-thought Graff on many
occasions and many of his actions were meant to make him the leader he wanted
to be on his own terms. He was so far beyond his cohorts and he was beloved and
hated at the same time, like Julius Ceasar. If they had spent more time in
battle school, it would’ve been easier to see how far ahead he really was intellectually.
His inner dialogue is very complicated for a similar person of his age. Notice
that Katniss seems like a witless moron, but in the book she was much brighter
than she appears to be in her film. You can’t adequately explain a character
without time and since they had to condense the film, you lost a great deal of
his achievements and intelligence.
4.
“Ender was easily manipulated”
·
Wrong. He was manipulated in order to show what
he would do in certain situations and in the book he was much younger than he
appeared in the film. He accepted many of the manipulations as tests and begrudged
Graff for them, but constantly outperformed the expected results. He couldn’t control
his life because that wasn’t his concern, but to say that he was easily
manipulated in the film just shows that it was is a misconceived understanding.
5.
“The ending was easily foreshadowed”
·
Sure. In the movie it was. I can easily blame
the director Gavin Hood for not only leaving out important dialogue, but absolutely
failing miserably to continue with the themes of the book. He botched the
ending by forcing the film to move at a rate that left regular viewers far
behind. For the life of me I cannot understand why he was even allowed to write
this. Sure the executive producers could’ve had more creative input, but they
obviously couldn’t see past the problems of the script and the feeling of being
“rushed” though the movie. I think Card was a part of the process, but never
really got the control he wanted. The movie execs probably gave Hood the green
light and didn’t want to have any scripts edited during the filming process.
The movie itself had passed through the hands of 3 companies that I know of and
finally ended up with Summit who failed to provide the story with a real script
writer, director, and production company.
That being said I don’t really have an opinion on the critics
themselves but their websites could easily be confused with buzzfeed or tabloid
journalism at best. Most of the reviewers did not give this film a fair
assessment and some of their criticisms while viable are also misplaced. It is
easy to say that it was rushed or that it was not comparable to the book, but
the honest truth is that this movie was never going to be LOTR or the Hunger
Games. It didn’t have the director, the budget, the runtime, the script, or the
production company with the stones to do it right. The movie did fall a little
flat compared to the book, but I did not think that the message lost much of
its potency. The story is captivating and shows us the difficulties of war, the
decisions to be made, and the harsh mental conditions it put Ender through. The
battle school may have not been moral, but it was necessary. I still thought it
was a good film despite what problems I have with it. I didn’t care that it was
rushed because it was entertaining and gripping.
Adam Out.
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