Ender's Game

Decades ago, as a teenager, I read the new bestselling scifi novel, Enders Game by Orson Scott Card. I was familiar with Heinlein and Niven and would someday discover Gibson, but I was exactly the right age and mindset to enjoy Andrew Wiggin's tribulations. The first of the series remains my favorite. There have been rumors of the movie getting made since 1989. Its bounced around with fantasy cast lists, debates about the requirements of depicting the Zero-Gee battle rooms, and the morality of Demosthenes and Locke's debates and eventual takeover of Earth's govt by his brother and sister. They were an important counterpoint to the war itself, and the entire morality of what they were doing, creating and using child soldiers engineered and trained as tactical geniuses attempting to defeat an alien foe that already showed it was capable of genocide. Its a grim story, and not meant to be taken lightly.

 

The movie grabbed as much of this as it could, comfortably include. However, it made a few mistakes which would have improved it a great deal to leave in. For one thing, in the book, Ender, when attacked, kills. He comments he was winning the battles in the future too, but he killed his tormentors. Bonzo DIED. So did the bigger kid from his earthside school. Nose into his brain. Ender was a murderer, even if he wasn't told. I thought the movie did a good job with battle school. The debate between the psychologist and the school director, including the flashes of the alien fleet driving him on probably could have been improved with a moment's explanation that FTL doesn't exist in the Enderverse. Ansibles exist, so you have quantum entanglement communications instantaneously across any distance, thanks to Special Relativity's other party trick. In the book they were operating on Pluto or Ceres.

 

There was no mention in the movie of the notice Ender and company took to the battle room entrance since it implied gravity fields that could be turned on and off, which is also how the Little Doctor worked, in a related way. Or that it was Ender who figured out you could destroy a planet with the Molecular Destabilizer (Little Doctor). In the movie they show it frying the planet surface. In the book, ships hit by the initial blast spread it to the atmosphere and there to the surface and turned the entire planet into gas. It wasn't burnt crispy. It was literally vaporized.

 

Killed the entire fleet too. People who'd built their fleet immediately after the attack and launched decades earlier. Folks who were family to the 100,000,000 dead in the initial Bugger attack. They called them Formics in the movie. At the time, hivemind aliens were cutting edge ideas not explored yet. By now, everybody has seen Alien and Aliens so its not so visually horrifying.

 

In the book, the battle school commander goes to prison for war crimes, despite winning the war. There were no drone ships. They had pilots. They reveal this in both, after the battle is won. They also reveal that the two boys Ender fought died, the first time he learned this secret, and devastating to his fragile feelings after being used as a child soldier. In the real world, Child Soldiers get really messed up and few survive long as adults. I knew a survivor of the civil war in Ethiopia, a child soldier who ended up marrying the woman he was ordered to rape. They have several kids. He tended to drift off in the middle of a sentence sometimes. Haunted by bad memories, I think. In context Ender's response to the attempt to blame him for the xenocide while simultaneously calling him the hero of the war.

 

I liked the Maori tattoos on Mazer Rackham. I don't remember that in the book, but it was a nice detail. In successive novels in the series, Ender is called the Xenocide, tried in interstellar court by the various human colony governments centuries after the fact, so they could feel smug about how superior they were to him, despite only existing because of his terrible choices, unknowing as they were.

 

In the novel, Ender retrieves the queen's egg, he hops into a sleeper colony ship to escape his brother, now supreme ruler of Earth despite being a murdering psychopath who enjoyed torturing animals and nearly killed his brother and sister many times when they were children. His sister joins him 30 years into the future and at the end of his brother's life, begging for forgiveness, which he does NOT receive, they flee into space for a distant colony world on a 150 year trip (relativistic trips involve time compression) and into the next story. I never cared for that one much, called Speaker For The Dead, which was also about aliens, just not warfare and lacked the edge of Ender's Game. In the movie, they merely show him in a sleeper pod with a timer clicking by but no explanation as to what that means. I doubt they'd make the sequel, though the side stories of the others were interesting to read at least.

 

Ender's Game the movie is flawed. I wish they'd included the Demosthenes and Locke debates by his brother and sister, and the collapse of Petra, who is victorious in the movie but actually goes insane in the books from stress. I'm still glad the movie was made. I waited 25 years to see it.