I understand that there are a lot of Orson Scott Card fans out there and that many of them liked his book, Ender’s Game. Hollywood has tried to capture the essence of the story in a feature film. The story focuses on an intergalactic war waged by children from Earth and led by their savant, Ender Wiggin. The movie will premier in theaters on November 1.
Harrison Ford (increasingly curmudgeon-like) plays Colonel Hyrum Graff, who believes in Ender and the other child commanders-in-training. 
There are problems with turning the book into a feature film as those who have read Ender’s Game will likely agree on. Most of the book takes place inside Ender’s own mind–so the translation to film may or may not work. There are finer points to the strategy employed by Ender to save the planet and the universe from the alien invasion. That strategy occupies a lot of the book and I don’t know that it can be plugged into a film and made interesting.
The Plot: As humanity masters interplanetary spaceflight, they encounter an insectoid (I don’t think that the word “alien/illegal alien” is politically correct anymore) race, known as the Formics. The Formics and humans have fought two wars and they are poised to fight a third to decide who will rule this portion of the galaxy. The International Fleet created the Battle School, a program designed to find children of the best and brightest tactical minds and to subject them to rigorous training so as to defeat the Formic threat once and for all.
(No Spoilers)

There are five books in Card’s Ender series.

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11 COMMENTS

  1. I read all of the Ender's series and read Ender's Shadow as well. Great books. After six, I just got tired of them.

    I'm looking forward to the movie and may have to reread the book before it comes out. I'm afraid I may get disappointed, as I did with Starship Troopers.

  3. Read them all, and agree, translating the book and Ender's "thoughts" will be a problem. Also the level of detail will suffer…

  4. In part, I thought that Starship Troopers did a good job making some of Heinlein's characters visual — but it depart significantly from the book in order to do that. You have to "dumb it down" to make a movie.

  5. After Ender's Game, I felt as if the series dragged. Card could have encapsulated the story into three books or even two longer books. However, Ender's Game stands as a SciFi classic and I'm looking forward to watching the film.

  6. They cast the film well. The budget is there. Gavin Hood re-wrote the Orson Scott Card script, so the vision of the movie isn't the vision of the author. This script merges Ender's Game with Ender's Shadow. There have been several years of failed production attempts, the latest in 2002 with Warner Bros. producing and Wolfgang Petersen directing. This latest effort is apparently working, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

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