November 1st just recently marked the release of the much awaited film, Ender’s Game. Based on the novel Ender’s Game, written by Orson Scott Card, this film follows Ender Wiggin, a young boy who is chosen to help protect the earth from an alien invasion. Set in a futuri
stic version of the world now, Ender’s Game is a classic science-fiction novel.
As with all film adaptations, many fans were skeptical at first. With such a complex storyline comes a lot of pressure on screenwriters and producers to get the plot right and fit in most of the content. Sadie Dasovich, a fan of both the Ender’s Game book and the movie, said of the movie “it wasn’t the same as the book, but that’s normal. They had to change it to make it able to be a movie.” She pointed out that the pace of the movie was much faster than the book mostly because “if they made it over a course of years, they would have to deal with changing actors.”
The actor choices in the movie, according to Dasovich, were not what she was hoping for. She said “the actor choices irritated me. The actor who played Bonzo is so short that he is basically looking down on the actor who plays Ender.”
Another common complaint of fans is that Ender is not as young in the movie as he is in the book. Dasovich commented, “six year olds acting the way Ender acts in the book would be sort of terrifying to be seen in a movie theatre.” Many fans compare this situation to that of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief, in which the age of the main character was also altered in order to better fit a movie script.
Sadie Dasovich said the movie overall was good, but “the book is better than the movie. The book is always better.”
