I love Ender's Game, and all of the sequels.

Honestly, I can say that I'd rather see no movie be made at all than a bad one. Hopefully, if Card writes the screenplay, we have a chance at a good film, and if Card DIDN'T write the screenplay, I wouldn't bother seeing it at all.

... without some sort of homoerotic, underage action. Oh wait, Ender has that - sweaty young boys wrestling in the shower.

Seriously, a film version of Ender's Game is going to require some serious acting on the part of leads who haven't even hit puberty yet. The film doesn't need just one child prodigy to pull it off, but several. They were almost ready to film once before with Jake Lloyd (Anakin from The Phantom Menace and Card's personal choice) in the title role. The project fell apart because, with only his performance in The Phantom Menace to recommend him, Lloyd didn't appear to be a good enough actor. (Let's face it, even excellent actors like Liam Neeson, Ewan Macgregor, Natalie Portman all gave wooden and unconvincing performances under Lucas's direction, so maybe it's not all Lloyd's fault.) Even once they agree on a treatment for the book they're going to have to find the actors fast and film it fast. A delay of a year or two in pre-production is fine for most movies, but for Ender's Game the entire cast would literally outgrow their roles!

As a result of all this, I think live-action would involve too many compromises. This is one film that really would be better done as a cartoon or CG feature. Unfortunately, adult-oriented cartoons have not fared well with U.S. audiences, who seem to expect cute little anthropomorphic Disney sidekicks and musical numbers from anything drawn or rendered. Japan does not have this problem. If I were Orson Scott Card and I wanted to see Ender's Game done right, I'd flip Hollywood the bird and hop on a plane to the land of the rising sun.

Anyone who thinks that a mass market, big budget Ender's Game will turn out to be anything other than Pirates of the Space Caribbean: The Enemy's Gate is Down starring a bunch of 20-something "teen" actors culled from whatever the hell it is that kids are watching on TV these days, has no idea how Hollywood, and particularly the distribution chain, works.

Hopefully, if Card writes the screenplay, we have a chance at a good film

John Varley wrote the screenplay for Millennium and turned a classic short story into the worst film made by anybody, anywhere.

Good writers think in a much too overblown, theatrical style. It just doesn't translate to the screen.

I wasn't much impressed with the episode which William Gibson wrote for the X files, either.

12-16 completley destroys the innocence of Ender's actions. Remember, he kills two kids.
The battleroom is the central focus of the children, battle school, the book. It was the reason EG was turned into a full novel. It has to be done exceedingly well. Sports movies with bad sports almost never work. This will hold true if the battle room isn't shot well, regardless of how little time is spent in there.
I forgot about the psych test, but it is hugely important if they are going to keep the adults opinion about Ender in.
The final battle is going to have to be CG with ships that look like ships, and will cut back to Ender in the cube, watching on a screen. The final explosion will hopefully be awesome.
There's a lot of subtleness behind the children's nakedness... Garden of Eden imagery and all.
I almost feel like they are going to have to raise the ages and take out both fights. The Bonzo one especially. Ender will have to have another sort of killer instinct test...
I don't think this movie can be made successfully. I want it to be good, but there are too many crucial plot elements that won't translate to the screen.

Absolutely agreed. Ender's Game is a very "psychological" type of book, which is all about what's going on inside Ender's head. Any script that fails to show that (and not in a blunt way with just a voice over) will fail miserably. I'd even venture to say that Ender's Game is probably harder to make into a movie than most books - eg. Lord of the Rings, being an epic, was much easier. Harry Potter, similarly, is comparatively easy. Most Phil K Dick books/movies were also much more action-based.

Daniel

If Warner had their way, I would have to guess that they would like to see it cut out entirely, or have Ender not kill them. But I doubt that Orson Scott Card will let that happen. One of the reasons that Ender is ultimately chosen is that when he has to, he strikes without mercy and utterly destroys his opponent. There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.

They can't cut that without destroying the whole point of the story. Ender's a nice kid, very smart, and more or less wants to be left alone. But he's been manipulated from the day he was born by a government that wants to train him to personally command the extermination of an entire sentient species. You've got to show that not only is he being driven to react this way against threats, but that the authorities who are watching will never help him, and actually approve of his retaliation with lethal force.

If Ender just turns out to be surprisingly tough, but lets the bullies live... you've negated the character. Ender doesn't do mercy. If there's a serious threat to his safety, he destroys it totally by any means necessary. That's what they wanted. That's what they built.

If it isn't children in the movie, this entire thing will be a failure. The whole point of the book is the exploitation of innocence. A 16 year old is not innocent. Any actor who has gone through puberty or is STARTING puberty is not fit to play Ender Wiggin.

If Ender's Game were to be made as an anime, would Ender turn out looking a lot like Ikari Shinji?

Shinji, we recall, has been manipulated by his parents, by the government, by the Marduk Institute and by NERV, all in the cause of a vast secret project. He attends a school full of kids who are in the same position as he; all of them have been similarly manipulated, all are on Marduk's list, all are candidates for Evangelion pilots. Shinji has great difficulty relating meaningfully to any of them. He fights, reluctantly, causes enormous damage through little or no fault of his own, hospitalises one classmate, kills another, and gets some severe psychological problems as a result. Finally, some extremely weird shit goes down and an entire species turns into yellow goo.

I'm quite sure that Shinji, Asuka and Rei would fit right in in Ender's world.

Have you even read the book?

He invents prefectly evil enemies with no redeeming qualities. They are foils; fabricated devices for creating lots of guiltless Ender vs evil battles.

At the very end of the book, Ender communicates with the last remaining Hive Queen. He learns that the buggers were not the ravaging hordes earth thought them, but intelligent beings. He learns that the war between humans and the buggers occurred because the two races could not understand each other. He then writes the book that eventually turns himself into a genocidal monster in the eyes of the public.

If I remember right, in the end Ender gets to have his cake and eat it too. He gets to be the hero for defeating those nasty nasty bugs, but he gets to remain innocent because he didn't know he was committing genocide

Except that he condemns himself as a genocide, and turns the popular opinion of him towards that pole, so that eventually his name is as reviled as Hitler's. Part of the premise of the books is the concept of a perfect general: one who shows sufficient empathy to totally understand his enemy, but one also willing to totally exterminate what he has empathy for. The only way to pull off that combination is by the trickery used by Ender's superiors. Ender doesn't get to have his cake and eat it too - he spends the rest of his very long life atoning for his cake-eating.

Card is a Mormon. Mormons love to seperate people into "worthy" and "unworthy" categories. I know because my family is mormon.

It looks like someone has a bone to pick with the Mormon religion, and is attacking Ender's Game, not because of any particular lack of literary merit, but because it happens to have been penned by a Mormon.

I think there's plenty of action scenes in Ender's Game. There isn't that much introspection as some of you say, there's very little that can't be put on screen. The book has great potential for becoming a movie, but it all starts with a good screenplay and needs a good director and a good cast of several wonder kids.

I strongly believe it would make a groundshaking movie if only it was done right. Perhaps the book is not known much out of the geek circles because it is marked SciFi and many people avoid this literature genre out of principle. But if you could sit them down and see the story it would reach them just the same, because it's a damn good story.

Nonsense. In literature criticism, you need to put in intentions of the author in mind.

While plenty of readers have free-associated their way into believing that Ender's Game had a pacifist ideal, the fact of the reality is that Card, being the man he is, probably intended it to have the opposite meaning. The world of Ender in Card's eyes is not a dystopia as many readers have thought, but an utopia. The way the war is won at the end of the book, regardless of whatever remorse and respect for the enemy is felt, was how Card thought it should be fought - without diplomacy, without mercy, without belief in innocence, and to the ultimate end.

Let's not forget, the only way the cycle ends is by the creation of a new all powerful authority which would exert total dominance over all others. There's no anti-war message here. Wars are just means to an end - the eventual total consolidation of power.

Particular the whole issue of actors at that age. They will probably have to move the age to 12-16. Unfortunate,cuz it dilutes it a bit. OTOH it avoids the risk of the Cute Factor, and reduces people protesting the film because it shows violent young uns.

This is a controversial book. If they attempt to cater to the PC crowd they condemn it right from the start. The movie should be every bit as controversial as the book or it will fail horribly. The whole gist of the book is having small children as the main characters, if you take that out it's just another space adventure for teenagers.

I think Card started out as a playwright before switching to novels.

According to Robert McKee, [amazon.com] plays are natural venues for dialog, novels are natural venues for inner landscape (thoughts), while the screen needs a more visual approach.

Just because someone demonstrates expertise in both novel-writing and playwriting doesn't mean they can write a good screen play. (Though if I had to bet on whether someone can write a good first screen play I wouldn't hesitate to put my money on Card.)

first, Starship troopers wasn't by any means 'a blockbuster', lackluster acting - and poor box office performance assures that.

Second, Ender's Game is far from neo-facisim.

Look, its great that you live in a pacifist country like Britian *cough* FALKLANDS *cough*, but honestly - your commenting negativly about a book you never read, comparing it to ANOTHER book you never read, and lumping both into the 'propaganda for the U.S. war machine.' simply to make yourself feel better about .. well .. something.

You are talking about two books, BOTH written by soldiers, and both dealing with a lot of inner morality searching of the main characters. In both books, people constantly question the morality and need for war.

Perhapse you should get off your high horse, and actually sample them - before looking even more foolish with your off the cuff and uninformed opinions.

If you want to say 'war is bad', fine, just say it .. don't try to find hidden messages in books you have never read.

"I only hope the movie is as good a quality as the books and are of LotR quality adaption and not a HP quality adaption "

The last thing I want to see is a LotR-quality movie adaptation of a good book.

The Lord of the Rings movies are very good movies. The camera work, the special effects, the acting, the directing, are all very very good. The trouble is that they aren't good adaptations of the books. It is understandable that plot shortcuts need to be taken when adapting a book to a movie. It is also obvious that a movie can't contain all the dialog that a book can. The time restrictions of a 2 (or 4) hour movie simply don't allow it to contain all that is in a well-written 300 page book.

What the movie format does allow, and is very good at, is developing characters. The tragedy of the Lord of the Rings movies is that the characters were largely mangled beyond recognition. Many of them, if it weren't for the coincidences of name, race and costumes, would have been unrecognizable as the characters in the books. (IMO the hobbit characters were handled the best.)

As I remember, Ender did not want to kill bonzo. In fact, Ender didn't even know that he had.

He didn't intend to kill per se, he intended to hurt Bonzo sufficiently that he would never again be a threat. He intended to leave no possibility that Bonzo would go away, lick his wounds and come back for another go. So, he didn't actually intend murder, but he certainly intended to use far more force than was necessary merely for immediate self-defence.

Whether dead, incapacitated, or just terrified to ever go near Ender again, Bonzo would have been destroyed as a threat. That was Ender's goal in every conflict with such people.

The reason it's so vital to the plot to have Ender get picked on and retaliate beyond all possible reason (it's a tribute to Card's writing chops that we don't notice that the murders of Stilson and Bonzo are, well, kinda psychopathic) is that it's an adolescent revenge fantasy, with its dials all cranked to eleven.

Consider that a kid who seldom fights and is smaller than his opponents invariably manages to beat them to death. He conquers every obstacle before him, commits murder and genocide, and yet is the object of the book's compassion. Who wouldn't want to be an ultraviolent martyr like that?

Indeed, I think the angsty eighth-grader audience will be key for this movie, as well as every maladjusted geek who never got over getting picked on in high school and wishes he could go Columbine on the folks who made him miserable back in the day.

Or in other words, Evangelion ripped off "Ender's Game" in anime form.

Harry Potter, similarly, is comparatively easy.

Funny you should say that, as the Harry Potter series is what convinced Card to give Hollywood another go at it. Before that he was convinced that it's just impossible to get enough good child actors to pull it off as live action.

So...do you folks suggest that the ending be glossed over as well? After all, an entire planet of beings is destroyed, and surely you don't want the kids to see a genocide if you're going to pretend the homicide didn't happen. I don't want that kind of compromise.

George Lucas showed us all the complete destruction of a populated planet in 1977. Alderaan was full of innocents - it had nothing whatever to do with the Rebel Alliance - but it was destroyed nonetheless.

Were we traumatised? No. We don't see the faces of anyone on Alderaan, we don't see them dying, we see no pain for anybody at all except Leia's as she watches, and Obi-Wan's as he feels a great disturbance in the Force.

However, what if instead of showing the Death Star blowing away Alderaan, we'd seen Vader slapping Leia about the cell, trying to physically brutalise her into telling him the location of the Rebel base? Suppose we'd heard a THX-enhanced crunch as the Sith Lord's black-gloved metal fist smashed the Princess's pretty nose to splinters? THAT would have upset us. That would have earned Star Wars a pretty high rating.

One-on-one physical violence upsets people. The bloodless eradication of millions that we don't have to face does not. It's why Hitler switched from SS firing squads to gas chambers - it upset his troops less that way. Same here. Nobody will mind the destruction of the bugger homeworld, but they may well object to Ender's habit of barehanded manslaughter.

I hope I won't get screamed at here for not reading the above comments, but I don't have time to read 25 comments right now and want to say this.

Remember that we never knew the kids died until the very end of the book, and it is that revelation that reveals to us Ender's key qualities and the criteria by which he was chosen.

This means that you don't have to show the depth of violence that we imagine existed during each of the two fights, becuase the point is that we are not supposed to realize he is a killer until the very end, and that shock is a critical part of the story.

I think this can be done without an R rating.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I'm sure I wouldn't agree with everything that came out of his mouth, but I can say that about anybody.

So he doesn't like gays? His reasons seem valid enough -- by which I mean they seem to be, at least, intellectually consistent. What's more, I see no evidence that he's ever voted to put anybody into "reeducation camps" or something. Is it not possible to be tolerant but still hold an opinion of your own? I mean, that's kind of the definition of tolerance, isn't it? If you believed in something wholeheartedly you wouldn't have to "tolerate" it.

Seriously, I don't get why some people seem to hate this guy so much. So he's a Mormon. It's cool to not like people just because they're Mormons, but it's not cool for Card to be down on homosexuality?