I will start with something of my perspective - where I am coming from as I write this review.
I read Ender's Game first when I was 12 - the book was passing through my house and I also devoured it and its sequel quickly. I gave the book a rest until I was 15 when I decided to write a 13 page paper on the book for one of my english classes. Since then I have read it and its sequels almost yearly with some exceptions to the point where I have read the book 8 or 9 times. I can't remember. I say this so you know that I'm quite familiar with book itself and love it dearly. It speaks to me in a way no movie ever could at its very best.
I will also tell you that I know something of screenplay writing. For those of you who know me, that shouldn't come as a great surprise - I'm a writer first and foremost.
I remember learning that for screenplays, each page represents about a minute of time on the screen. The novel Ender's Game is ~360 pages, which would convert to 6 hours on screen except for the fact that the format for screenplays is not as packed as the format of a book, so each screenplay page contains less than would its book counterpart. I say this so you realize that there is no way a movie designed to have a certain time limit could ever contain everything the book does.
With that lengthy preface, I'll say simply that I liked the movie, I just with it were longer. The movie begins and ends at roughly the same spot as the book. This is an impressive feat considering not only the time skips in the book, but the number of time skips the movie also had to do. It makes some decisions that movies have to make in order to not entirely lose the audience in its quick pace, but I understood those decisions and didn't mind. Not every character, not every scene, not every location can be shown - many of these items have to be combined to maintain coherency and the movie remained cohesive. Some drops were obvious (Locke and Demosthenes) some were not, but overall the surface story is there and I enjoyed it from beginning to end.
As I outlined in my review of the book, the inner thoughts are hard to get at in a movie, but I thought the lead actor did a good job of showing certain emotions and other thoughts were brought into the movie in other ways. So it wasn't as deep as I might've liked it, but it's certainly not a shallow movie either.
Now, here's what I wanted the whole movie through: space to breathe, time to think, pauses to consider.
The novel is incredibly deep and contains a multitude of ideas. Many of the ideas present in Card's novel are in the movie, but they come at such a quick pace it's hard to remember them all by the end. One excellent quote is said and before a second has passed to let me take it in, another character is already talking again and moving the story along.
Another thing I desperately wanted was time to know the characters better. Part of what makes the novel are the individual personalities and depth of character contained in each character. But in the movie there was barely any time to get to know the characters. Ender we got to know well, but not as well as I would have liked. Most of his complicated psychology is lost to us. Bean, Alai, Petra, and Dink I wanted to see more of to understand their loyalty to Ender and their perspectives. Even characters like Bonzo and Graff and Mazer I wanted to see more of to understand their deeper thoughts and motivations.
But let's be honest, I wanted more time with the Launchie group; I wanted more time in the battle rooms; I wanted more of the final simulations; I wanted more time at the end to digest what happens and how Ender moves on. But a movie in the theaters doesn't have time.
So here's my hope - I hope they release an extended DVD version. I enjoyed the movie because it took a book that's nigh impossible to do well as a movie and did a decent job of it. No childhood dreams or imaginations of mine were crushed and no liberties were taken that I couldn't handle. Not every lover of Ender's Game will agree with me (it certainly wasn't a perfect movie), but I thought it was a movie worth watching. Now I hope they create a version that gives us more to watch and space to consider what we are watching.
P.S. I still hold to my notion that I have no idea where they're going to go next if they want to make this a franchise. Ender's Game was impossible enough to make.
P.P.S. These are not all my thoughts on the movie, just the main ones I remember now before I go to sleep. Feel free to ask me questions about it or the novel.
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