I wrestled over this decision for a long time but I finally did go see Ender’s Game.  Let me preface this by saying that I disagree with Orson Scott Card on every stance he has taken regarding the rights of the LGBT community.  I find his musings about “urban gangs” to be not so very veiled racism, and it saddens me to see a man who has a platform using it to be so divisive and hateful.  Therefore I have not provided a link to Card’s website as I have with other folks in this post.  I don’t want to increase his readership.

I also reached the decision to attend after a long and thoughtful conversation with David Gerrold at a summer barbecue at Len Wein and Christine Valalda’s home back in July.  I didn’t want to do anything that might have shown support to Card’s offensive homophobic writings.  David pointed out that the amount of money Card was likely to receive was very small, and that if the movie failed we punished a lot of people who had nothing to do with Card’s positions.  It takes hundreds of people to make a movie.  They’re proud of the work they do and shouldn’t be punished because of the attitudes of the author of the underlying material.  He also said he thought this movie’s time had passed.  If it had been made in the 1990’s it would have had more relevance.  I later learned that Card received a flat fee for the rights to the book, and I realized that nothing I did would affect the inevitable uptick in the sales of his book.  I also realized it’s nomination season which meant that I, as a WGA member,  could screen this film.  I was also interested because years ago someone at Warner’s had asked how I would have approached adapting the book, and I was curious to see if the ultimate adaptation went in the direction I had contemplated.  (It didn’t, but more on that later.)

The writer and director wisely began by up-aging Ender.  Have a six or seven year old as your protagonist was a non-starter.  It’s rare to find a terrific kid actor — think Haley Joel Osment versus that kid who started in The Phantom Menace — now try to imagine an entire Battle School filled with 6 and 7 year old child actors.  It wouldn’t have been pretty.  I’m partial to Harrison Ford and thought he did a nice job as Colonel Graff, but I think the adapters missed the point with that characterm and he could have been deepened into a more interesting character.  This was fundamentally a book about child abuse, but in the film it seemed to become a movie about bullying and how to handle it.

As I write I find I can’t work up much passion about this movie, and I think it’s because David was right — It’s a story who’s time has passed.  Video games dominate our culture so the “shocking” ending that it wasn’t actually a game and that Ender has committed Xenocide has little punch in this day and age.  I did like the fact that the famous warrior who drove back the aliens years before has a line of dialogue that nods toward the sequel to Ender’s Game — Speaker for the Dead which for my money is the more powerful and meaningful book.

I watched the movie with my friend Brett who had never read the books, and we both had a sense of discontent about the film.  It wasn’t bad, it was just unsatisfying.  When I told him a bit about Speaker for the Dead we both realized that this movie was less of a fully realized film and more of a very long first act.  The interesting story is what happens after Ender goes wandering through the galaxy with an alien queen in his backpack.

So here’s how I would have adapted the film.  I don’t think the interesting characters are the kids.  I think the interesting characters are the adults, particularly Colonel Graff.  The adults knew what they were doing.  How they were essentially torturing kids to turn them into warriors which by any definition is a war crime.  How they were plotting the annihilation of an entire alien species using these children’s innocence and trust in the grownups in their lives.  If you’re not a psychopath or a sociopath that has to do something to a person.  In the book when Graff comes to Ender’s house he urges the boy “not to come” to Battle School.  It’s that flash of humanity, in a sense a man begging this boy to save the man from himself that I found interesting and powerful.  I wanted Graff’s story of the man who destroys his soul, and the lives of the children under his care to save his world.