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  1. This was appalling. Read the books. Acting is shallow, effects are the best of it. Storyline feels like they took the most "exciting" scenes and stitched them together – the siblings do not feature half as much as necessary, they and their story were a pivotal part of the novel. Not even going to go NEAR the butchered accent. WTF. 1/10 (I mean, the graphics deserve something right?)

  2. I would personally give this a 4/10, for poor acting, pacing, and negligence of the source material and major plot elements from the book. While the original story is indeed based primarily around the conflict that is centered upon in the film, large elements which give the book it's memorableness is cast away, leaving a weak motive and reason for choices made by the characters in the adaptation. The main element I am referring to is, of course, Valentine and Peter. Not only does Ender base a lot of his moral decisions upon the influence of his siblings, Peter and Valentine’s personality contribute heavily to Ender’s mental trauma. In the book, we see Valentine as the embodiment of morality within the three and Peter playing the analytical and logical side of the three, with Ender trying to find his place within the two extremes at his time in battle school. For Peter, the ends always outway the means, a frame of mind Ender is encouraged to exercise extensively at battle school. But due to his past history and hatred of Peter and his ways, Ender backs down after any display of this side, leaning on memories of Valentine to distance himself from Peter’s tactics and strengthen his resolve by his morals. This plays a critical role in the book, showing his psychological struggle at battle school paired alongside his physical trauma. In the film, Valentine’s role is glossed over, with Peter not making a SINGLE appearance, thus giving the audience little backstory or reason behind each action taken towards Ender and each action that Ender takes, ultimately giving the sense of an undeveloped MAIN CHARACTER and making it hard for us to actually support his decisions.

  3. Movies with child actors are generally cringe worthy, and there are plenty of scenes that will make you "Captain Picard, head in hands" but this is a decent effort, the battles were awesome and the World its set in seems pretty legit (aside from using rocket boosters/vertical liftoff to having a hyperdrive of some sort?), the special effects with the drones are awesome likewise the sense of scale (reminiscent of the old Macross anime)..

  4. Not sure why people like this movie. Maybe I needed to have read the novel in order to enjoy it, but it was pretty boring to me and I was just hoping that it would end soon. I understood that the sims were actually real battles, but the acting was very off putting.

  5. I keep reading that people felt the movie left out things from the book, but do they realize that it's an adaptation, meaning things will obviously be different from the source. The people behind the movie aren't gonna just cut and paste everything that happened in the book because a) it'd be waaay too long and b) why not just tell viewers to read the book? Going into the movie with no background or expectations, I found a deep, layered story with memorable main characters and a double-edged ending, which has me excited to see a sequel to this movie.

  6. Watched the film, while not completely horrible as an adaptation, it just zooms from scene to scene without any real character development or interaction. It skims over (Ender making friends for example), leaves out (his siblings entire arc), or down right ignores the book (Bean was a couple years younger than Ender and was not on the same launch group as Ender).

    By the way, I had 2 major issues with Bonzo. 1. It's pronounced "Bone-so" not "bonzo the clown". That was actually emphasized in the book. 2. Why the hell is Bonzo, a kid that is supposed to be a couple years older than Ender (and Ender often emphasized as a small kid) at the least, half his size?

  7. I thought the film had good idea, good setting and good plot but was let down hideously by the child actors and the written dialogue, then I found out it was based on a book which the idea, setting and plot all came from. 

    Also the Ender characters acting wasn't that good… he just couldn't do deep emotion 

  8. This movie does bring up a lot of controversial questions. I might add, that in the book, after winning the war, Ender is considered unfit to return home because of his training and sent to help colonize a world, where he communicates telepathically with a Queen egg & discovers that the attack on earth was an accident; they hadn't realized we were sentient! So turns out the genocide wasn't actually needed-just proper communication between species. Do the ends really justify the means? Should we act with extreme prejudice when we know almost nothing about our enemy?

  9. the only thing that truly irritated me was Petra. It annoyed me how Graff would talk about keeping isolated Ender is whats best when she is by his side a good majority after the time, like after he "fought" Bonzo, she was comforting him right after. Its contradictory.

    I hate how she was nothing like the book. In the movie, she was "sweet and soft spoken" (Hailee Steinfeld's words), when in the book, she has attitude shes a bad ass, it was mentioned in 1 of the books that she had to be genetically tested to make sure she wasn't a boy. Why? She was too aggressive. Sweet and soft spoken doesn't get you into battle school.

    Other than that, I thought the movie was alright. Got the main points down, the visuals were gorgeous. I didn't like expect it to be amazing and just like the book. Just expected it to at least entertaining and for Asa Butterfield to do Ender Wiggin some justice, which he did.

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