Ender’s Game


Ender’s Game written by Orson Scott Card is a futuristically, fantasized novel about a young boy that the government believes is the key to stopping all future attacks with the Formics, also known as “buggers” on earth. It is perfectly written for any age audience above 13, but the movie was poorly thought out and missed a lot of important details. The movie also changes the appearance of some of the characters. The book described the characters very specifically but in the movie it seemed as if they ignored those characteristics.


It seemed as if in the book, the progression of the story took a couple of years as in in the movie it might have taken only a couple months. They are trying to keep the movie in at least 2 hours, but they could have put something in the movie to let us know that the storyline is taking years to get to the climax. In the beginning of the story Ender seemed to be the same age as the ending of the movie, unlike the story, Ender began at age 6. Asa Butterfield was a perfect choice to play the character Ender. He matched the personality and appearance very well. Asa could have, however, play Ender in the middle throughout the end of the movie and start of the movie with a younger boy to play Ender. Another discrepancy is the character for Bonzo, the leader of Salamander Army. In the book he described to be a big man, he’s ripped and easily mistaken for an adult. The movie presented him to be just a short kid, compared to the others, who looks intimidating and acts like an adult.

Some of the settings were not as I imagined either. For example, the battle-room in the book is described as a rectangular shaped room with zero gravity, and there were many of them. In the movie it showed a big spherical shaped room in the center of the whole school, and there was only one of them. To me I think that in this case the movie was better because of the settings. It gave more of a visual and understanding of where everything is and how everything looks. Now in the book, the battle-room has stars around the room, so people can take cover, however in the movie it didn’t look like stars, but it still matched the setting perfectly. The battle school itself looked the same as it was described except for the huge battle-room in the center of it.

Ender’s perception of things in the book and the movie is very similar. For example he thinks differently from other kids in battle school. His tactics are very different and more complex than any other student. He thinks differently and tries to think more concise to get a better plan to complete his simulations. In the beginning of the book and the movie, the government believes that he is the one to stop all future wars because they could see what Ender was seeing, and hear what he could hear too. On Earth they knew that he thought differently and he handled certain situations the way other wouldn’t. The connection between the movie and the book about Ender thought, and his whole personality was similar and I thought it was important to keep that connection, and they did.



I would say that the book was much better than the movie. The book explained more about each character, setting and plots very specifically and gave a lot of details that the movie did not cover. I strongly recommend that you read the book first and then watch the movie, that way you see how the book gave more details than the movie. Do not watch the movie first because then you won’t see that the book was much more interesting. Read Ender’s Game, it is a perfect read for anybody and it is a true page-turner.