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| Ender's Game by fabio 10/10/2014, 9:50pm PDT | ||||
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| A novel of already questionable value gets an even worse movie adaptation.
So I realize they had to cut a lot of stuff. What they chose to cut and what they chose to keep though was insane. They end up keeping a bunch of shit where its only purpose was in supporting a single moment at the climax and they fucked up the climax! First, the only good decision they made: cutting his brother's plot to take over the world with message board posts. The bad that they keep: All the shit with his sister. They start him out at a military academy instead of school. They cut out his brother's plot. Why not cut his family entirely and start him off training? They had already bumped up the screentime of the chick in battle school who practically takes over the role of his sister, so why keep the sister at all? That stupid adventure video game. It sucked in the novel where its only point was redundant symbolism and they kept it in a movie that needed to cut a ton of shit. The necessary stuff that they cut: Holy SHIT they butchered the only remotely interesting thing about the book: coming up with the different strategies in the simulations. How does Ender think outside the box? How does he train his squad to think different on their own? How his strategies change the nature of the game and force everyone to adapt? How the game becomes stacked against him with surprise rules he has to overcome? Nope! Zip! The very first battle he comes up with the brilliant strategy of grabbing 2 guns to go all Equilibrium, spinning around perfectly sniping dozens of tangos. Takes command of his own squad. Immediately skip to leaderboard showing his squad reach #1. Immediately skip to the final battle where Bean flying around on a safety line comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. Off to command the fleet. There's one small line thrown in there about Ben Kingsley controlling the simulation, but not for one second do you believe that it's a simulation. Every battle is shown in full CGI glory...sort of. Mostly you just see closeups of the kids as they shout out technobabble and wave their arms around holographic tablet displays; the battles just sort of happen in background behind all that. No tactics. No sense of what's going on. It's actually worse than the dull chaotic opening space battle to Revenge of the Sith. They couldn't even give Ender a mini map showing a bunch of red and blue triangles? Not even a first battle. They go right into a technobabble montage then straight to the final battle. Shit they changed for no reason: The Bugger (called "Formics" here for god knows what reason) invasion wasn't stopped in a space battle, but by jet fighters on Earth straight out of Independence Day. Mazer Rackham is talked about as the brilliant commander who saved them, but all he did was kamikaze his crippled jet into the mothership. In the book, nobody knew how the outmatched human fleet defeated the aliens. In the movie, it's still presented as a mystery, but the publicly available footage of the battle that took place on Earth shows the one and only mothership exploding. Another unknown mystery was the knowledge that killing the queen disabled the drones, but the whole thing took place on Earth and the "classified" footage shows tens of thousands of alien fighters fall to earth after the mothership blows up. How was that kept a secret? They changed that part of the plot so that it made no sense, robbed it of any kind of twist, all so they could recreate Independence Day over a space battle. Missing the entire point: Literally every other scene of the movie is Harrison Ford being all dour and explaining to another character how Ender has to be sad and put upon all the time so that he never thinks help is coming. All the strategy details cut out and glossed over, and they felt they needed 20 scenes of Ford saying this exact same thing over and over. The included the shower fight scene, but left out the part where the commanders were watching it, ready to step in if Ender's life was in danger but not before to hammer home the idea that he has to finish everything himself. In the movie it's just a fight, followed by some child psychologist shouting that they shouldn't have left him alone. They missed the whole point. What they fucked up, what they REALLY fucked up, was the fact that every single one of those scenes in the book was supposed to build up to the climax at the final battle where Ender is presented with an impossible no win scenario. He has a paltry number of of the oldest crappiest ships against an uncountable alien fleet thousands of times larger than any battle before. The entire point of the Colonel riding him and forcing him to think he's alone was to condition Ender to not quit in this scenario. How is it handled in the movie? He has the entire best of their fleet at his command versus...a single enemy carrier. He freezes up just like the book but it makes no sense when it's just a single ship, less than the previous technobabble montages. He regains composure and blows it up before going to another technobabble closeup battle where the aliens are "swarming" but they never show enough of it to give you any idea of them being outmatched. Show detailed CGI of the alien planet being destroyed. The picture goes dark. Everyone cheers at winning the "simulation". The picture comes back with the TWIST of...the exact same CGI of the destroyed alien planet. YOU MEAN THIS WAS ALL REAL?!!! *gasp* I'm not sure but it might have been intentional genius to have the kid playing Ender portrayed as a child version of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. |
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Ender's Game by 10/10/2014, 9:50pm PDT  Re: Ender's Game by 10/10/2014, 11:05pm PDT The other question brought up by Star Trek and Nemesis by 10/11/2014, 12:40pm PDT Damage is based not on the object's mass and velocity, but rather its gravitas. by 10/11/2014, 2:21pm PDT No one will ever top the Daedalus Maneuver. ~__~ NT by 10/11/2014, 3:17pm PDT It's a kid's movie. NT by 10/11/2014, 8:31pm PDT The Mentos of Movie Apologia NT by 10/12/2014, 7:18am PDT |
