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Part of Ender's Game Script Posted
SilentJason writes "Orson Scott Card posted a few of the pages from the Ender's Game script onto the web. He changed some material, as to be expected, like the buggers becoming Formics, as well as cutting the fight between Ender and Stilson. I first saw this on Ain't It Cool News, reported by Cassius the Evil. You can read the script at Fresco Pictures. "
Silly Sci-Fi Gear: The script stumbles immediately by calling for everyone on the bridge to be wearing computers. While this may be realistic, its hard to take military guys dressed like McD's employees very seriously. With movies, its really important to project the right image. This can be done -- take the Marines in Aliens for example. They used tech -- IR, trackers, cameras, etc -- but they also used Big Guns, bad-ass body armor and a gung-ho attitude.
Of course, these being naval guys, the best way to make them bad-ass is by making them British (consider the change in the Imperials from Star Wars to Empire). Even the British, however, will look silly with McDonald's headsets on.
Lousy scripting: Woolies? You expect people to be scared of aliens nicknamed "Woolies"? You gotta be kidding; how do you expect people to take a threat named after long underwear seriously? Additionally, a lot of the script reads poorly; just pick a section of lines and try saying them. Finally, they try to establish Mazer as cool the wrong way -- you need a valient charge into the enemy fleet, diving through swarms of lasers and missiles and enemy ships, attacking the Queen's ship in what would otherwise be a suicide mission. Instead, they shoot a missile from around a moon. Right.
Think about The Hunt for Red October. When did Ramius seem like a naval genius? When they said he was a genius? Or when he risked ramming the Neptune Massive and avoided the torpeado through sheer intuition (while the rest of the crew sh*t themselves)?
The training room won't work: Simply, the training room scenes described in the book just won't work on film. Besides the technical challenges, the action will have to be simplified too much to be really meaningful. Its simply a matter of not translating from book to screen (unless we get some brilliant writing to make up for it, which I haven't seen).
Too much attention to detail: This is a toughie. I mean, that moron at the Sci-Fi convention who insists that the X-Wings in Star Wars shouldn't have made noise is correct in that sound doesn't conduct in space. However, there's a *reason* that Lucas had the space fighters make noise: it would have been lousy without it. Experience tells us that explosions and fighters and war make noise. It'll look odd without it, technically correct or not. These are the sorts of concessions you make for a decent film.
The only thing that might save this film is a kick-ass job on the director's part. A good director can make up for a multitude of sins by altering the script or coming up with original ways of showing things. Still, I also doubt that will happen in this case.
I'd hate to see Ender's Game turn into a Wing Commander-quality movie.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
However, I may be overconvcerned about this. I'm more worried that they add tons of space-battle footage (since this *is* a story about humans vs aliens) at to make the film be what was expected for the general audience rather than those familar with the book. If the latter is true, there should be almost no space shots in this, maybe a docking scene, but that's it. No battles, no nothing.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I find it hard to complain about an author that has written several of my favorite books, all quite different. Ender's Game, Songmaster, Speaker for the Dead, Wyrms, Seventh Son, Pastwatch, and Treasure Box. I have disliked a few as well: Xenocide, Folk of the Fringe, and Prentice Alvin, but great artists have great works and secondary works (i.e. works that I like and works that I don't).
I think the charge of retelling the same story is a weak one. Card has written better in more genres than any author I have read (Suspense, Sci-fi, historical fiction, Fantasy). In fact when he has explicitly retold a story, as in Ender's Shadow or his novelization of The Abyss, it is with fresh insights that enriched my experience of the original.
Indeed variations on a theme is an honored tradition in art. Does anyone think Van Gogh drew too many sunflowers, or that Austen wrote too many novels about romance among the landed elite? (Bonus points if you find published expressions of these opinions, which no doubt exist.)
In short, to dislike his books or particularily his series is quite fair. To challenge his artisitic integrity because of this, is not.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
Bean is supposed to be younger and smaller than Ender. I don't know if they could fudge that one, especially if they wanted to make an Ender's Shadow movie.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
I can't get the script to work. I've tried everything! I downloaded it from the site, and named it 'ender' in my home directory. ./ender: Permission denied'
I typed 'ender' and it said 'bash: ender: command not found'
So I realized . wasn't in my $PATH, so I typed './ender' and it said 'bash:
So I typed 'chmod 700 ender', ran it again and it said './ender: EXT: command not found'
So I opened up the file and added a #! before EXT, thinking that EXT might be the shell it needs, but I don't have EXT installed on my system.
So my questions are:
a) What is this EXT shell that the script was written in?
b) How can I get this script to run under Linux?
c) What does this script do?
Maybe I'll just stick to compiled languages, scripting languages seem like more pain than their worth!
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Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I loved Ender's Game. And Loved it the way it was orginally. Buggers becomming something else? How else would it Ender's game be unique? and the brutal murder of that fat kid being taken out?! I dont believe that.. that was one of the msot deeply emotional bits of the whole story, the realization at the end the way he mirroed it by killing the other kid.. truly unique piece of writing, I wish it would remain as it was. Bean is my hero btw! So is ender.. but ender was almost robotic..
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He has this attitude, "If it was worth selling once, it is worth selling twice."
:-)
Many times he has written essentially the same story and sold it as a short story and a novella, or as a novella and a novel. The story is usually pretty good, but reading the second version always leaves me with this irritating deja vu since I know that I have read this before, but I know it wasn't quite this...so I re-read the whole story but I am irritated all the way through.
OK, so turning a book into a movie is standard, but it is too close to a habit of his that eventually made me stop reading him.
Now if only Steven Brust will come out with another few stories...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I am criticizing Card, not for being a good author, but for failing to clearly draw a line in the sand when a work is done. I see other authors writing similar stories (eg Zelazny) but no matter how clearly the characters are essentially repeats, the story itself is different.
Card is the only one that I know of who publishes the same exact story, same people, places, and plot, several times. And for me personally the result is incredibly frustrating to read.
Incidentally I mentioned Brust as an extreme counter-example. Brust plays games with his stories, so much so that frequently you would swear that his stories are written by different authors!
Also the games are themselves interesting. Remember that deja vu that I complain about from Card? Read To Reign in Hell from Brust. There is about a page-and-a-half in there that is repeated. Exactly. It isn't a mistake, it was a deliberate way to emphasize that a small confrontation near the beginning of the story is the same as the major war at the climax. Did I get irritated? You bet! So irritated that I went back and verified that it was a word-for-word repeat, then I read the lead-in to each section and verified that it was deliberate.
You see, Brust understood how irritating deja vu can be, and so used it for an artistic device. Card does not and so has permanently irritated me. Which is why I will read Brust instead of Card any time I can...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I would say that film and books are two different media with different properties, and when a film version of a novel fails, it's likely because the filmmaker is not properly taking advantage of the medium.
I can think of two examples of films when stand very well in their own right apart from the books upon which they're based: Contact and Blade Runner. Both films knew just what to chanage to take advantage of the things that film does well (visuals, mood, and emotion) and drop the things which film does not do so well at (detailed debate and internal thoughts).
Both films I believe produce something which is very distinctive. Are they better than their novels? They're different. They're just as good, in a different way. (Well, actually I liked Contact the film better than the novel, personally.)
Film versions of books CAN be done well.
(Sorry about the alliteration...)
Kubrick had the scenes of spaceships (and on the moon) silent, and nobody complained. (OK, he had all those "atmospheric" classical music pieces playing...) I don't think anybody has ever said "2001" wasn't a "decent" film.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
I'm glad Jake Lloyd will be playing Ender. I was afraid that his being in Phantom Menace would ruin the careeer of someone who obviously has some talent.
I guess I shouldn't have worried too much -- after all, Harrison Ford managed to live down being cast as Han Solo. (True, Hamill didn't survive being Skywalker ... but I'm not sure that much was lost in that case.)
Yup. There were clear signs of talent in his performance in Phantom Menace. Granted, given the lame script and even lamer direction of that movie, those signs may have been hard for some people to see. But they were there. Hopefully they'll get a better showing in Ender's Game.
>Or do you just not trust the production team?
I think this is probably the sticking point for most people. It certainly is for me.
>But has Card any screenplay experience?
Abyss. The book is worth the read too. It was written at the same time the movie was being filmed and written. The book was necessary for the movie, and the movie formed the book. A very interesting synergy. I'd like to see more projects of this nature. BTW, after the book, the movie ending actually makes sense.
-matt
Hi Orson,
Thanks for dropping by to chat with us. It's nice to be able to interact with you personally as well as be transported and carried away by your stories. Are there other forums where you do this as well?
[And before somebody chimes in with 'it's in his own best interests to do so', so what? The same could be said for many other stories/discussions here where the people concerned can't be bothered to participate or don't want to weather the inevitable flames and snide digs. I don't blame them, and when somebody does decide to enter the fray anyway, I think they deserve recognition.]
cheers,
-matt
When Graff says "Who stopped the formics when they invaded fifty years ago?" it should be "sixty years ago" if you add the "50 years later" and "ten years later" notices.
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grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Orson,
I have been always curious to ask you if you ever drew any of the social dynamics of _Ender's Game_ from _Lord of the Flys_ by by William Golding? For me, your books have taught as much about human behaviour as any sociology or psychology book; at least within the context of the personalities presented in the plot.
I really do think it is too bad that Peter Brook (Who directed the original _Lord of the Flys_ movie) isn't around to direct this film.
-AP
P.S. Come to think of it, have you ever considered using the sociological behaviour patterns of the average SlashDot user as the premise for a book? :)
Speaking of SlashDot, howabout a SlashDot interview!
Write Malda and set that one up!
I got the impression from the script excerpt posted that Card was doing his best to keep most of the brutality intact (I don't really like the fact that the fight with Stilson has been dropped, but there are other chances to keep the themes alive). I think Card has the integrity to make a true-to-theme movie or none at all. You're absolutely right - a Disnified movie would be a disaster, but I don't think he would allow that to happen.
Hollywood can get away with making this movie as long as they're very careful to market it to adults and not children... It'll be difficult to keep a movie starring mostly kids from looking like a kids' movie in a trailer, but it can certainly be done. And I don't think anyone who goes for this script will be dumb enough to try to bring in young audiences with it.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
I didn't know about it, so it's news to me. If you knew about it, good for you. Let those who had no idea learn the facts too, okay?
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Somehow I feel that Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide wouldn't make a good movie.
:) Card sounds like he's cut the non-action stuff out for the picture.
While I'm not sure that I like it, Hollywood seems to have come to the conclusion that a sci-fi movie = an action movie. Those two stories are pretty darn far from action movies.
Ender's Game is nearly an action movie already. There's stuff blowing up other stuff, which is all an action movie requires.
Ahh well.. Just rambling..
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I really don't care if Lloyd plays ender, just as long as he does it right. one of my main fears is that Ender's Game will be toned down for a kids audience because it has kids in it. The plot is so much deeper then TPM. You would think OSC would see it as an affront to his own beliefs to not make this movie good. Was his intented audience for the original novel children?
He mentioned that high quality children actors are hard to find, this makes sense, just consider that Lloyd was the best choice out of thousands for TPM.
So with that in mind wouldn't it be cool if some producer went out on a limb and decided to make this all CG? we have gotten to the point where emotions can be conveyed through CG. I imagine that the battles would pose a problem to any director, and CG would be an obvious solution. So why not make the whole movie CG? it would provide a solution to having to find good child actors; you can just create them.
anway, just my lousy 2 cents.
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Blade Runner.
Dune. Narration almost always gets in the way. If you need narration in turning a book to a movie, either you're doing it wrong, or the movie should not be made.
--The basis of all love is respect
2001 did quite well for its time with rotating sets and all. Note the flight attendents in this movie. They either were directed well in doing "velcro-walking" (pretending that velcro, not gravity, held their feet to the floor), or they were actually wearing velcro.
Even more interesting: those ugly hats they were wearing. As near as I can tell, this got around the issue of long hair, which doesn't fall nicely to the shoulders in zero-G. Today, the real way to handle this might be to "scrub" and computer-animate all long hair in post-production. Since this is expensive, one may cheat by making short hair the fashion for all characters in zero-G. This may not be too unrealistic--do you want long, flowing hair where it can float into your face? Kubrick couldn't do this because women just didn't have short hair in those days--it would freak people out. But now we have Ripley and Sinead!
--The basis of all love is respect
hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to pain and pain leads to excessive quoting of popular science fiction characters.
dave
Take a look at the other books (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind). Ender's Game was rather juvenile, but the other three were definitely not. I can't speak for Ender's Shadow (I just started reading it), but I certainly enjoyed the first four. Card definitely takes a look at some interesting subjects in Speaker, Xenocide, and Children - further, they're not shoot-em-up action books like EG.
Correction: I misposted the link to the LOTR page. I gave a fan page. Apparently, this is the official one. Sorry about that. It's very hard to read with lynx, however. :-(
"Websters" is hardly the end-all and be-all of whether something constitutes a `word' or not. Most of us laugh at "Websters", you know. The OED is a good starting place, much better than any old "Websters" silliness, but even that isn't absolute. Words aren't what you think they are. They derive from many sources, and anyone, especially a native speaker, has full licence to invent new ones.
In this case, however, I did not. In fact, the word in question has seen use for around twenty-four centuries at least, and probably more. I suppose you'd try to tell me that fajitas and quedadillas "weren't words" either, just because "Websters" was ignorant of them.
Furthermore, "Websters" is not a well-defined term. Any one can publish a "Websters". And many people have. And most of them are crap.
Most importantly, I already posted a reference in this thread which, if one were to follow the link, would in graphic and offensive detail explain precisely what the word means, and why. Today, I choose not to violate the delicate sensibilities of the gentle readership of this august forum by printing verbatim such foul material as to be found in that link. Kindly respect that position. Here's another such link that the prurient may read if they're interested.
The alleged connection to pædophile is suspect at best, since the pædo- stem did not appear in pedicator. Circa 110 AD, Suetonius wrote in De Vita Caesarum, Divus Iulius (The Lives of the Caesars, The Deified Julius), citing the earlier C. Licinius Calvus, the following: Bithynia quicquid et pedicator Caesaris umquam habuit.
I don't see why pedicator would be related to pedometer or pedology. I think you're confused pæd- (often written paed-) and ped-. The prevalent America spelling of pædophile as pedophile not only confuses those of us accustomed to and reliant upon proper stemming, it probably also annoys the pedestrians and podiatrists, with the only folks happy with the confusion being the pædogogues. :-)
And I'll check now...
Nope, no mention of Formics. It's all from a kid's perspective. "Formics" is a very adult word. Of course, Ender has the brains of a grown-up kid.
I do hope that the Stilson thing remains. It's disturbing but crucial, after all. Kids kill.
Oh, God, I hope no one makes an Ender-Columbine connection and boycotts the movie...
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Don't get too mad at Mr Coward; "Anonymous Coward" is a catch-all name for anyone who posts anonymously. It took me a while to figure that out too. The various cretins who've been lobbing mudballs at you and your work under that name are each discrete entities, most of them barely literate. While certainly your books are worthy of some criticism, the thick-skulled posts of the Anonymous Cowards rarely qualify as such.
While I have your attention, let me say that I've been an ardent admirer of your work since the early eighties, "Maps in a Mirror" is my favourite anthology besides my Arthur Clarke omnibus, and "Unaccompanied Sonata" is the most beautiful SF story I've ever read; I come back to it again and again. Thank you, Mr Card.
He wrote a novelisation of the movie. The resulting novel, of course, was far better than the film.
Someday someone will write a script about slashdot not posting an article about Card or Ender's game for an entire week. Scary, I know.
Bugger means sodomy in many contexts.
And I think you meant pedophile.
as well as cutting the fight between Ender and Stilson.
I hope this doesn't mean that changed the death of that boy. It's tragic when they neuter strong writing (think Lord Of the Flies).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
then you put in a couple of gratuitous breast shots so the film has an R
:)
In Australia, it often works the other way. A few tits & ass are OK but lots of graphic violence gets an R rating. Many movies that are PG in the USA get R down here due to the amount of violence. (Predator 2 for instance).
It's always amazed me that violence is OK to censors in the USA but sex is not. Oh well, descended from Puritans vs descended from convicts, I guess
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Expect two more books in the Alvin Maker series: Crystal City and Master Alvin
:-) )
:)
Very cool--just finished Heartfire before the holidays and was wondering what was next.
"And if you don't know that Alvin is really Joseph Smith and Arthur Steward is really Brigham Young and that they're going to...(forget the whole quote), then You Haven't Been Paying Attention!" (I never noticed the parallels between the two, personally...
I knew that Card grew up as a Mormon, and that had some influence in the Alvin Maker series--but I wouldn't have known enough about the Book of Mormon to make the connection either
Warning: Topic Drift
Occasionally I see someone mention the Alvin Maker series here on Slashdot, but not so often as books that are "more sci-fi-ish." I stumbled on Seventh Son by accident--almost literally. I found the book lying under a pile of computer junk in my apartment and have no idea where it came from. I read the whole series so far within the last 3 months--and I definately see a message for the open source community. There are tons of parallels; Alvin, Verily, the crystal city, the golden plow...RMS, ESR, the Internet, the GPL. Hmm, GPL, Golden PLow. Just noticed that... My point is this: if you like Orson Card but don't like to stray to far from sci-fi, you still may want to give this series a chance. If you read fantasy, then you'll probably like it anyway.
numb
-dvorsd
"Formics" did not occur in Ender's Game. But as I sat with Lynn Hendee, one of the producing partners on Ender's Game, watching Starship Troopers in order to see how much damage that film was going to do to Ender's Game, we realized that it had the potential to hurt us in only one way: If we used the term "buggers," someone might think of "bugs" and remember the ludicrous "brain bug" scene in S-Troop and start laughing uncontrollably at an inappropriate moment in Ender's Game. So we changed the name in the script, and I "previewed" the name change in Ender's Shadow. The look of the buggers will also be changed - insectoid in general body structure, but radically different from the aliens in S-Troop.
...
Apart from that, the only thing we discovered in watching S-Troop is how deeply dumb Hollywood filmmakers can sometimes be. Here you have a film whose storyline is so lame that only a twelve-year-old could like it enough to see it twice - and then you put in a couple of gratuitous breast shots so the film has an R and those twelve-year-olds can't see it in the theaters! Needless to say, those of us making Ender's Game will make very sure that it has a rating that will allow its ENTIRE audience to attend
- Orson Scott Card
The reason I refused to consider animation was that, despite the passions of those who love animation, until recently I had never seen animation that could express human emotion at all. Stories that are event-driven work well in animation, but character-driven stories don't - a fact well known in the industry, even if animation fans often don't understand it.
However, there recently has been one animated film that finally broke the "character barrier": Iron Giant. Genuinely witty writing was joined with art that actually made the faces expressive and brought animation to a point where at least a few nuances of expression could be shown. Maybe this was achievable all along, but the point is, few tried. So, with the right team, an animated Ender's Game might be do-able.
Right now, though, we remain committed to the live-action version.
- Orson Scott Card
"Formics" is the formal name for the aliens, "bugger" is common slang. This is clear in Ender's Shadow (worth reading BTW) but I can't remember if it is in Ender's Game.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
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Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if pedication weren't precisely the connotation that Card intended. You were not supposed to identify with or in any way like the Buggers.
Aren't the two media of books and film fundamentaly different? Do you think there's something about Ender that specifically does not lend itself to a movie format? Or do you just not trust the production team? I think Ender is feasible, although don't know how it will work out. Certainly having Card write the screenplay means that no one will be able to say that it was contrary to the author's wishes. But has Card any screenplay experience?
Which books have successfully translated into movies? Which have failed? What do you think the cause was? I believe that no single cause exists. Consider Dune as movie and book. I don't think many people were very happy with the movie. I don't think it was the actors, but the time allotment. Can Ender be told in the 2½ hours allotted? Is there too much internal dialogue for it to work out, or is there enough action?
A more important movie coming up for next Christmas (or the following one) is the first of three installments to The Lord of the Rings. Details are at the The Lord of the Rings movie page, with casting photos and FAQs/gossip available as well, plus an IMDB entry. In this case, it's not going to be too short the way Dune was, since it's going to be three movies. I don't know that even Card dreams of doing the whole Ender quartet as movies. I hope not.
"That little brat"? I've met Jake, and he's an exuberant, decent, unspoiled, extremely bright, very talented young man. I wonder why you would make such a personal comment about a child you haven't met.
Maybe the reason you didn't enjoy his performance in Fantum Mennis was that the writing was so awful. There IS no actor who could have made those lines good. Given the right script and the right director, Jake can be astonishingly good.
However, no one has been cast because there is no director in place and no studio yet funding the film. By the time that happens, Jake will probably be too old to play the part. The kid from Sixth Sense already is too old.
But however the casting turns out, Jake Lloyd is a human being who has done nothing to harm you and does not deserve to be attacked personally in a public place where it is quite possible that he or his friends or family might see your message. The messages posted here might be electronic, but the people who read them aren't.
- Orson Scott Card
All full-length novels are too long for the screen, unless they've been seriously padded with extraneous writing. However, while length forced me to cut SOMETHING, I chose to cut the Peter&ValentineTakeOverTheWorld subplot because it is completely unfilmable - just a couple of kids typing - and hard to make believable without being able to use the novelist's tool of getting inside the characters' heads.
As to Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, they are all unfilmable in that they absolutely depend on knowing what characters and thinking and feeling from the inside. Most of what matters can't be visualized. So a film version of Speaker, for instance, would be a bunch of talking heads interrupted occasionally by unwatchable cruelty. Who wants a movie of that? Not me!
Most of my novels are unfilmable, except those written with film in mind (Homebody, Treasure Box, Ender's Shadow, Enchantment). A few older works would do well on screen (Treason, Wyrms, Hart's Hope) and we're exploring a film version of the Alvin Maker books. We're even attempting a version of Pastwatch - though fitting THAT into two hours is pretty hard, especially given how much has to be explained.
Print science fiction, at its best, is rarely translatable to film. Which is why film science fiction is rarely as "good" as the best print science fiction, and why sci-fi films so often focus on action. The costs of science fiction filming are so high that sci-fi films must appeal to a large audience in order to recoup the investment. When a sci-fi film can be done for much less - check out the astonishingly creative and clever "Being John Malkovich" for an example - then it can explore the much greater possibilities that are routinely exploited in written science fiction.
- Orson Scott Card
The script that I wrote this past summer and posted early this fall is a complete rewrite - the old script was thrown out and I went back to the book and started from scratch. The first script was from the adult point of view, trying to make it more fundable by not relying so heavily on child actors. That was a mistake, because the emotional heart of the story is the relationships among the children. So the first strategy was tossed, and this script is absolutely from the children's point of view. Works a lot better now.
I wish I could post the whole thing, because there are some cool surprises that I wish I could have included in a new edition of Ender's Game. But what the new script definitely is NOT is "essentially the same" as the previous one. And the reaction of Hollywood makes that clear - this script is working, and it's now only a matter of time, I think, before we get the package put together and the film under way.
- Orson Scott Card
But, I am looking forward to it nevertheless. I hope it remains true to form. They *must* do the war room properly. Most of the game plot hinges on it. I don't know how they're going to make it look Zero G'ish realistically, but I'd like to see! Either way, I suggest reading the book... it took me 8 hours to wax it off - 6 hours more is very little to pay for books instead of movies. Just my advice...
Ender's Game is about the cruelty of humanity, (specifically children on children). Make no mistake, this is no children's movie, Ender is a murderer. Taking that out of the movie will be changing the whole nature of the story, making it less than what it is. What Hollywood studio would have the balls to show one 7yr old murdering another? Unfortunately none of them, and thus the whole story is ruined. I generally am not a big fan of violence in movies (can't stand the bang-bang shoot 'em ups anymore), but in this case the violence is necessary; intregal to the story. Mr. Card puts up an excellent case against violence by showing just how brutal real violence can be. What a shame the full extent of it won't be preserved for the big screen.
Back in September, my wife and I attended a book signing for Orson Scott Card in Virginia, and I took copious notes on my Pilot, but never posted them. He spent about an hour talking about the movie, his books, etc.
Rather than trying to re-write my notes, I'm just going to paste them in here and do some quick abbrev expansions, etc.. Hopefully, they'll still make sense. :-)
Ender's Game Movie
Some other stuff
That's about all I have...if you ever get a chance to see him, I recommend it highly -- he was a funny, intelligent, engaging speaker and answered all questions fully (and sometimes got on a soapbox, but he put pretty clear disclaimers around those self-described diatribes...)
-david.