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More Delays for Ender Movie
Arramol writes "IGN reports that difficulties in hammering out a screenplay have resulted in more delays for the Ender's Game movie. Despite attempts by several teams of writers, no script has yet been written that meets necessary standards in the minds of Warner Brothers or author Orson Scott Card. The latest plan involves an entirely new script written by Card himself."
Seriously, a film version of Ender's Game is going to require some serious acting on the part of leads who haven't even hit puberty yet. The film doesn't need just one child prodigy to pull it off, but several. They were almost ready to film once before with Jake Lloyd (Anakin from The Phantom Menace and Card's personal choice) in the title role. The project fell apart because, with only his performance in The Phantom Menace to recommend him, Lloyd didn't appear to be a good enough actor. (Let's face it, even excellent actors like Liam Neeson, Ewan Macgregor, Natalie Portman all gave wooden and unconvincing performances under Lucas's direction, so maybe it's not all Lloyd's fault.) Even once they agree on a treatment for the book they're going to have to find the actors fast and film it fast. A delay of a year or two in pre-production is fine for most movies, but for Ender's Game the entire cast would literally outgrow their roles!
As a result of all this, I think live-action would involve too many compromises. This is one film that really would be better done as a cartoon or CG feature. Unfortunately, adult-oriented cartoons have not fared well with U.S. audiences, who seem to expect cute little anthropomorphic Disney sidekicks and musical numbers from anything drawn or rendered. Japan does not have this problem. If I were Orson Scott Card and I wanted to see Ender's Game done right, I'd flip Hollywood the bird and hop on a plane to the land of the rising sun.
Anyone who thinks that a mass market, big budget Ender's Game will turn out to be anything other than Pirates of the Space Caribbean: The Enemy's Gate is Down starring a bunch of 20-something "teen" actors culled from whatever the hell it is that kids are watching on TV these days, has no idea how Hollywood, and particularly the distribution chain, works.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
12-16 completley destroys the innocence of Ender's actions. Remember, he kills two kids.
The battleroom is the central focus of the children, battle school, the book. It was the reason EG was turned into a full novel. It has to be done exceedingly well. Sports movies with bad sports almost never work. This will hold true if the battle room isn't shot well, regardless of how little time is spent in there.
I forgot about the psych test, but it is hugely important if they are going to keep the adults opinion about Ender in.
The final battle is going to have to be CG with ships that look like ships, and will cut back to Ender in the cube, watching on a screen. The final explosion will hopefully be awesome.
There's a lot of subtleness behind the children's nakedness... Garden of Eden imagery and all.
I almost feel like they are going to have to raise the ages and take out both fights. The Bonzo one especially. Ender will have to have another sort of killer instinct test...
I don't think this movie can be made successfully. I want it to be good, but there are too many crucial plot elements that won't translate to the screen.
http://www.pterrys.com
Absolutely agreed. Ender's Game is a very "psychological" type of book, which is all about what's going on inside Ender's head. Any script that fails to show that (and not in a blunt way with just a voice over) will fail miserably. I'd even venture to say that Ender's Game is probably harder to make into a movie than most books - eg. Lord of the Rings, being an epic, was much easier. Harry Potter, similarly, is comparatively easy. Most Phil K Dick books/movies were also much more action-based.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
They can't cut that without destroying the whole point of the story. Ender's a nice kid, very smart, and more or less wants to be left alone. But he's been manipulated from the day he was born by a government that wants to train him to personally command the extermination of an entire sentient species. You've got to show that not only is he being driven to react this way against threats, but that the authorities who are watching will never help him, and actually approve of his retaliation with lethal force.
If Ender just turns out to be surprisingly tough, but lets the bullies live... you've negated the character. Ender doesn't do mercy. If there's a serious threat to his safety, he destroys it totally by any means necessary. That's what they wanted. That's what they built.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If it isn't children in the movie, this entire thing will be a failure. The whole point of the book is the exploitation of innocence. A 16 year old is not innocent. Any actor who has gone through puberty or is STARTING puberty is not fit to play Ender Wiggin.
http://www.pterrys.com
Shinji, we recall, has been manipulated by his parents, by the government, by the Marduk Institute and by NERV, all in the cause of a vast secret project. He attends a school full of kids who are in the same position as he; all of them have been similarly manipulated, all are on Marduk's list, all are candidates for Evangelion pilots. Shinji has great difficulty relating meaningfully to any of them. He fights, reluctantly, causes enormous damage through little or no fault of his own, hospitalises one classmate, kills another, and gets some severe psychological problems as a result. Finally, some extremely weird shit goes down and an entire species turns into yellow goo.
I'm quite sure that Shinji, Asuka and Rei would fit right in in Ender's world.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Have you even read the book?
He invents prefectly evil enemies with no redeeming qualities. They are foils; fabricated devices for creating lots of guiltless Ender vs evil battles.
At the very end of the book, Ender communicates with the last remaining Hive Queen. He learns that the buggers were not the ravaging hordes earth thought them, but intelligent beings. He learns that the war between humans and the buggers occurred because the two races could not understand each other. He then writes the book that eventually turns himself into a genocidal monster in the eyes of the public.
If I remember right, in the end Ender gets to have his cake and eat it too. He gets to be the hero for defeating those nasty nasty bugs, but he gets to remain innocent because he didn't know he was committing genocide
Except that he condemns himself as a genocide, and turns the popular opinion of him towards that pole, so that eventually his name is as reviled as Hitler's. Part of the premise of the books is the concept of a perfect general: one who shows sufficient empathy to totally understand his enemy, but one also willing to totally exterminate what he has empathy for. The only way to pull off that combination is by the trickery used by Ender's superiors. Ender doesn't get to have his cake and eat it too - he spends the rest of his very long life atoning for his cake-eating.
Card is a Mormon. Mormons love to seperate people into "worthy" and "unworthy" categories. I know because my family is mormon.
It looks like someone has a bone to pick with the Mormon religion, and is attacking Ender's Game, not because of any particular lack of literary merit, but because it happens to have been penned by a Mormon.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I think there's plenty of action scenes in Ender's Game. There isn't that much introspection as some of you say, there's very little that can't be put on screen. The book has great potential for becoming a movie, but it all starts with a good screenplay and needs a good director and a good cast of several wonder kids.
I strongly believe it would make a groundshaking movie if only it was done right. Perhaps the book is not known much out of the geek circles because it is marked SciFi and many people avoid this literature genre out of principle. But if you could sit them down and see the story it would reach them just the same, because it's a damn good story.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Nonsense. In literature criticism, you need to put in intentions of the author in mind.
While plenty of readers have free-associated their way into believing that Ender's Game had a pacifist ideal, the fact of the reality is that Card, being the man he is, probably intended it to have the opposite meaning. The world of Ender in Card's eyes is not a dystopia as many readers have thought, but an utopia. The way the war is won at the end of the book, regardless of whatever remorse and respect for the enemy is felt, was how Card thought it should be fought - without diplomacy, without mercy, without belief in innocence, and to the ultimate end.
Let's not forget, the only way the cycle ends is by the creation of a new all powerful authority which would exert total dominance over all others. There's no anti-war message here. Wars are just means to an end - the eventual total consolidation of power.
first, Starship troopers wasn't by any means 'a blockbuster', lackluster acting - and poor box office performance assures that.
.. well .. something.
.. don't try to find hidden messages in books you have never read.
Second, Ender's Game is far from neo-facisim.
Look, its great that you live in a pacifist country like Britian *cough* FALKLANDS *cough*, but honestly - your commenting negativly about a book you never read, comparing it to ANOTHER book you never read, and lumping both into the 'propaganda for the U.S. war machine.' simply to make yourself feel better about
You are talking about two books, BOTH written by soldiers, and both dealing with a lot of inner morality searching of the main characters. In both books, people constantly question the morality and need for war.
Perhapse you should get off your high horse, and actually sample them - before looking even more foolish with your off the cuff and uninformed opinions.
If you want to say 'war is bad', fine, just say it
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
He didn't intend to kill per se, he intended to hurt Bonzo sufficiently that he would never again be a threat. He intended to leave no possibility that Bonzo would go away, lick his wounds and come back for another go. So, he didn't actually intend murder, but he certainly intended to use far more force than was necessary merely for immediate self-defence.
Whether dead, incapacitated, or just terrified to ever go near Ender again, Bonzo would have been destroyed as a threat. That was Ender's goal in every conflict with such people.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Harry Potter, similarly, is comparatively easy.
Funny you should say that, as the Harry Potter series is what convinced Card to give Hollywood another go at it. Before that he was convinced that it's just impossible to get enough good child actors to pull it off as live action.
George Lucas showed us all the complete destruction of a populated planet in 1977. Alderaan was full of innocents - it had nothing whatever to do with the Rebel Alliance - but it was destroyed nonetheless.
Were we traumatised? No. We don't see the faces of anyone on Alderaan, we don't see them dying, we see no pain for anybody at all except Leia's as she watches, and Obi-Wan's as he feels a great disturbance in the Force.
However, what if instead of showing the Death Star blowing away Alderaan, we'd seen Vader slapping Leia about the cell, trying to physically brutalise her into telling him the location of the Rebel base? Suppose we'd heard a THX-enhanced crunch as the Sith Lord's black-gloved metal fist smashed the Princess's pretty nose to splinters? THAT would have upset us. That would have earned Star Wars a pretty high rating.
One-on-one physical violence upsets people. The bloodless eradication of millions that we don't have to face does not. It's why Hitler switched from SS firing squads to gas chambers - it upset his troops less that way. Same here. Nobody will mind the destruction of the bugger homeworld, but they may well object to Ender's habit of barehanded manslaughter.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.