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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."
Are adaptations of books, old movies and sequels all that Hollywood can produce now? Sad state for a supposedly "creative" industry. That said, I'm actually looking forward to this one - I think it's a good thing that the script is being held to some standards.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
Expect a rather large gay=organised boycott of this movie, due to OSC's rather public rants.
:)
Which actually could result in a backlash from the religious right in America going to see it in droves...
Would be interesting to see how Card's politics and religion will undoubtedly shadow the movie itself
The extended EG books are great. The original is the best but the other books tell a wonderful interesting story of the progression of mankind and probably one of the most realistic tales of how man might interact with other intelligent species.
I only hope the movie is as good a quality as the books and are of LotR quality adaption and not a HP quality adaption (the last two movies have really fallen short). Keep the movie as short as you can without cutting down the story. Everything you need and nothing you don't. EG was always deeply about the characters and what is going on inside and between them. That aspect must be maintained. We need to feel the need and the pain of all the characters.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
As far as I'm concerned this film has some major challenges to face that are integral to remaining true to the book.
1. The characters age from 6yrs old to 12 yrs old. That's a HUGE swing. Them being children and developing are two important themes that need to remain.
2. How are they going to film the Battle Room scenes? It's a 3d fight, so there really isn't a good way of doing it. I think the best way would almost be a first person view directly from Ender, so the battle flows as he sees it, but this would lead to problems in the final battle.
3. The Computer Game at the end (i can't remember it's name). That is going to be an extremely difficult thing to replicate, and build tension with. The build up of hopelessness at the very end will be crucial (more so than in the book) and will be hard to pull of with blips of light.
4. Will they even cover Peter Wiggin? It will be hard to do that as well, especially his rise to power on the nets...
Those are just a few of the problems I see. It's going to be a huge challenge to accuratley represent the book well. The only way I can see it getting done is CG, but this seems to dark for a CG movie.
http://www.pterrys.com
Given the sort of person who views this site, this is probably not stricly necessary. However...
SPOILER ALERT: THIS POST CONTAINS KEY PLOT ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK
One of the things I see as a probable cause of conflict is that some of the key scenes in the movie, and key scenes of character development, is that Ender basically gets picked on, and then retaliates by beating is antagonizers to death.
Now, given todays mass market, I dont expect that Warner Brothers wants to spend a hundred million or so on a sci-fi epic and then have to cripple potential box office gross by slapping an R rating on it. The main character is essentially a very likable child who is very smart and a great leader. They want to get children in to see this thing. They wont be able to do that if they have to get an R rating on the movie. But given the brutality of these scenes, I dont see how they can do justice to them without showing the brutality.
If Warner had their way, I would have to guess that they would like to see it cut out entirely, or have Ender not kill them. But I doubt that Orson Scott Card will let that happen. One of the reasons that Ender is ultimately chosen is that when he has to, he strikes without mercy and utterly destroys his opponent. There is no way to portray the character of Ender properly by having him pull a half assed beating on Bonzo, or that first bully, that lets them live.
Beyond that, I dont see any other likley cause of conflict with a script. Like any novel adaption, it will have to be cut down for time constraints.
END COMMUNICATION
Let's hope Orson Scott Card's personal views will not be reflected in the movie script!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The only way Douglas Adams got his script done was to die... then the arguements him and the studios about what constitutes a good script ended, and the movie got made. I suspect the same will be true of Enders... we'll see it in the theaters about five years after Card dies.
Here's a comment he made on his official forms regarding the movie. Interesting stuff:
Warner is still strongly committed to making Ender's Game into a great movie, and we agreed to another year or so of option, starting with a new script written by me (a page-one rewrite not based on any previous script, including mine). Guess how I'll be spending my Christmas vacation.
This is very promising, I think. As far as I know, all other elements of the team remain together. I will be working closely with Chartoff Productions (whom I've been working with on this for ten years now) and with the Warner executive to get this script right - emotional, truthful, the kind of film that even people who think they hate sci-fi and war films will like.
It will be faithful to the story, within the limitations of a two-hour form factor. Stuff has to be left out. But what's THERE will be true to the story in the books, even if it isn't word-for-word or point-for-point the same.
Some people's favorites lines and scenes won't be in the film. But we will try not to contradict them - so you could imagine that it still happened, only off-screen .
But if we need to make a contradictory change, we will. It's more important that it be an excellent movie than that it be an accurate transcription of the book. Don't you agree?
I want a movie people can sit through. Two hours if possible; no more than 2.5 hours. With two hours or less, you can get two showings a night at popular showtimes. That's the studio's goal; and it's mine, too. We're not doing Gandhi, here. It doesn't need to be ponderous. It needs NOT to be. It needs to be so good that people pack the theaters - as many showings as possible . That way I have a chance of getting other movies made, too. The last thing I need is for people to say, "Ender's Game - the movie that's even slower and longer than Heaven's Gate!"
"Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality" by John Kessel
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
OSC doesn't do new stuff. Almost all of his books is a retelling of (his) Mormon values. They tend to start with a very good book or two (i.e., the fist two books in Ender or Homecoming series) and then rapidly disintegrate into fairly banal family and religious values only he and his religious friends could believe in. On the other hand, he is a very good writer and writes very convincingly, even I can't stand his values and religion, I find myself reading even his worst books. I always kick myself after finishing an other one of his pretentious shit and wow to myself "never again".
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034
Many people are astonished to learn that the man who wrote about "that poor little boy" is such a rabid Fascist. But Card has always been a rabid Fascist, as well as several other species of asshat, and none of his works demonstrate that better than the sad tale of Ender Wiggin itself.
Here is a very respectful article by SF writer John Kessel which is suspicious of Card's motives. You should read it; it's pretty good. I'll wait.
Back in the mid 1980's I knew a struggling SF author who managed to get a few stories published and breached the threshold for membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (or SFWA), the SF writer's union. She joined thinking it would help her fledgeling career.
In 1985 the big news in SF was Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, which had swept both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Accordingly, my friend read it and passed it on to me, as she often passed on books and magazines. I read it and saw how it would be compelling to a certain mindset, but I didn't think it was all that good.
"So what did you think of it?" she asked me later.
"I think I see why it's so popular, but the guy really doesn't write that well."
"Well all it is is an apologia for Hitler. Sorry, but I don't buy that argument. When I was a kid I heard every Sunday how Jesus would forgive Hitler if he really really repented, but I say fuck that. Some things can't be forgiven or redeemed."
She could get a bit passionate about stuff like that, so I let it drop. As it happened, though, SFWA members vote on the Nebula awards, and Card's sequel Speaker for the Dead was out. Card's publisher helpfully sent all SFWA members a free copy to help its chances of getting the Nebula like Ender's Game had.
One day I spotted it on her coffee table.
"Have you read that?"
"No, I don't plan to. It'll just be more of the same."
"Buzz is it's going to get another Nebula."
"Well if it does, my colleagues are idiots."
So I took the book and read it. She was like that; if someone wanted to write about forgiving Hitler she wasn't the type to complain. It's a free country and all that. Just don't ask her to read past the point where she figures it out.
About fifty pages into Speaker I gave her a call.
"You are not gonna believe this," I said. "Ender ends up on a planet settled by Brazilians."
"Brazilians?"
"And he's angling to prevent the genocide of the badly misunderstood aboriginal natives of Planet Brazil. And it's hinting that he's gonna pull some Buggers out of his ass before the end of the story."
"Wait a minute. You are telling me that if I wrote a story where Hitler escapes to Brazil, prevents a massacre of some Native Americans, and then raises a bunch of Jews from the dead, that this would be about parallel?"
"Well I'm only fifty pages in..."
"And they're going to give this crap a Nebula Award?"
"Well, it certainly looks that way."
"I think I'm going to need the book back," she said very evenly.
If you click back to Kessel's Innocent Killer essay and scroll down to the section titled The Guiltless Genocide you will see that Kessel mentions an essay called Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman by one Elaine Radford. Elaine was my writer friend and if you are among the many people who hate that essay and want to blame someone for it, you can blame me because it probably never would have been written had I not l
You should read this.
4
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/703
And this.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Although I wrote the "asshat" article at kuro5hin, I wouldn't really consider it germane to this debate; and if it was, I would have just posted a link, not the entire article.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
If OSC is listening... maybe a miniseries for sci-fi would be a better option? If it was my book and my option to move it to screen, I think I'd do something like Star Trek and Serenity ended up doing (though this would be better planned) which is to do a series on TV that starts in the beginning.... build the characters over several seasons, then plan a big blockbuster movie at the end of it all for the final shootout.
This would allow for the actors to grow physically... start them at just before puberty and hope that they get growth spurts, and as actors. In general it would let the story develop more fully and on a timeline more consistent with the novel... I don't think I sat down and read the whole thing in one night, longer stories can be more interesting because you have to stop and think about the events between reading periods, so take advantage of that.
On the business side of things, they could use the time and revenue to develop the CGI over years instead of months and would be able to reuse the models, effects, etc. and incrementally improve upon them as the CGI becomes more important in the story. The revenue from commercials could seriously offset this development and allow for a really good movie at the end instead of having to blow the whole budget on CGI they could spend more on 'getting it right'.
For the actors / kids this would really give them the time to 'become the characters' as they could start off as regular kids with a few quirks and grow into the personalities that make the book powerful.
For the audience... well how big is the audience for this movie right now? I know very few people outside of sci-fi fans who have read this book unless they were assigned it as summer reading in high school. A TV series could certainly grow the audience size and bring them up to speed on the story at the same time. I hate movies that have to tell this huge backstory because the meat of the plot is at the end but you won't understand the motivations of the characters without the back story.... spend more time in the movie on the events that unfold and let the characters just be who they are the whole time without having to explain how they got to be the way they are.
As a side note, it would be very interesting to do some web based tie in 'marketing' by creating a web community around the idea of Peters forums... where people could discuss the implications of the events in the show...
the downside to all of this is that we already know how it ends... it'd be really cool to not know and have a series that builds up the tension, with a web based extras feature for creating anticipation and a big movie at the end to wrap it all up in a final crescendo.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Can't speak for the rest of the series, but I thought the original sucked. The premise of it - that war in space is so enormously more difficult than other forms of warfare, that you needed not only life-long training, but to be actually genetically engineered to do it - was ludicrous. Think back to 1940. Aviation was in its infancy, and no one really knew how to conduct air warfare, or even what air warfare meant. Within five years, we had progressed (if that's the word) to titanic air battles, aircraft carriers, V-2 rockets, etc, etc. No genetic engineering required - ordinary mortals could learn to do it with a year's worth of training.
And the big space battle in EG was no more complex than, say, the Battle of Midway! We could fight that battle now, with nothing more than a few quick spacecraft check flights. Pilots already have to know how to think in 3D, deal with fast moving targets, etc, etc.
Given all that, it was really tough to slog through the interminable initial sections of the book, where Ender goes through what amounts to child abuse for years, when there isn't any reason for it. Maybe the other books would have been better, but I'd had my fill.
Sean