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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.
They should take a card from Douglas Adams et. al... and just slap some shit together, and let the digital effects speak for themselves.
No... wait... don't.
IGN reports that difficulties in hammering out a screenplay have resulted in more delays for the Ender's Game
Sounds like endgame for Ender's Game.
(Maybe we could get Uwe Boll to direct it?)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
... the original screenwriter's decision to make Valentine a lesbian and have her marry her partner in Act II may have been a mistake.
"the" Ender's Game sequels? You make no distinction between, say, Ender's Shadow (good) and Shadow of the Hegemon (tedious) or between Speaker for the dead (the best of the series) and Xenocide (quite awful and very predictable)?
As for your question, I think Card started out as a playwright before switching to novels. I'm not sure, but I seem to have picked up this piece of trivia from one of his introductions.
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.
Yes, Card does have some experience. He is a playwrite as well as a novelist.
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.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
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!"
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.
I'm sure in the hollywood version it's all surly teenagers etcetera. Can't have Card's anti-war message coming through too clearly now.
Right! Cuz there's no more right-wing, gung-ho, pro-war establishment than today's Hollywood. Damn wingnuts...
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.
Anti-war message?
Are we even talking about the same Orson Scott Card here?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
John Varley wrote the screenplay for Millennium and turned a classic short story into the worst film made by anybody, anywhere.
Good writers think in a much too overblown, theatrical style. It just doesn't translate to the screen.
I wasn't much impressed with the episode which William Gibson wrote for the X files, either.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality" by John Kessel
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
From Orson Scott Card's own website:
So here's what I have to say about Serenity:
This is the kind of movie that I have always intended Ender's Game to be (though the plots are not at all similar).
And this is as good a movie as I always hoped Ender's Game would be.
And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.
I'd rather just watch Serenity again.
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".
This movie's going to be great. We all know the longer a screenplay is the development, the better it gets! Right? Right?
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
For the film's final twist - that Ender has been fighting the actual war not just a simulator - to be feasible, the audience needs to understand the existence of Ansible, and the way the Dr. Device chain reaction works, without these explanations seeming like blatant clues as to the ending when they happen earlier on in the movie. In a 600 page novel you can hide these sorts of key facts in the general 'fleshing out' of the world, but by the time you trim it to a 2 phour script, then it gets difficult.
I'm worred that the book's plot holes will be shown up with great clarity - in my opinion it's never adequately explained why it has to be a kid who controls the fleet, rather than Wrackham. If the reason is video game skills, then I can see a swing to teenagers not young kids in the lead roles, which makes sense from the studio's point of view but will ruin the empathy.
I don't see the computer simulation episodes being a problem, they will simply look like PS3 games (bacause that's what they will be, there's money in tie-in games). Hollywood never bothers to extrapolate the state of the art when computers are concerned, witness the Nostromo in 'Alien' being less graphically capable than your cellphone.
On the upside of all this rewriting, the longer the movie takes to get made, the better the battle room / war scenes can be done with state of the art CGI.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Seems to be popular on her but I'll risk a troll rating by saying
that I found Enders Games to be the dullest sci fi book I've ever
read and in fact I got so bored I gave up 3/4 way through.
The only other book that got even remotely close in tedium rating
was Radix by A. A. Attanasio.
Enders Game - great book for people who rate political allegory above
anything remotely resembling a good plot.
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.
Just because someone demonstrates expertise in both novel-writing and playwriting doesn't mean they can write a good screen play. (Though if I had to bet on whether someone can write a good first screen play I wouldn't hesitate to put my money on Card.)
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
Please, you obviously read the books and try to share relevant information. Leave /. immediately and return when you have learned to talk about subjects you know nothing about, and refrain from having actual arguments in support of your opinions. TIA for your commitment in upholding the /. standards.
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
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!
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.
Dude, if Warner had their way, you would just send them the 10 bucks, and let them skip making the movie.
"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 thing I want to see is a LotR-quality movie adaptation of a good book.
The Lord of the Rings movies are very good movies. The camera work, the special effects, the acting, the directing, are all very very good. The trouble is that they aren't good adaptations of the books. It is understandable that plot shortcuts need to be taken when adapting a book to a movie. It is also obvious that a movie can't contain all the dialog that a book can. The time restrictions of a 2 (or 4) hour movie simply don't allow it to contain all that is in a well-written 300 page book.
What the movie format does allow, and is very good at, is developing characters. The tragedy of the Lord of the Rings movies is that the characters were largely mangled beyond recognition. Many of them, if it weren't for the coincidences of name, race and costumes, would have been unrecognizable as the characters in the books. (IMO the hobbit characters were handled the best.)
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
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:[.]
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.
The reason it's so vital to the plot to have Ender get picked on and retaliate beyond all possible reason (it's a tribute to Card's writing chops that we don't notice that the murders of Stilson and Bonzo are, well, kinda psychopathic) is that it's an adolescent revenge fantasy, with its dials all cranked to eleven.
Consider that a kid who seldom fights and is smaller than his opponents invariably manages to beat them to death. He conquers every obstacle before him, commits murder and genocide, and yet is the object of the book's compassion. Who wouldn't want to be an ultraviolent martyr like that?
Indeed, I think the angsty eighth-grader audience will be key for this movie, as well as every maladjusted geek who never got over getting picked on in high school and wishes he could go Columbine on the folks who made him miserable back in the day.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...is if the sequels were optioned as well. This is bound to get me flamed, but IMHO, the adaptation of the rest of the quartet would suck. 20+ pages of philosophical and scientific diatribe between two characters doesn't translate very well to the screen... and this is most of the last three books, especially Xenocide The screenplays would read more like transcripts of a talk show than science fiction flicks...
Maybe they could shorten it...
"The trees are made out of pequeninos!!!"
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.
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.
They'd better hurry up and get this produced. The actor they'd tapped to play Ender just died of old age.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
In other words, you go to war with the kids you have, not the kids you want?
-a
I hope I won't get screamed at here for not reading the above comments, but I don't have time to read 25 comments right now and want to say this.
Remember that we never knew the kids died until the very end of the book, and it is that revelation that reveals to us Ender's key qualities and the criteria by which he was chosen.
This means that you don't have to show the depth of violence that we imagine existed during each of the two fights, becuase the point is that we are not supposed to realize he is a killer until the very end, and that shock is a critical part of the story.
I think this can be done without an R rating.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!" -- George W. Bush
Card has directed a few local theatre things (which doesn't mean too too much, but he does know how to make dialogue flow).
This delay is incredible. I remember looking over an early version of the script about 5-6 years ago for a few minutes (someone who know him had a copy and I'm from his hometown). I can't remember any content, but I know it's been in the talks forever.
Just like DNF
Tibbon
tibbon.com
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