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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."
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.
"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.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.