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Ender's Game Trailer Released
The first trailer has been released for the movie adaptation of Orson Scott Card's sci-fi classic Ender's Game. It gives us a good look at Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham, and Hugo's Asa Butterfield as Ender. It also demonstrates just how much money they put into the special effects for this movie.
Shut up, meatbag! Bender's the best one of the bunch!
FX spaceships are cheap. The effects are no better than Iron Sky. Since this has Big Name Actors, they probably spent too much.
In the book, the adults barely appear. But if they paid for Harrison Ford, they probably let him talk too much.
Just wait til the narrated cut comes out.
[Emphasis mine] Appreciate art on its own merits and you'll be the happier for it. Not everything has to be politicized. When everything is politicized, we become incapable of finding common ground with people we disagree with. When we can't even appreciate art together with others who have views we disagree with, how can we ever learn to tolerate each other? How can we have unity amidst diversity if we do not, as Plato said, have a communion of pleasure where we might at least rejoice and mourn over some things we hold common?
I'm not really sure you read the same book I did. Ender's game isn't about "just following orders"... I can't think of a single character who has that as their motivation at any level. Everyone involved is either being lied to and manipulated or is trying to save the world by any means necessary. If you insist on making it about the military, I would take it as an attack on spending soldiers' lives on wars that the soldiers know and care nothing about. Especially since most of the people doing the fighting 'on screen' were drafted into the situation long before they could make that decision for themselves (even genius children can be manipulated).
But really it should be a story of "the ends justify the means" and questioning if they really do or not. Ender's Game is a story about adults who put kids through hell, leading to nervous breakdowns and at least a few deaths. All because they think it's the only way to save the world and in the end not only were they wrong, but their crimes were far worse than we had been led to believe.
The most fascinating part of this, for me, is that I connected with Ender's Game more easily as a young adolescent precisely because I was gay and understood how harsh and how quickly a child has to grow up. I also understood empathizing with my enemy, my enemy not understanding the degree of harm he was doing to me, and not trusting adults or authorities.
I also keenly felt the idea of being tested in subtle ways, in manipulating adults and politics with their own fears, and deeply appreciated the affects of demagoguery before I even knew what it was called.
I felt like Orson Scott Card so deeply understood the plight of being a bright, homosexual child with more self-awareness and introspection than many an adult, that I was shocked to find out that he was so antagonistic to it. This was after I read Speaker of the Dead which seems to so perfectly capture that sensation of oppression.
Maybe my sense of connecting with the author and his general outlook on human emotion was so great, that to find out he is as homophobic as he is caused a deep-seated sensation of betrayal and cognitive dissonance. Also, I don't even want to separate my knowledge of the artist from the art, which is a topic worthy of an essay itself.
Also, I feel that while it seems a bit pushy and bitchy, and will evoke the typical "uppity homosexual" response, complaining about a popular person's homophobia and suggesting that they, and even their art, be considered as lesser because of it, still seems to me to be an effective way at showing strength and causing people to realize the tenuousness of their position.
No art or artist is held to account for all their crimes, and in the fullness of time people will forgive Card as a fuddy duddy for his homophobia, but in the here and now where it has extreme political relevance to my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on this globe, I say he is an ass for his views and I do not wish to patronize him. Let the future enjoy him unfettered by these concerns like I can enjoy Wagner now.
I've read both books, and as far as I can recall, the comparison is fairly apt.
There's nothing particularly ground-breaking in either, despite Slashdot's glorification of Ender's Game as some sort of nerd canon. It's pretty much EVERY sci-fi/fantasy story ever told:
It's Mary Sue Fantasy, dressed up with a bit of techno-babble about faster than light communication. Hunger Games didn't bring much new to the genre either (other than the film adaptation's use of the talents of Jennifer Lawrence, who I happen to think is a primo piece of ass second only to the adorable Anna Kendrick) - it's Lord of the Flies + Running Man + Logan's Run + every other dystopian fantasy you've ever read.
Neither of them are particularly ground-breaking literature, both are light, relatively enjoyable takes on established genre fiction, and neither of them are as momentously, insightfully philosophical as their fans try to make them out to be. The reason teenage girls like Hunger Games is because it has a tough teenage girl protagonist. The reason geek boys like Enders Game is because it has a loner misfit boy who turns out to have special powers that let him save the world, even though he's unappreciated by the society that birthed him. Each book provides its fans with the hero they wish they were.
It's an interesting point but isn't there a difference between giving money to someone alive right now who is actively working against your interests and reading the works of someone who has been dead for over 200 years?
I think you need to recast it in other terms.
For example- if you were sick and had to go to the emergency room, would you turn down the assistance of a racist, homophobic doctor?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Since it's a morally complex point, I have little doubt that part will be cut from the film.
Hell they are flat out telling him what they are doing. When did they ever admit to their goals in the novel?
Quite. What a miserable mess. They rewrote it basically from scratch. Kept the names and the We Win part and redid everything else. Half of the point of the book was Ender didn't know. That he fought every single battle thinking it was just particularly grueling training. That the military lied to him and almost everyone else throughout the entire book. Little doubt? How about no doubt whatsoever? How can he "come to a realization" when that entire element has been completely removed from the plot? 5 seconds of footage is enough to know they completely rewrote the destruction of the alien planet. Where is Ender's despair? Where is his giving up on the "training"? The only part that's left is his decision to just blow it all up with the Little Doctor, and they turned that into a triumph, rather than the training failure Ender believed it to be.
No better than I expected. There was no way in hell they were going to do the book justice. Odds went up after Hunger Games, I guess. I could have sworn audiences would rebel against kids killing kids, but I constantly underestimate the bloodthirstiness of contemporary audiences. Still, looks like they failed, as expected, despite being able to keep the violence.
You're describing elements of the Hero's Journey. That shows up damn near everywhere because it's a compelling template - the reluctant or unlikely hero who turns out to have more strength than they thought... it's an easy model to imagine yourself into, to draw inspiration from, as well as providing counterpoints to what would otherwise be "Awesome person saves the day again, the end"
That said, Ender's game does particularly gel with certain geek-guy stereotypes; the bullied outcast who gets to be entirely justified in striking back, and whose unique genius makes them valuable. There's a potential comparison with Twilight also; both books make for good escapist fiction (for the gender they're aimed at) whilst having some somewhat disturbing moral assumptions buried just below the surface.
The difference (I think) is that Ender's Game does that at least somewhat knowingly, to force you to consider some ugly ideas that it's holding up as virtues.
But it also highlights the fact that hindsight is always 20/20.
The information given by Mazer towards the end basically points out that humanity had no other foreseeable option. (Adult) human strategists were incapable of giving tactically brilliant but suicidal for anyone chosen maneuvers. The long travel time for fleets meant ANY force sent would automatically be obsolete by the time it arrived causing any REASONABLE commander to simply withdraw. The military forces the Buggers were able to field we numerically so overwhelming that defensive strategies by humans were hopeless. Logical answer? Suicidal, "deal with what you got", "Never tell me the odds!" attacks.
The Bugger Queen only reinforces this fact. Once the Bugger Queen realized what they had done, they understood that they would have retaliated the same way the humans did had they suffered the same experence. Even if the Buggers wanted to end the war, they were aware the biological/psychological differences prevented communications (and therefore diplomatic means) from happening.
Were the crimes of the leadership bad? Yes. Were they irredeemably, unforgivably bad as they're made out to be in the sequels? In hindsight, Yes; in context, No.
It's the deviations from the Hero's Journey that make a story interesting. The human brain is very good at looking for patterns; once a pattern is learned, the subtle changes away from the pattern are what provides the interest. This is how we distinguish faces, and it's why all Asians look alike to a westerner (the base pattern is tuned to one facial style, but Asian faces introduce more than just subtle differences from that pattern, which really throws things off).
Also interesting reading, a list of examples of the Hero's Journey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monomyths