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Movie Review: Ender's Game
Note: in the lead-up to this film's release, a boycott was organized in response to Orson Scott Card's efforts as an anti-gay-marriage activist. If you find your desire to see one of your favorite stories clashing with a desire not to support Card's political views, an organization called the Equality Initiative has offered an alternative. They suggest going to see the movie, if you want, and then simply donating the ticket price to any of several related charities.
First, let's get the obvious out of the way: they cut a lot from the novel. Really, quite a lot. As a book, Ender's Game is not terribly long, and it's a very quick read. That makes it sound ideal for a movie interpretation at first blush. But part of the reason it's such a quick read is that it's dense with plot, character development, and internal narratives. The movie is dense as well, but mostly with events. What makes the book great is not so much what the characters do, but why they do it and how. So while the movie conveys the majority of what happened in the book, it fails to convey the reasons behind the facts. I don't know that they could have done any better within a two-hour time limit, but it leaves us with a question: is this film for people who have read the book, or for people who haven't?
Since the book has been out since 1985, I'm going to assume most of you are familiar with the story. I won't reveal the major plot twists, but minor and intermediate spoilers may follow. If you aren't familiar with it, then here's the bottom line: go read the book! It's good.
Right from the beginning we see how deep the cuts go. Central to Ender's time at home is the whirlwind of conflicting emotions running through him about his monitor, his family, and his status as a Third. The film rushes through these, hitting each only briefly enough to show the viewer that there exists something deeper. Ender mentions being a Third, but doesn't explain what a Third is, or why it's a point of shame and embarrassment. They introduce Peter, but fail to show that their relationship is more complex than your typical sibling rivalry. In the book, Peter is brilliant, sadistic, intuitive, and a hell of an actor when adults are around. In the movie, he's just a jerk for a few seconds before Ender rockets off toward the plot.
Even Ender's early fight with Stilson loses much of its impact. In the book, it really isn't much of a fight; Ender immediately has Stilson at his mercy. The point of the scene was to show Ender's deliberate use of brutality and intimidation to secure safety from the larger group of enemies. He's reluctant, but not hesitant. In the movie, this is distilled down to a command for Stilson to "stay down" before the fight has concluded and a shaky warning to the others.
So, even just 10 minutes into the film, we see the film is not taking the time to illustrate these characters to a new audience. That trend continues: most of the minor characters are cardboard cutouts of their literary counterparts. Bean is somehow in the same initial launch group as Ender, and simply serves as an ally. Peter and Valentine just serve as occasional spurs for Ender's development. (Yes, that means the entire secondary plot was scrapped. I'm not too sad about that; there's no way they could have given it enough time to do it justice. And it was always the least believable thing, for me, in a novel about space battles and insectoid aliens.) Alai makes mention of peace, but he doesn't have a role as a peacemaker. The contrast between his connection with Ender and the constant violence surrounding them is lost. Petra has more interaction with Ender than most, but it has some bizarre romantic overtones.
Well, then, what about the scenery? If the movie is for fans of the book, it should at least be awesome to see expensive CGI of the scenes we imagined in our heads when reading it, right? And it is.. sometimes. The space battle sequences are impressive, and seeing the students fly around in zero-g was neat. But it was also jarring, at times. Take the Battleroom at the school, for example. In my head, it was an approximation of space, with a dark background interrupted only by the simple "stars" and the gates. In the movie, there's an awful lot going on, visually. The walls are windows dominated by a view of Earth. Everything's polished and shiny. The light pistols shoot bright, Star-Wars-like laser bolts that flash dramatically when they hit something. All the ships in the battlefleet look fancy and brand new, instead of hastily constructed and out of date. Ender's interface in command school is far more graphical and pretty than is sensible. It's cool to see, and I suspect viewers who are unfamiliar with the book won't think twice about it. But it's clear that this interpretation is not straining to be as faithful to the book as possible, which is mildly disappointing.
The movie's acting was decent. There won't be any Oscar nominations, but they didn't have a whole lot to work with. As I mentioned earlier, most characters had their subtleties stripped away. Asa Butterfield does a respectable job with Ender, using glances and body language to supplement some of the situations where the story was simplified from an internal narrative. The casting director definitely made the right decision going with kids in their early teens rather than the much-younger ages from the book. Harrison Ford played Graff well enough, but it'd be more accurate to say he played Harrison Ford. If you tend to like his characters, you'll enjoy the role. If not, you might like Viola Davis, who played a surprisingly good Major Anderson. Those two characters were tweaked a bit in order to separate out their conflicting emotions about training Ender, and they pull it off. Ben Kingsley does a fine job in his abbreviated role as Ender's adversarial mentor.
A few other random notes:
- They gave up the biggest plot twist ahead of time; there were at least two obvious references to what was going to happen. Ender is kept in the dark, but the audience is not, which is too bad for new viewers.
- The fantasy game was represented pretty well. Like most other plot elements, it was stripped down to its essentials, but I was surprised by how well they integrated it into the story. I was expecting it to be cut altogether.
- Due to the trimming and simplifying of the story, the movie's dialogue was largely original. It mostly paraphrased the book. However, they occasionally threw in direct quotes from some of the more stylized lines. It happened infrequently enough that it broke immersion.
It's inevitable that a successful book won't fit within the confines of a movie script. We knew this going in. Nevertheless, some adaptations have succeeded by being as faithful as possible to the ideas behind the book. Ender's Game doesn't manage this. Other adaptations have been successful by reimagining the work for a new medium, thus drawing in new fans. Ender's Game doesn't quite manage this, either. It straddles the line, and in doing so, leaves us with a sequence of events that seems entirely arbitrary, when it should instead seem inevitable. If you're thrilled about the possibility of seeing expensive CGI for one of your favorite stories, go see it. Otherwise, give it a pass.
Hopefully they can make it as good as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That movie was excellent.
Firstly, homophobic is a ridiculous word -- inaccurate as hell. You can be against homosexuality (generally due to religious beliefs) and not have a phobia about it.
Secondly, it's a shame so many people will reject this movie because the author doesn't share their views or beliefs. Separating art from the creator is all too often a very important skill, that too many people lack.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I'm not much interested in Hollywood versions of classic books, ever since Peter Jackson took a book that is much shorter than any of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and stretched it out to what promises to be a trilogy in it's own right. The Will Smith "I, Robot" has almost nothing to do with Asimov's stories. If Hollywood brought the notoriously talky Foundation Trilogy to the screen it would have nine films, be crammed with CGI fleets slamming into one another, the Mule would be more physically intimidating than Sauron and Arkadia Darrell would have bigger tits and ass than Beyonce.
Ender's Game is all about being in Ender's world, you are in his head you experience things the way he see and experiences it. That's why the ending of the book was shockingly good.
However this is difficult to translate into a movie especially with the Captain American/Iron Man style they chose to make it in.
did you forget to take your meds?
From what I've been told, Card will not get a dime of your money regardless of whether you see the movie or not.
Unless you've been living in a vacuum, you know that there are people boycotting the film in protest of Orson Scott Card's very public political positions. There are also people seeing it as a show of support. It's been pointed out that Card is not in for producer money--he got paid when the option was exercised, and won't see more money regardless of how well the film does. On the other hand, judging by Ender's Game's position on The New York Times Bestseller list (#1 on November 10th for mass-market paperback) this movie has sold some books, and those will cut Card some royalty checks.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
While I disagree with the guy's views, I wonder about the zealotry against him. Did you to see Midnight in Paris? How about The Piano? If you are that concerned with the character of those who benefit from your entertainment consumption, should I take your choice to watch those as an endorsement of child molestation? And if you haven't seen those, give me any list of 20 movies you like, I'm sure I could find others.
go read the book! It's good.
If you're a teenager (or younger), yes, give it a read. If you're an adult, meh. There are worse ways to pass a rainy afternoon, but it's not a must read. It's young-adult fiction that does not hold up well for adults.
As for the movie, this is rare movie I thought could be longer. You get one hit of every major plot point--one fight with the bully in the first school, one interaction with Peter, one training battle with each team, etc.
What gets lost is why Ender thinks the way he does. In the movie, he's just born this tactical prodigy. In the book, he's a gifted kid, but we get to see how he learns to use those gifts.
And I didn't think the give-away for the final twist was that bad. Over all, I left not feeling angry for the money spent.
what does a "homeless gay teen" charity do that a "homeless teen" charity wouldn't?
Have counselors on staff who won't try to "cure" his orientation, and other teens around that not only accept him for who he is, but actually share the trait that too often alienates him.
I know your question wasn't serious, but it is actually a serious problem. A significant number of homeless teenagers are on the streets because their families rejected their sexual orientation. Homeless shelters generally try to be comforting and understanding, but with tight budgets they don't always end up with the most sensitive staff, or even enough staff to protect the guests from each other if there's a conflict.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Ender's Game is the quintessential classic military sci-fi book.
I have to disagree with that quote. Ender's Game is an anti-war book. If you want the quintessential classic military sci-fi book, read Starship Troopers.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
So you were the type of student in school that "read" the assignment but failed to "understand" what he read. Never once did Ender seek "revenge." Never did Ender want to make them "Sorry" for beating him up. He wanted them to stop, and he was willing to hurt them enough so they would never hurt him again. This is very different than revenge.
I really don't understand where you come from in thinking that this is a revenge novel. In the Ender makes sacrifices because he is going through is for the betterment of humanity.
Survival is a large theme in this novel. not revenge. There is a huge difference.
I'm glad I was not your teacher for a literature class.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
If Hollywood brought the notoriously talky Foundation Trilogy to the screen it would have nine films, be crammed with CGI fleets slamming into one another, the Mule would be more physically intimidating than Sauron and Arkadia Darrell would have bigger tits and ass than Beyonce.
I need to see a fan made trailer of that STAT.
First off, they paid for Harrison Ford, so they had to let him talk too much. In the book, Col. Graff doesn't say much. Also, Graff with his little aluminum thingie on his hand pulling in the kids in the battle room ("Use the force, Ford!") doesn't fit with the rest of the movie. Nowhere else do they have gravity control or tractor beams. Or magic.
We don't see much of Ender's development as a tactician. Ender is presented more as the Chosen One than the one who claws his way up to be the best. There's a flavor of M. Night Shyamalan ("The Last Airbender" and other overproduced turkeys) here.
As is typical of space battle scenes in movies today, the CG effects are great and the tactics are wrong. Battles are in way too tight a space, and everything is turning too tight and going too slowly. It's the George Lucas WWII biplane school of space battle. Big tactical idea: line up all the little ships as armor around the big unarmored ones. That dates back to the Roman legions, and went out when machine guns were developed.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie version of Ender's Game, but agree wholeheartedly with the reviewer's take on what succeeded and what failed. In fact, I probably enjoyed it so much because I expected much less. The glaring failures were all necessary to make a successful movie, but they still managed to indicate the most important philosophical points. Yes, Graff was harder than in the book (and Anderson's softness was used to make up for this), Bean was introduced too early and wasn't adversarial at first like he should have been, and what were they thinking with the romantic overtones with Petra... But we know why Ender did what he did and how it affected him, and that didn't change from the book.
My one sadness about this movie is that it didn't inspire my son to read the book (he started it last year, read the first paragraph of Graff's pre-chapter conversation, and decided he didn't want to read it). But at least my copy is now on loan to one of his friends who was inspired to read it.
Addlepated - punk & metal
It had great potential back when it was written. But now the training "games" that Ender goes through cannot have the same impact.
***SPOILER***
It's one thing to realize that the little green dots you've been sending to fight the little red dots are really ships with people on them. And you've been ordering them to their deaths and getting petulant about it because you had to get up early. It's entirely different when the dots are now fully rendered ships.
Hold it! How are you ordering them to their deaths? It's already been established that FTL does not exist in this universe. Inter-stellar operations are, effectively, suicide missions because by the time you return everyone you left behind will be dead. So FTL does not exist for ships but it does exist for communications. And that had to be hidden from everyone? Why? Why not let the families of the people on the ships talk to them?
It had to be hidden in order to preserve the ending and the characterization. But it had to exist to provide the ending.
You completely missed the point of the book if that's what you got. What made Ender the supreme commander wasn't his intelligence; he was brilliant, but not significantly more so than many of the other kids. Ender's gift was his empathy: what allowed him to overcome his foes was exactly that he DIDN'T see them as less than human, but that he respected, maybe even loved his adversaries, even as he set up to destroy them.
I won't argue about the rest of the series though
And yet, in and of itself, "I Robot" was not a bad movie. It just didn't have much to do with the book. A movie can only really hold a short story with any fidelity - the great successes being "Minority Report" and of course, "Blade Runner" both Phiip K Dick stories that you can read in a couple of hours...
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Card owns 50% of Taleswapper, the production copy. He's getting a big taste of the box office, even though the studio isn't writing checks payable to his name.
You must have gotten the book mixed up with another book. But it has been 30 years since the 1980s so that makes sense. Not sure where you got the revenge thing or the sub-human thing.
Ender's Game is about a reluctant hero, torn from his family and forced into the military where they required him to make brutal decisions to survive. He succeeds over his rivals and predecessors because his humanity made him a better leader. The irony of the story, and Ender's torment through the remaining books, is that he was seen as a killer when he, in fact, was not.
I agree with you on I, Robot, but there was a method to Jackson's madness in The Hobbit.
As the story goes, Way back when, Tolkien decided to write a sequel to The Hobbit, and the sequel "got away from him" and became a lot longer and darker and more adult than the first, children's story. Years later, Tolkien wanted to rewrite The Hobbit in the same adult tone as Lord of the Rings, rework some of the inconsistencies, and fold it into the same overall story arc. He apparently spent a lot of time on this. Some of his notes are in the appendices of Return of the King. Tolkien died before he could complete it.
His son Christopher completed the story, renamed "The Quest for Erebor", posthumously.
You'll notice, perhaps, that Thorin called their journey "The Quest for Erebor" in the first Hobbit movie.
But there are legal tangles. Tolkien sold the rights to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which eventually came into Jackson's hands, but not any of the materials he had written since, and the Tolkien estate (read: Christopher Tolkien) has refused to consider selling the rights to any other Tolkien works. So Jackson has access to The Hobbit, and he has access to parts of the story that are in Return of the King. He wanted to do The Quest for Erebor (for whatever reason, imagine dollar signs if that works for you) as two films (later three) but couldn't get the rights to Tolkien's other notes on the rewrite, because Christopher Tolkien wouldn't deal. So basically, they did what they could with the materials they owned, and basically pulled the rest of the story out of their collective ass.
So, how well or ill the final product was, is as always up to the viewer to decide. But my POINT is, the INTENTION was to tell the larger story that the author had imagined it becoming. As described in the appendices of Return of the King (which are for the most part worth reading) a very key part of the War of the Ring, and Gandalf's own personal goals, were: (a) the elimination of Smaug, (b) the reestablishment of a dwarf stronghold under the mountain, and (c) driving the necromancer out of mirkwood. One could say that a side goal was to get the Mirkwood elves engaged for the coming war. These are all important preludes to the War of the Ring.
Sorry to be so long winded, but the point is, there is actually an author-inspired reason to make The Hobbit a trilogy, although I'm sure money had a lot to do with it also.
But don't bother asking these question in rec.arts.tolkien. They hate hate HATE Jackson over there, and any discussion of the movies rapidly gets incoherent.
Back on topic, I remember all the furor on Usenet back in the eighties when Ender's Game first came out, (you can probably still find it in the Google Groups archives) but never got around to actually reading the books. I really liked the film, but I went in being familiar with some of the story's plot points from reading the discussions all those years ago. I can't speak to how someone who had never heard of it might like it, EXCEPT, my daughter, who had never heard of the story, went in cold and really really liked it. She considers the film a keeper. To put this in perspective, she hated Avatar.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, aka Blade Runner, is a whole novel.
.: Semper Absurda
I don't want Christopher's money grabbing bastardization. I wanted the Hobbit. A fun story with Epic bits about a hobbit./
Not Oakenshield's really, really, really serious adventures about really really serious stuff with serious people who seriously want to be serious.
Plus the movie had bits that were outright stupid.
The Ending of Enders is pretty lame to anyone with a lot of reading experience. It's great for kids; which then remember it with overly found memories of their past.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just because someone does not agree with your opinion does not make their opinion wrong. Or that they did not "understand" something.
I think you're arguing semantics there.
Because the kid that all the bullies pick on ... and the adults either are too stupid to see it or actively promote it ... but he is The One who will Save Humanity.
Except that it is not about survival. It is about Ender being The One who will Save Humanity. And some mean people try to hurt Ender. And so Ender has to hurt the mean people so that Ender can get on with the business of being The One to Save Humanity.
Yay Ender!
Boo anyone who hurt ender!
I'm serious here. Did anyone feel any compassion for the people that Ender killed? No. They were cardboard cutouts of evil that existed solely so that Ender could overcome them as part of his character development. But not KNOW that he had killed them. Because Ender has to be innocent.
Famous entertainer joins the Board of Directors for one of the most prominent political lobbying groups some people disagree with, more news at 11.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Yeah, that was a hastily thrown together argument. I blended Woody being creepy with Polanski raping a 13 year into one charge of child molestation. Point is, no one seems to have a problem with 90% of the creepy/illegal shit entertainers do, but one campaigns against gay marriage and they start a boycott. It's just a weird hypocrisy. There are probably much worse people than Orson Scott Card who have received plenty of Hatta's money. But whatever, way to take a stand on something.
Quite the contrary, actually.
The original "Enders Game" novelette was nominated for that year's (1978) Hugo and came in at #9 on the Locus Poll. The novel version (1986) won the Hugo, the Nebula, the SF Chronicle award, and placed 2nd in the Locus Poll. That's quite a bit above average. .
The 1987 sequel, Speaker for the Dead, won the Hugo, the Nebula, the SF Chronicle award, and 1st place in the Locus Poll. That was the first time an author had taken the Hugo in back-to-back years for best novel especially where the 2nd was a sequel.
Although I haven't read either in over 20 years, I think Speaker holds up better than Ender's Game in no little part because the basic plot of Game got ripped off a lot in the interval (The Last Starfighter, anyone? Which actually appeared before the novelization of Ender's Game but well after the original novelette. There were also a whole host of other "it was just a game/it wasn't just a game" stories).
The movie suffers from the compression of the novel -- the audience deserved more of the battle room, if nothing else, and a better idea of how grueling the schedule there and in Command School really was -- it looks like a couple days at most.
But the biggest issue with compression is moving command school to near the Formic homeworld. I couldn't figure out why, especially as they kept with the concept of instantaneous control with the ansible (FTL communication). But it was mainly so that they didn't have to break from Ender's shame at his destruction of his enemy to the hope of restoration by finding the last queen's egg.
Ok, I can see how that helps streamline things, until you realize that, uh, he just stepped off a military base, brought something alien back with him, and now he's going to traipse across the galaxy to find a place to put it? Um, no. That can't happen until he's already been out of the military.
They should have split it in two: Battle school, maybe up until the first victory of Dragon Army (going any further leaves too little for a second movie), then the rest. That would have let the characters breathe, let them have a decent epilogue reuniting Ender and Valentine, and the Hive Queen, and maybe even some way of bringing in Locke and Demosthenes.
Design for Use, not Construction!
My uncle is a horrible racist. The other day he asked for 100$ so he could get his car fixed. I gave him 100$, not to support his racism, but so he could get his car fixed.
OSC is a horrible homophobe. The other day he asked for a few pennies from my movie ticket so he could get more movies made, amd maybe even write more books. I gave him a few pennies, not to support his homophobia, but to support him getting more movies made.
".. brutal decisions to survive."
to succeed not survive.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Will Smith "I, Robot" has almost nothing to do with Asimov's stories.
I keep reading that, but I don't get it. Could someone explain the hate?
The "I, Robot" book was a series of short stories describing what a world might be like if we had intelligent robots. He created the 3 laws of robotics, then introduced various what-if scenarios where the rules all failed. It plays with these about humanity, religion, and morality. The take away is that you can't code morality using a few simple rules. It is complex and nuanced, and perhaps there is something special about "life" that can't quite be described.
The "I, Robot" movie was a single story, describing what a world might be like if we had intelligent robots. It included the 3 laws of robotics, then introduced a what-if scenario where the rules failed. It juxtaposes a with a "heart" but does not follow the 3 laws, against robots that cold and logical but are subject to the 3 laws. The twist, where the robots "evil" actions are actually a logical consequence of the 3 laws is just the kind of thing Asimov was trying to demonstrate.
So I conclude that it has a lot to do with Asimov's stories. The real question is, would Asimov have preferred that the movie tell the exact same stories as the book? Or would he have preferred a novel story that explores his themes further?
Nobody is being honored or praised here.
Anti-Card activists are simply practicing intolerance towards intolerance.
And even that is done merely through them calling for a boycott. I.e. Passively.
They are not going around spreading anti-Card propaganda and making shit up about him, calling him a pedophile and mentally ill, nor are they joining political movements aimed against him personally.
You know... like he does from his bully's pulpit.
As for the movie... could have used half an hour more.
But not of the Peter and Violet subplot. Which would be ridiculous today.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yeah, I don't get the hate for I, Robot movie... their wasn't a coherent story in the first place. Just a bunch of related shorts, none of which were long enough for a movie.
The movie took one of Asimov's later realizations as its main point: eventually the 3 laws go wrong. If they're rigid laws and they're smart enough robots, then you get the 0th law and they protect humanity at the expense of the individual. If they're flexible they see themselves as the greater good and the expense of humanity. Asimov wrote both ways.
Here's the difference: it sounds like your uncle needed the money. Someone who can't afford their own $100 to fix their car is in a tough spot, and it's a decent human thing to help them out even if they're a pretty lousy person. Card does not need the money. He already has way too much money, demonstrated by the way he throws it around to harm the lives and freedoms of others. Your uncle needed a hand up; folks like Card need to be knocked down from their lofty arrogance.
Did anyone feel any compassion for the people that Ender killed?
Ender did.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Where in the book do you see Ender striving to succeed? That wasn't his motivation. He never wanted to be the leader. He was just trying to get everyone off his back, and to like him enough to stop bullying him.
In Ender's physical fights, he was always defending himself against a superior opponent. Not trying to prove something. In the battle school showers, he would have been killed. It wasn't about success.
In the final test at battle school, and in the final battle against the Formics, Ender had given up and didn't care. It was Bean that won out in both cases while Ender was pretty much using a crazy suicide tactic.
So no, Ender was not driven to succeed. In the subsequent books, his only drive is repentance. Much like his drive for acceptance in the first book.
Your uncle may be a horrible homophobe, but he probably didn't do anything about it other than maybe avoid gay people in his personal life or vote for an anti-gay politician. In other words, your uncle isn't *actively* anti-gay. Giving him money to fix his car may support anti-gay activity in a very roundabout way (he needs the car to keep his job, he needs his job to eat, and if he starves to death he can't vote for any anti-gay politicians), but giving money to Card funds anti-gay activity in a much more direct manner since he uses his money, and the prestige he gets selling his works, for anti-gay purposes.
Your uncle probably also didn't give 10% of the car-fixing money to an anti-gay church, either.
Ender's Game was originally a short story. Maybe they should have based the movie on that instead of the book?
I'm serious here. Did anyone feel any compassion for the people that Ender killed? No. They were cardboard cutouts of evil that existed solely so that Ender could overcome them as part of his character development. But not KNOW that he had killed them. Because Ender has to be innocent.
Yes, and the innocent boy wipes out an entire sentient species. Meanwhile his psychotic, megalomaniac brother brings about world peace but only as a means to seizing supreme world power for himself.
It's not about survival or teen nerd wish fulfillment, it's about how our much our intentions matter as compared to our actions.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Is he going to use his car to drive around town with a megaphone ranting about niggers and jews? If so, and you knew about it, then you were wrong to support him.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There's an article here http://plover.net/~bonds/ender.html that, once you get past the deliberately inflammatory intro, makes a heck of a lot of sense.
Ender's Game makes way more sense when you read it as a combination of nerd-wish-fulfillment and some weird-ass militant Jesus propaganda. He (and only he) can empathize with the people who are killed - he loves them so much, that he must destroy them. When he kills other children, it's because of his wonderful rationality - but it's okay, because he didn't _mean_ to, and besides, he's really, really sorry. He "sacrifices" himself with self-imposed exile at the end of the novel, ending up spreading his philosophy throughout the cosmos.
Ender is an endlessly-suffering figure, targeted for (what else) his greatness. He's a "Mary Sue" character through and through.
(It's also interesting to think about the imagined persecution of straight white christian (mormon in this case) men, and how it relates to Ender, whom everyone is necessarily against).
then introduced a what-if scenario where the rules failed.
...and thus turned the movie into yet another remake of RUR, the primordial "robots go nuts and kill people" story that is precisely what Asimov was reacting against and trying to avoid when he created the 'three laws", whose whole purpose was to write off the very possibility of such a plot from the word "go", so he could concentrate on the interesting questions.
So yeah, they took the title and slapped in on something that was antithetical to the original in every respect. Other than that it was a good movie (except that RUR is a fairly pedestrian play, and doesn't need any more remakes, even though every single movie about robots ends up as a remake of it.)
It's as if someone took "Starship Troopers" and made a film where humans settle their differences with aliens by peaceful negotiation. It might be a good film (it probably would be better than the film that was made of that name) but it would be diametrically opposed to the theme of the original book, just like the movie "I, Robot" is.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.