Sunday, March 31, 2013

Ender's Game Movie coming your way

They are making an Ender's Game movie.  It's coming out in my birth month, making this about the 5th year in a row that I will get a very interesting birthday treat.  The filmmakers in one article I read assured the readers that the creators are going to be sure the movie faithfully contains all the brutality readers have come to love the book for.  I must admit that this really took me aback because I don't love Ender's Game for the brutality.  Maybe this is because I am a Girl, but I doubt it.  Anyone who's in it for the brutality would get bored by all the other things I love about it like the characters and the bright flashes of humor and beauty and the moral quandries.  The brutality was horrific and startling and pretty much soul-crushing because of the way the story was told and the knowledge we had that Ender didn't.

Obviously this movie is not going to contain all of Ender's Game. They're very up-front about the fact that very little of the content comes from the book.  You would need a full TV series-length work to try to produce the book.  (One of the reasons I always wanted it to be made into an anime series.)  And the movie is also going to contain aspects of Ender's Shadow.  Somehow.  This seems like a bad idea to me because if you're going to hack out people's favorite scenes and truncate the timelines for one movie, trying to cram in another book's worth of character development will be difficult.  (Which is why I wish they'd done the Lord of the Rings thing and filmed two movies at the same time, but they are not made of money, and they have to realize that the chances of the fanboys hating on this until it dies young and in debt are pretty much guaranteed.)  I'm interested to see what kind of hybrid monster this becomes.

I am setting my expectations on Tank.  If my expectations are low enough, I can usually enjoy almost anything.  But the CGI in the promo poster makes me think I may need a new sublevel for low expectations . . .  I set my expectations low, but I pray that they make something powerful and coherent, dark and bitter but ultimately not devoid of hope.

What are your thoughts about the movie?  And what made you like the book?

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