I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
The Enders Game movie. Just WTF, every part of it was worse than the book.
Except possibly Harrison Ford. He is great as a gruff arsehole, past his prime, but still awesome.
Just looked it up on IMDb, how can it possibly have a 6.6?
Honestly, it was a book that should have been two movies. You make the first movie end with Ender’s team winning in the academy. You them make the second movie’s depiction of the battles more abstract so you prepare the audience for another triumphant win, just to find out that Ender committed a genocide.
The whole point of the book, is Ender wrestling with the fact that he was being trained to commit a genocide on the largest scale; then the bombshell, oh BTW that last ‘training’ was the real thing, “yay we won!!!”.
The next book is Ender coming to grips with and trying to find some recourse for his crime.
The movie glosses over all of the nuance and complexity.
Which is why I think a two book adaptation works better in this case.
The movie does a better job in the first half, where the use of Ender is more abstract and the movie can use the extra time to lay out some of Ender’s ideas on when to use force. Then, the climax of the movie is Ender winning the final academy battle and setting up expectations in the next movie.
A whole movie focusing on the campaign, obscuring the campaign to make it seem to Ender and the audience that this is more training, and using the first movie’s pacing as a way to set up audience expectations. It also gives time for Ender on screen to see this nuance and complexity so the audience comes into the final battle understanding Ender’s viewpoint before the rug pull.