Ender's Game: More thoughts

SPLOILERS!!!!!!!!

(And unlike the original review, I'm just going to flat-out give away the ending here.)
Now, before I savage this thing some more, there is a point I want to make:

While my general style is to accentuate the negative, I gave the film a B-. That's higher than a C. I liked it, I wanted to love it, but it had some problems. In an earlier post I linked to the Red Letter Media review and it was clear that they Just Didn't Get It. In contrast, Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic, but he didn't review it in that persona) liked it. Neither the RLM guys nor Doug read the book before seeing the film, by the way, so it's not a case of "oh, the lit nerds will love it and the illiterate popcorn hogs will hate it" or vice-versa.  My overall reaction is a lot closer to Walker's than it is to Mike and Jay's.  That said, I can't say I liked it more than the film version of The Hunger Games. (That said, I disagree wholeheartedly with the notion that it is or should be described as "The Hunger Games in space," for reasons I may very well dedicate an entire blog post to.)

The Stupid Stupid STUPID Ending
I said in my review that I thought the ending scene was stupid because Ender finds this dying formic queen literally right outside the most important military base in the universe. Let me expand on that.

This scene isn't in the book. I'd really like to just quote, say, the last five pages of the book to demonstrate what an utter travesty this scene is, but I feel that would get me in trouble.

So in the film the dying queen pokes Ender with her claw and seems like she's about to kill him and he just stands there. He'd totally let her skewer his neck, but then she retracts it. Is she forgiving him? Because some reviewers have insisted on reading it that way.  Killing Ender gains her nothing.  Somebody would come looking for him, find the nest, smash the last egg. Now, I admit that I was busy thinking man, this is really stupid, and I infinitely prefer the way the book did it, so I wasn't really paying the utmost attention to what was going on in that scene, but "forgiveness" didn't really occur to me.

And there's another reason that I wasn't thinking about the queen forgiving Ender because... well, it's another I'm A Pretentious Jerk Who Read The Book In Seventh Grade reason. Sorry.  Y'see, forgiveness does play into that scene in the book, but not at all the way it might in the film. Ender is able to tap into the egg/larva/pupa/whatever's ancestral memory and see the Third Invasion from the formics' eyes:

There was no memory of pain or fear, though.  What the hive-queen felt was sadness, a sense of resignation. She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought. We will surely die.

Here's why the "forgiveness" reversal really rankles: Because the film takes the book's morality and reverses it.  The book is upfront about this: the military did what it thought, based on the information it had, it had to do. The bugs were the aggressors, and they did not go quietly.  In both stories, they tried to kill us, and then we killed them. I was only a few years older than Ender when I read the book for the first time, and even I got that there was nothing to forgive. The only person who needed to seek forgiveness was Graff, and even then only for tearing Ender's soul apart, not for the whole xenocide thing. Again, to make this clear, because the film paints Graff as a villain: he did what, as far as he knew, he had to do. That doesn't excuse him entirely, but I feel a lot more sympathy for Ender than I do for the bugs.

The Bathroom Scene
Since I used to maintain that the reason this film could never get made was because a major plot point involves two pre-teenage boys fighting naked in a bathroom, I figured I might as well address how the film handles it.

In the book, after Ender humiliates him in the Battle Room, Bonzo shows up with a gang of thugs to ambush Ender in the shower and beat the snot out of him. Ender goads him into fighting him in a fair fight, and that means getting naked (insert snide comment about the gay lobby boycotting this film here). Ender's covered in soap, though, so Bonzo can't grab him, and Ender eventually, um, wins.

In the film, after Ender humiliates Bonzo in the Battle Room - in a battle that Bonzo didn't even participate in in the book, because the adaptation compresses a lot, which isn't necessarily a bad thing - Bonzo and two thugs ambush Ender in the bathroom, and Ender goads Bonzo into fighting one on one. But in this version, Bonzo's still fully dressed and Ender's wearing his towel, because let's be realistic, that's about the only way you can shoot that scene. So the film tries to compensate by having Ender soap up his arm. Um, okay, that just looks silly.

The scene needs to happen, at least I thought, because it hammers home the whole "Ender can't know what the stakes really are" theme that makes the final act so powerful. Ender has no idea that he's a killer, right up until Graff tells him, "oh by the way, that wasn't Starcraft." But in the film, the scene is cheapened anyway because - maybe I have to go back and watch that scene with Val on the lake again, but - I'm convinced that Bonzo actually lives. So what was the point of including it?

Speaker For The Dead??!?!?!!?
No way in hell. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Ender's Game's box office returns being about half its budget. Speaker is not so much a sequel to Ender's Game as it is, uh...

Let me start over.  Imagine that instead of being The Empire Strikes Back, the sequel to Star Wars was more like The Godfather, Part II.   I mean, it continues Ender's story, but it is an extremely different story.

What I consider to be the main problem
To re-state something I might not have made clear in the original review: The climax comes and goes, and if you're unfamiliar with the story (and don't see all the foreshadowing) then it's gone before Harrison Ford tells you "oh, that was the climax." If you don't know the twist ahead of time (and, okay, here I'll agree with the RLM guys that it was fairly easy to see coming), there's no tension. The book got around this problem by really presenting Ender as being completely burnt the frak out by the time he rolled around to the final game, and OSC tricked us by making us think the dramatic tension was "is Ender just going to throw the game, or is he going to see it through?" But that's totally absent in the film.