Ender's Game Becomes a Movie?

[yakking]

(FYI, that is a book by Orson Scott Card. If you haven't read any of his books, your life up till now has been wasted. Get out of the chair, go to the nearest book store, and read his work)
Lots of my friends are saying Card is making Ender's game into a movie. Thoughts?
Obviously, it will be nigh impossible to portray Ender. He is basically the perfect person. Though he is supposedly based off Card's son. Also, since the cast would be virtually all kids, it will be very interesting to see how well they can get 6 year olds to act.
Should they make it a movie? Or not?

[UmbreonMatt]

yakking Wrote:Should they make it a movie? Or not?

"Should they" isn't much of an issue, seeing as they're already going ahead with it. '08 release, I believe. All we can hope for is for it to stay true to the source material, and given Hollywood's track record, the outlook looks bleak. The novel itself doesn't (IMO, as well as that of others I know) carry much mainstream appeal, so Hollywood, spying a lucrative 4 (or more) book franchise, is likely to pervert it. Time will tell though.

yakking Wrote:Obviously, it will be nigh impossible to portray Ender. He is basically the perfect person.

Eh, I didn't quite get that impression, lol. And...

yakking Wrote:Also, since the cast would be virtually all kids, it will be very interesting to see how well they can get 6 year olds to act.

Thing is, using child actors more often than not produces better acting, seeing as the kids have to go through large-scale auditions to nail their parts, as opposed to the adults (Oh! Big name! Come on in!). They'll probably be using older kids for the parts though, hopefully not by too much. And yeah, whoever manages to pull off Ender will likely have a successful acting career ahead of him. Good luck to them finding someone to play him in the sequels, heh.

I'm just going to wait and see. I enjoyed the novels, but I'm not some hardcore fan who'll go postal if the movie turns out differently from the original.

(And off-topic, I picked up Ender's Game not because of any plaudits on its part. I just happened to read a brief description of the guy and went, "hey, I like what this guy has to say, let's check out what he's written". And I hear some people find the word 'bugger' offensive. One wonders how they're going to deal with it.)

[yoshi]

I hated Ender's Game. No way I'm seeing this movie.

For the kids acting, if they could get all of them to do Lord of the Flies, they can do Ender's Game.

[+darwin]

Hollywood is simply digging around for the next Harry Potter... This COULD be successful, but there's also the possibility of too many cooks spoiling the pot. From what i've read, the next Narnia movie is supposed to be an absolute mess because the bigger the budget, the more executives tend to meddle. I'm being cynical, but i'm not getting my hopes up just yet

[Shattered Rift]

Ender wasn't perfect so much as he was more intelligent than most adults. Bean, on the other hand...

And didn't the kids age a good six years over the course of the book? More than that, maybe? They might end up needing to pretend it wasn't as long a time as in the books. That alteration I wouldn't mind, but with Hollywood in charge of this we're bound to end up with some crappy love story between Ender and Petra, which won't be even close to right. ::.Avoids going into a rant that would include spoilers.::

If they get the Battle Room and the ship fighting scenes right (how could they screw that up after years of practice with Star Wars and Star Trek?), the movie will probably be able to "appear" as an action movie. I'm curious how they'll deal with...

the murder in the book, though.

And they have a potential six more movies after this. Are people forgetting the Shadow Saga? (Shame they wouldn't be able to pull off using Ender's Shadow as a movie. ... they might have to, actually, since it covers so much of the background in Bean's life.)

[sirhatter]

I am excited.

THe sequels to ender's game were dissappointing. the first book in the series though was amazing.

Long Live Ender.

[kagemucha]

Haley Joel Osment (The little boy in Sixth Sense) would be the ideal Ender for me.

Wikipedia actually states that the script is a "fusion between Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow". So the whole "Shadow Saga" can definitely be pulled off.

In any case, I'm excited. Harry Potter v. Star Wars = Awesomeness.

[Shattered Rift]

You can't combine them without overly focusing on Bean, though... and telling two people's stories is just too much in one movie. On the bright side, Ender's white, and Bean is some mix of African and something else, so it shouldn't be difficult to tell them apart.

[yakking]

Isn't Card making a book, Shadows in Flight that unites Ender with Bean's Children, and wraps the story up?
Ender isn't so much perfect, as he has a perfect understanding of human psychology.
I was just worried about them screwing with the plot, and having a love story or some such put in there. (I am a die hard fan, and I just think this will be a disaster)

[Shattered Rift]

Card released a book a couple months ago (can't recall the title of it) that was a hundred-page long bout of religious tolerance. I don't know if he's working on the story to unite Ender with Bean's children, but he did want to at one point (two or three years ago after he finished Shadow of the Giant). (As I recall, that's not exactly the right premise. But saying more would lead to spoilers.)

[Lord_owlstar]

* Lord_owlstar shoots yoshi
How could you not like ender's game?

They could possibly hire midget actors. for the parts.

I really wish that hollywood would stay true to the plot though, If they're to keep true to the book, it won't be for children under 10. They'll probably try to market it to them anyways.