S03E16 — Ender’s Game

SPOILER ALERT: This episode and transcript below contains major spoilers for Ender’s Game.

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Featuring hosts Timothy Haynes, Donna Haynes, Rebekah Edwards, and T. Josiah Haynes.

Alright baby listeners… this week we’re heading to Battle School. 🚀

We’re talking Ender’s Game — the beloved sci-fi classic that somehow manages to be about genius children in space while also being deeply upsetting the entire time.

We break down the massive differences between the book and the 2013 movie adaptation, including why the film feels way more like a YA blockbuster, why the book’s political themes hit so much harder, and why aging the kids up changes basically everything.

Plus:
• why the “meat shield” strategy became an accidental running joke
• whether Asa Butterfield was the right casting choice
• why the battle school timeline makes absolutely no sense in the movie
• and how this story weirdly predicted social media decades early

Baby listeners… this one got philosophical, chaotic, and just a little bit spicy.

Final Verdicts

If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, we recommend waiting to read our verdicts. (But you’re probably grown, so do what you want!)

The book turns Ender’s Game into a chilling political sci-fi story about manipulation, war, and the terrifying cost of turning children into soldiers. The movie keeps the big ideas and cool visuals but softens the darker themes, making it feel more like a YA sci-fi adventure than the deeply unsettling story Card originally wrote.

Donna: The book was better.
– Book Score: 7/10
– Film Score: 2/10

Rebekah: The book was better.
– Book Score: 9/10
– Film Score: 7.5/10

Josiah: The book was better.
– Book Score: 9.5/10
– Film Score 4/10

Tim: The book was better.
– Book Score: 7/10
– Film Score 6.5/10

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Full Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Rebekah: Guys- I have died … guess what? Oh. So, no, what? Sorry, I thought we were singing. No. Different, different episode. 

[00:00:08] Josiah: Sorry about 

[00:00:09] Rebekah: that. Now, okay. 

[00:00:10] Tim: Goodbye and thanks for all the deaths. 

[00:00:12] Rebekah: Um, also a different episode. I have great news. Okay. Project Hail Mary has now made our top three episodes performance within the first- Yay

seven days. Wow. Yay. What? And I would like to make the announcement that we have surpassed 5,000 all-time downloads. Yay. Yeah. Yes. Woo. 

[00:00:34] Josiah: Thank you. Thank you all. Truly.

[00:00:53] Rebekah: Okay, we are here today to discuss the combining of Ender’s Game and this podcast in holy podcast episode, ep- episodenody. Yeah. I don’t know what I’m saying. 

[00:01:07] Tim: Not set aside, not holy at all. It 

[00:01:10] Rebekah: is not a holy thing. 

[00:01:11] Tim: Nothing. 

[00:01:12] Rebekah: But we are here to talk about Ender’s Game. 

[00:01:14] Tim: W- H-O-L-L-Y. 

[00:01:16] Rebekah: Which apparently is going to be having some spicy takes, uh, but not spicy movies because it’s made for children, and there’s no sex in this.

So, in way of a content warning, there is many much, uh, unaliving themes for sure. Unaliving themes. Uh, we will be spoiling Ender’s Game, the 2013 film and the first book in Ender’s Quintet. We may also discuss very mild spoilers from the rest of the series, although I don’t know if anyone but me has read beyond th- this book in the series.

I think Dad may. When 

[00:01:48] Josiah: did you read beyond? 

[00:01:49] Rebekah: Several years ago. Yeah, I’ve read the first three. Josh has read the first four of the five books. So I am considering reading beyond now. I do remember the second book, which is Speaker for the Dead, I really liked. But anyway, we are not there yet. We are neither here nor there.

In fact, where we are is at our fun fact. The fun fact for today: are you good at deep strategy games? And if so, tell us why you keep beating Rebecca in them. 

[00:02:14] Donna: Please let me go first because- 

[00:02:16] Rebekah: Please … 

[00:02:16] Donna: my answer is the shortest of everyone’s. It includes two letters: no. 

[00:02:20] Rebekah: Every time we pull out the games, Mom is like, “Oh, I love spending time with you.”

[00:02:25] Donna: I’m like, “But don’t you do it.” “I like watching you all play. Woo.” There, I, let me say this. I don’t mind trying. The problem is I just feel like you all just have to tell me what to do. Well, then that’s not me playing. That’s you telling me what to do. And I just feel, I don’t, that’s not fun for you, and I don’t, doesn’t do me any good.

‘Cause what are you trying to do? Are you trying to help me to beat you? No, I don’t think you’re trying to do that. That’s like a girl doing your hair. She’s never gonna make you as pretty as she is. 

[00:02:54] Rebekah: You know what? You do you, Piggy 

[00:02:56] Josiah: We’ve already started with the spicy takes. Well, I like deep strategy games.

Uh, Evan, Charlotte, and I, we play Dune Imperium. We like some- 

[00:03:06] Rebekah: My light is sitting on my copy of Dune Imperium right now 

[00:03:09] Josiah: Oh my goodness. Well, we gotta play sometime. Okay. Um, w- love the Dune games. We got, uh, a lot of Dominion, some deep Dominion, uh, expansion packs, the original deck builder. There’s a lot of good strategy games out there.

Uh, Rebecca might mention Scythe. I like, I like the Red Rising game. Is that deep strategy? Uh, 

[00:03:33] Rebekah: I would call it strategy. I don’t know if it’s like… There was a, a video on YouTube about, like, the definitions of strategy games and the varying levels of strategy- 

[00:03:41] Josiah: Yeah … 

[00:03:42] Rebekah: that I thought was really interesting 

[00:03:43] Josiah: I think it got recommended to both of us 

[00:03:45] Rebekah: Yeah, which tells you enough of it you need to know about me.

I like strategy games. Like, when it comes to board games, I like something that is, like, beyond Catan. I don’t wanna have to play it for six hours, but I will if it’s, like, good enough. Do you know what I mean? Like, if I like a game enough. I don’t know that I would say I’m good at them, though. I am not, uh…

I’m no Ender Wiggin, if you will. But Josh is better at strategy games than me. I enjoy playing them and I enjoy learning them. I’m usually… Like, I can win the first time, but if I have to play the same game again with the same people, I generally will not win after that because once other people get an idea of how to do the strategy, I, like, don’t care en- Like, Josh makes notes about Scythe, for instance.

He has a note about how to win from every faction with, like, the step-by-step- Oh, wow … instructions of what to do. I just don’t… I feel like I lose interest by the time you get to that point, so. 

[00:04:39] Donna: I like playing the Castles game. I’m not necessarily super good at it, but I think it’s fun. 

[00:04:45] Rebekah: By the way, if you are a board game person watching this episode, Castles of Mad King Ludwig is my favorite board game.

It’s wonderful. 

[00:04:51] Tim: I don’t know that I’m particularly good at deep strategy games. I enjoy games like Monopoly was a strategy game of sorts. Um, I have played Stratego as well, which is a strategy game. There are other strategy games that I like, and I can’t remember the name 

[00:05:06] Josiah: of it. Yeah, it was a Kickstarter campaign.

I think it was the Age of Comics. 

[00:05:13] Tim: Age of Comics. I think that’s right. Mm-hmm. That sounds 

[00:05:14] Josiah: like- Very cool … 

[00:05:15] Tim: I thoroughly enjoyed it every time we’ve played it. If a game is going to take four-plus hours minimum, that’s really difficult. 

[00:05:22] Rebekah: All right, Dad, would you like to tell us a little about what Ender’s Game is?

[00:05:28] Tim: Ender is the name of a person So the novel and film are both centered around Ender Wiggin. Ender is not his real name. Ender is his nickname. 

[00:05:40] Rebekah: In the film, they make it his middle name so that it’s clearer. Like, instead of… They don’t make it a nickname. 

[00:05:46] Tim: That’s interesting. Well, he is a genius child, six years old at the start of the novel, 10 years old in the film, who is recruited by the International Fleet, or IF to train and hopefully lead an army against the invasion of an alien race of bug-like creatures.

They’re large, not little bugs. They’re bigger than human being bugs. Taken from his family, Ender is isolated and groomed to be a ruthless commander using his unusually high intelligence, creativity, and compassion to strategize clever battle and attack plans. He moves through the ranks quickly, passing many other children from six years old up to young adolescents, and eventually is respected by many of the children who are proud to follow his lead into battle.

After refusing to continue several years into his training, he’s convinced by his sister Valentine, whom he dearly loves, to stay the course and fulfill his destiny. He’s moved to a space station and trained by Mazer Rackham, the only other commander to ever significantly challenge the buggers, Formics as they’re exclusively called in the film.

Ender and the child soldiers he’d trained with earlier win every battle scenario during command school. However, they soon discover these computerized scenarios aren’t games. Ender and his team have actually obliterated the Formic homeworld in real life. Ender finishes the story sympathetic to the aliens he genocided, looking for a way to restart the Formic race.

It is interesting. The book is a very long period of time. The movie is a very compressed period of time. 

[00:07:22] Rebekah: So I will say this is much, much darker of a film. In fact, I’m just going to start kind of getting us into some setting changes here. The film is dark, but the book is far darker, I would say. So the book itself, it’s such an odd juxtaposition because it has to do with children, but it’s clear from early on that it’s like it’s about children because they are malleable in a different way.

It is not a book for children. And I think that this is one of the ways that the film first diverges like from the book in a way that I’m not sure worked. I mean, I think we will probably discover for larger audiences it probably didn’t work. For instance, we get these conversations in the book between the commander that’s basically raising him to be the commander they want.

And in the film, it’s actually some of it is actually said directly to Ender or to the audience on screen that Ender must not ever think that someone will ever come to his aid. No adults will ever help him. And the idea is essentially kind of a political and societal one where no longer is it a war crime to use children for these purposes.

Children, in fact, are able to make quicker and more kind of ruthless decisions in war as they push off formidable bugger armies that they insist are coming back to attack and et cetera, et cetera. The movie kind of felt like it was trying to lean into Hunger Games tropes, like where it was trying to be like a dark YA kind of thing because it starred children.

I think that they didn’t get into the deep evils of some of what the, the book did And so I don’t know if I think it was a good choice, but I do think that it was a different option. 

[00:09:02] Josiah: Yeah, I, I got Harry Potter vibes too with the kids going to school and being faced with a big, dark threat. 

[00:09:09] Rebekah: Yeah. 

[00:09:10] Donna: My thought on Hunger Games of, we, Dad and I just actually discussed this this afternoon, I felt like they did the same thing with Ender they did with Katniss.

“You’re the one we wanna use, but we’re not gonna tell you what we’re gonna do because you couldn’t handle it. You wouldn’t,” blah, blah. However, she started this at 16. He was six in the book. That was off-putting to me, and I get the change in the societal thing. It didn’t, you know, the whole world building of you can only have two children, and somehow they were able to have three, and that didn’t, that didn’t really bother me as far as that’s that reality.

But something about him being six, I’m like, “Come on.” 

[00:09:48] Rebekah: Yeah. I mean, all of the kids are supposed to be younger in the book than they were in the film. So at the beginning of the film, Ender’s six, Valentine’s eight, Peter I think is 10, the brother. Although we barely see Peter. We’ll talk about that. He is nine when he meets up with Valentine at the lake.

In general, I think we end up going about five years to a sixth before kinda the epilogue periods of time. But I had the exact same thought of like, “He’s six?” I’d read the book. This is my second or maybe the second time reading the book. I’ve seen this movie a ton. Reading the book, it, like, disturbed me in a way I was uncomfortable with, which I can understand audiences probably would have been as well.

[00:10:24] Josiah: Yeah. I was taken aback by him being six at the beginning of the novel. And, you know, ke- I kept forgetting it because he was having such mature conversations and having to make mature decisions. And then I really liked when Orson Scott Card had Ender cry multiple times while he was trying to make this decision about going back to battle school and everything.

He commented something like, “I hated to ever cry in front of everyone, and I’d done it three times t- just in today.” And I was like, “Oh, my goodness. He’s a six-year-old really trying not to be a six-year-old.” 

[00:11:03] Rebekah: It’s clear that they’re using genetic modification and some genetic engineering in terms of new children being born because these children, all three of them, Ender and his brother and sister, were engineered geniuses.

To be born geniuses so that they would be far more advanced than adults. 

[00:11:20] Tim: And I get that kind of thing, but when I was reading the book initially, six years old, it’s just too fantastical to believe. It, it’s just beyond believable. Well, I understand the child thing and all that, but it just, it took it out for me right from the beginning when I first read it.

But I enjoyed the book, for some parts of the book I should say. In the film, it seemed like there were less- of the realities of the modern world than there were in the book. The book was pretty heavily political in ways, but the film seemed to avoid that primarily. 

[00:11:57] Rebekah: You see the tech, and I think that it made it clear that it was the future.

Like, this is not modern day. It didn’t look so different that everything was completely shifted into this futuristic thing. So it was like near-ish future. You saw enough of that to understand, but they jump you into the action of like what’s going on, and they skip a lot of the politics and culture things.

Like, there was a lot about his, Ender’s parents and, like, their religious background, and the way that religion is frowned upon, and the fact that Poland is still a non-compliant country when it comes to religion and to the fact that you can only have two children. And like, there’s all these, like, culture and political things because this book was written to be an incredibly, like, politically driven novel.

[00:12:39] Tim: It definitely is supposed to make a political statement, so the movie fails to do that specifically. 

[00:12:44] Josiah: I don’t know how controversial it would’ve been for the filmmakers to s- declare that child soldiers are bad. ‘Cause honestly, the film language to me, so much of the time is saying, “Look how cool it would be to be in battle school,” when I think that Orson was not going for that.

[00:13:02] Tim: He was opposed to that kind of thing, I think. That’s what his political bent was. But I think with the film bumping them up at least five years, I think even Ender when he started looked like he was 12. 

[00:13:13] Rebekah: They definitely made him a lot older. Here’s maybe one thought. By the end of the book, it fel- it felt very, like, alarming when you’re just still going, “Oh my gosh, this kid hasn’t even gotten old enough to, like, finish being in regular school.

He can’t vote. He can’t own anything.” Like, Card wrote the book maybe in a way that was supposed to feel devastating to really encounter Ender’s age. I think part of why it kind of looks cool is because maybe to age the kids up to avoid some of the horror of making them literally child soldiers, which should be a- horrifying thing to a modern audience.

Like, in order to do that, to remove one part of the horror, you then accidentally kind of incentivize children to want to do these things. It did not have maybe the desired effect, or it had a, a side effect that wasn’t expected. 

[00:14:01] Tim: In the normal course of their aging through the school, although Ender was bumped ahead a number of times, they should have been 17-ish by the time they graduated Battle School, which you can enter the army when you’re 18.

So the movie kind of took the tack, this is just a pre-military school. 

[00:14:21] Rebekah: There’s even a point at which Valentine, when she and Peter, like, get their chapter later on, there’s a point at which she says something. He’s, like, s- saying something about control or whatever, and Valentine goes, “I have not even started my monthly cycle yet.”

And I was like, “Wait. Wait, what?” Mm-hmm. And so I looked it up, and she was still, like, 10. And I thought, “Oh, my gosh. What is happening?” Like, it was definitely kind of alarming. 

[00:14:45] Josiah: Similar moment near the end of the novel when Ender goes through a room, I think at Command School, so near the end of the novel, and he mentions that he went into a room and the boys were making a dirty joke that he couldn’t even begin to understand.

[00:15:02] Tim: Well, I do believe that Card was trying to make a political statement. He was doing what science fiction often tries to do, what’s referred to as hard science fiction, and that’s taking a hard topic, putting it in the future so that we can examine it without worrying about the lens of today. You know, we’re not talking about this president.

We’re not talking about that country’s military. We’re not talking about this particular situation. Instead, we’re taking it and isolating the subject, putting it in the future so we can look at it with new eyes and say, “Oh, wait a minute. That doesn’t sound good.” I think that was his intention as hard science fiction.

[00:15:42] Josiah: So another thing that, uh, Card has in his novel is the Buggers. Of course, they call them Buggers in the book. They never call them that in the film. They are called Formics, which is their scientific name in later books. But they, uh, they never say Formic in Ender’s Game. I haven’t read the books, but apparently i- in the second, third, fourth book, they start using Formic more commonly.

Possibly as a, uh, relation to formic acid found in the venom of ants. They’re very ant-like. I wonder if they didn’t use the term Bugger because that is a, a foul word in British vernacular. 

[00:16:21] Rebekah: That makes sense. I mean, that would be one reason to avoid it. Although maybe it was just sequels, like setting up for sequels.

It was just easier to be clear because they do end up calling them the Formics, and it’s more confusing by the third movie to, like, change the language of a- an alien race you’ve set up. 

[00:16:36] Tim: I do agree, though, that because it is primarily, first, for an English-speaking audience, part of that English-speaking audience is British and will understand that vernacular, and that will color the way that they hear it.

[00:16:51] Josiah: It is kind of meant as a pejorative, as an offensive term for the bug people. So I think it a- it’s appropriate because using it in the way that a British person would use it is entirely accurate to how they feel about the Formics. 

[00:17:06] Donna: Then the last of our setting changes, just wanna mention, the North Carolina lake where Ender goes kinda between one school going into a higher level of command school.

It’s at a North Carolina lake, and it looks a little more northern, like maybe Montana or Alaska. Now, the movie was actually filmed in New Orleans, but the lake scene was shot in British Columbia. 

[00:17:30] Tim: I think I have an idea about why that location had to change. They probably wanted a more pristine future.

Everybody’s driving electric cars. Population is reduced down to two children, and you have to get special permission to have a third, and that’s very, very unusual. And most of the world has done that. So you go to a place that’s even less inhabited, a place like British Columbia, where you’re not in a place that’s really grown up.

You can do really far shots, and it’s like it’s completely timber covered and water as far as the eye can see. 

[00:18:05] Donna: A very, very small, completely unimportant part of the plot, okay? But I kinda missed it in the movie. In the scene when he and Valentine are out on the lake, they’re on this wooden raft, and I thought it was interesting in the book they made this deal, this big deal about the fact that he would only talk to her On a raft that he built himself of completely non-metallic or any kinda thing that could carry listening device and anything.

You know, I thought that was k- very interesting. Showed you a little bit more of his thinking process and just his attention to detail. But I did like the fact that in the film they were on a very makeshift raft and it’s, like I said, it’s not s- not really important to anything. Uh, there was one little piece of the book that I thought was interesting that they included.

[00:18:57] Rebekah: I thought it was interesting. They did bring in a little bit of the communication stuff to the film, where he thought he was talking to his sister and all of that, and he wasn’t. But I do think in the book you get a lot more of the stark, like, I am constantly watched and controlled, and my life is not my own.

And, like, again, it, it kind of points more towards those, like, deeper themes that the movie just, like, didn’t really explore that much. 

[00:19:22] Tim: And the movie was 13 years ago at this point? 

[00:19:24] Rebekah: That’s correct. It came out right in the smack dab middle of Hunger Games. It does have, like, the Katniss vibes. Like, you definitely hit the nail on the head with that.

But I think one of my complaints about the third Hunger Games movie was unlike the book, they didn’t make Katniss as, like, almost catatonic, unhinged, cannot, like, function any longer. And I thought, you know, Ender becomes that kinda person, and they took out a lot of that as well, which I thought was interesting.

[00:19:51] Josiah: But also Asa Butterfield is no Jennifer Lawrence. Can we talk about Asa Butterfield being bad? I remember hating Hugo, mainly ’cause he was in it. 

[00:20:01] Donna: Let’s just say whatever genius casting director put Hailee Steinfeld with Asa Butterfield and expected him to be the star, ’cause she out-acted him every time she was on the screen.

And I don’t even know that I’m a huge Hailee Steinfeld fan, but when they were on the screen together, she commanded the screen more than him. 

[00:20:19] Josiah: You know, talking about characterization, film Ender is, I feel like, less emotional in some ways, especially at the beginning of his arc. He’s not, like, crying like six-year-old book Ender is.

He’s older, so maybe they took it off, took it out to make him feel older than six years old. I don’t know. But he’s also more emotional in other ways. During battle school in the film, he was letting things aggravate him, and he was showing childish frustration at little things. I really did not like Asa Butterfield’s portrayal or how the director told or let Asa Butterfield act.

I was also bothered by, like, in the film, he was not a genius commander. It was just less convincing. Some of this is just, like, I don’t know how on earth they would’ve portrayed this in the film. His genius plan in the movie is meat shield. Just get- Meat shield … a bunch of people to surround your important thing.

He does it in the battle room and then he uses that at the end And I’m just thinking like, did no adult commander ever think of meat shield before Ender? 

[00:21:33] Tim: Have you ever heard of Normandy? That’s exactly what that was. You could throw enough bodies at it, you would eventually win. 

[00:21:40] Josiah: In the book, Ender trained his companions to think on different planes than the enemy.

He said a few different times that the enemy gate is down, even though by conventional standards it was forward, but it was in a zero-G environment. And then this kinda comes back in at the final battle as well. So it doesn’t really matter what direction you think is down. Any direction can be any direction ’cause you’re in zero-G gravity.

Thinking like that, it was… Some of it was morale, some of it was just mental. It just felt easier to go down towards the enemy gate, and you were a smaller target. But he also empowered his sub-commanders, his toons, and his squadron leaders to make independent decisions. He trained them to be little Enders so he didn’t have to micromanage them.

This reminded me of Brad Pitt in F1, actually. He bent the unspoken rules to achieve victory no matter what. The reason I, I like that movie more than most sports movies is ’cause Brad Pitt, during the whole film, is like, “Well, yeah, everyone does it this way, but it’s not actually in the rules, so I’m just gonna do it a different way and there’s literally nothing they can legally do to stop me.”

And, uh, Ender does the same thing where technically the practice in these war games in the zero-G environment is to basically defeat every enemy and then you ceremoniously put four of your people’s helmets at each corner of the gate or something like this, and that triggers the vic- the computer system to say, “Okay, you won.”

He even said, “Well, this will only work once,” but it was a desperate measure. Basically sacrificed a bunch of people, but they were in positions where even though they were frozen, they could put their helmets at the corners of the enemy gate. And even though all of them were basically incapacitated, the computer recognized it as a victory for Ender.

So it’s, th-this kind of creativity and intelligence is on display in the book. A-and importantly, I don’t know if this was well covered in the movie. It wasn’t the worst in the world, but in the book they emphasize that he needed empathy to understand the battlefield from his enemy’s perspective. This was the whole reason that his older brother Peter was not the savior of the world, because he was so ruthless but he had no empathy, so he could not see from the enemy’s perspective.

And so all of these elements of Ender, Orson did a pretty good job of convincing me by showing, not telling, that Ender is a genius commander that’s very creative. And there was very little of that In the film 

[00:24:26] Donna: It didn’t translate. 

[00:24:27] Rebekah: Yeah, I think they, like, attempted to kind of spoon feed you a tiny bit of it.

The film runtime felt about right for what it was, you know, with all of its faults that it did have. I think that that would have been difficult, especially because they tried to pull it down into, like, YA or even, like, teen book i- or film rather than kind of the very adult film that it was. I think it would have been harder to communicate that in a way that made sense.

[00:24:54] Josiah: First of all, montage. Not a corny one, but there were not enough montages in this movie. 

[00:24:59] Rebekah: I would agree with that. 

[00:25:00] Josiah: The worst example, in my opinion, I watched the movie while I was in the middle of the book, and this was about the time that it switched over, and I was shocked when he was given Dragon Army the same day that he did the battle against two armies.

Which in the book, and in the film, is the last thing he does at battle school before being promoted. He was in charge of Dragon Army for one battle for one day before he was promoted to command school. 

[00:25:31] Tim: I agree, a montage would have been wonderful to do the time change. Remember, I’m the person in Harry Potter that doesn’t realize that time is changing just because the bird flies up into the sky and suddenly there’s some snow.

How am I supposed to know that three or four months have passed? I need more clues. So for me, the entire film happened in the course of about four months from start to finish. 

[00:25:58] Rebekah: Are you talking about Ender’s Game? 

[00:25:59] Tim: Yes. 

[00:26:00] Rebekah: Okay. Nope. 

[00:26:00] Tim: Yes. 

[00:26:01] Rebekah: Do you wanna know the actual truth? So- 

[00:26:03] Tim: What did they think they were doing?

[00:26:05] Rebekah: I caught this. I’ve never noticed it before, and I’ve… This is probably the 10th or 12th time I’ve seen this movie. In the film, this is, like, I mean, Ender is not even… He’s barely been at school. He’s… I, I think he’s in Bonzo’s army at this point, and you’re in the room with just Commander Graff, and he’s talking to the psychologist character.

I’ve n- I never did get the character’s name. Anderson. Anderson. General Anderson. But Anderson was a different person in the b- Anyway, it doesn’t matter. 

[00:26:33] Donna: Yes. 

[00:26:34] Rebekah: Uh, Viola Davis. Yeah, that’s right. Yes. So they’re talking, and he, like, s- Graff turns around, and he, like, looks all emotionally at the screen in front of him, and it shows the Formic home planet and their forces, like, going towards it.

And there is a clock, and it says their forces will be there in 28 days. 

[00:26:55] Tim: That was into the time. I, and I was being generous when I said the whole movie takes place in no more than four months. 

[00:27:02] Rebekah: Yeah. 

[00:27:03] Tim: It, it is too compressed in time. 

[00:27:05] Rebekah: Well, and then he goes into, like, stasis when he’s on the ship from Earth- Yeah

where he met with Valentine at the lake, and then they put him in stasis to get there. So I, when I saw that with Graff, I was like, oh, so with- It’s like a month long? Like, is this whole movie two months long? Like, I don’t get it. So maybe they had their forces wait. 

[00:27:23] Josiah: I think the stasis was only in the book.

[00:27:25] Rebekah: No, I just watched the movie. They put him in stasis, and then there were, like, time dials, like, going forward as he’s sitting there, and then they put him in stasis again when he gets on his own ship and tells Valentine. We’ll talk about the plot, but they do it twice. But it’s on the way from Earth with the lake stuff into command school.

And I was like, “Wait, but 28 days, like, w- why is he in stasis?” And so they don’t explain a lot of it. I think a lo- basically, a lot of the world-building falls apart, and then you miss out on, like, the strategy and the, that part of the characterization. 

[00:27:57] Tim: Unfortunately, every time you say Book Ender, I think of bookends.

So- Okay … it just throws me off every time. Sorry. Ender, in the film, is more cocky. When he tells the Sergeant Dap that he’s gonna salute him, he’s quicker to disobey. How do you pronounce it? Bonzo? Bonzo. Bonza? They said 

[00:28:14] Rebekah: Bonzo. 

[00:28:15] Tim: Bonzo? Bonzo? 

[00:28:16] Rebekah: Bonzo. It sounds more like bone at the top- Oh, he’s Spanish … ’cause it’s Spanish.

Not Bonzo. 

[00:28:21] Tim: Cor- Yeah … correct. He’s a bonzo, so it doesn’t matter. Exactly. 

[00:28:24] Rebekah: Um, 

[00:28:25] Tim: he’s quicker to disobey his orders in the first battle. Um, his comment about not respecting people just because they outrank him, those are things that you don’t get as much of in the book. 

[00:28:35] Rebekah: He’s not childish like that in the book.

[00:28:37] Tim: He’s a child in the book- 

[00:28:39] Rebekah: Yes … 

[00:28:39] Tim: but he’s not childish. 

[00:28:41] Rebekah: Yeah, his more childlike parts- In the film, he’s older … are the, like, what Josiah mentioned. He cries. Like, there’s a couple of those sorta, sorts of things. He’s very innocent about other things, but … 

[00:28:50] Donna: Would that mean that the producers, the screenwriters, whatever, they think it’s more mature for a child to be smart-aleck and disrespectful?

[00:29:00] Rebekah: It could be that they’re trying to communicate to the audience, “Don’t forget this is a kid. This is not actually an adult,” but they’re putting him in adult situations, and so they make him act more childish to, like, reinforce the point, not necessarily because they see it as actual maturity. 

[00:29:17] Josiah: It felt more to me like they were trying to communicate, “Look how Ender is always right when everyone else is wrong,” which is not necessarily incorrect.

In the book, he starts out as unlikable, and he has to… One of his challenges that he overcomes, and I really liked this part of the book, is that he is not liked be- uh, the command, the Colonel Graff and everyone, they try to make Ender unlikable so that Ender has to learn how to instill camaraderie in his platoons and, and squadrons so that people will follow him more readily and in training and in battle.

And I felt that arc in the book, and there was none of that in the movie. He d- he didn’t deserve it What about his brother, Peter? Do you wanna talk about Peter? Yes. 

[00:30:11] Tim: Well, his huge role should 

[00:30:13] Josiah: be 

[00:30:13] Tim: emphasized. 

[00:30:14] Josiah: Peter is such a central character in the book, partly because Ender thinks about him all the time.

He does get some point of view chapters, obviously, but he is given very little screen time. And becau- the filmmakers know that he gets so little screen time, so they make him go psychopathic in the, the 20 seconds he’s on screen, choking out Ender, uh, for little to no reason. He is supposedly ruthless, but yeah, the, the book actually goes back to Peter and Valentine for the majority of a chapter and, and a few little bits later.

Val and Peter, I, I really liked how the siblings essentially troll the world into letting them become world leaders. How that’s insane how Orson Scott Card predicted the future, not exactly that, but, like, of social media and smartphones and tablets. This was written in the late ’70s and the early ’80s. I mean, computers.

The- home computers were not a thing yet. He was all on social media. He, he just called them desks instead of tablets, which is pretty close. I don’t know. I like how Ender is presented in the beginning of the book as the great leader who will save the world because he is a combo of Val and Peter. He was a third child, which was a big deal because Peter was too much one way, Val was too much the other way.

And then the, in the middle of the novel, Peter and Valentine team up and they become world leaders in a, in a sense. 

[00:31:45] Rebekah: Sense, and also for real. 

[00:31:47] Josiah: I thought it was one of my favorite setups and payoffs that Orson Scott Card told me, “Ender is the perfect leader because he’s a combo of Val and Peter.” But then what Colonel Graff didn’t think about was just having Peter and Val team up.

[00:32:03] Rebekah: Yeah. Nope, that was not considered. 

[00:32:05] Josiah: Yeah, ’cause they’ll still be crazy powerful. 

[00:32:08] Rebekah: Okay. If you’ve never read this book, one of the most chilling parts of it, it’s not necessarily a, a scary film, or book rather But it was, at one point bef- this is all before Ender goes to space at all, Peter, like, has him held down, and in the film they show him, like, “I could kill you right now, you know.”

But then he looks at Ender and Valentine when things cool down, and he looks at them just, like, dead serious and goes, “You’re gonna think I’ve changed, and then one day when you think I’ve changed, you’re gonna remember this conversation, and you’re gonna remember that I’m gonna kill you. And essentially I’m going to kill you, and no one will know that it was even a murder, and you’re gonna just convince yourself that you’re bad for thinking that that could be me.

But I’m standing here telling you right now that I’m gonna do it.” And I was like, “Ooh.” Like, it was so creepy. But it’s not… You know, obviously they cut that all from the film, so it’s… Ooh. 

[00:32:58] Donna: There was a great part in the book when he was talking about his relationship with Valentine, but he said he really wanted Peter to love him.

[00:33:06] Josiah: Yeah. That was to Valentine. 

[00:33:08] Donna: To… Yeah. He was like, “It’s not because I hate him and I want him to have bad things happen to him, or I want any ill to… I don’t wish him any ill will. I want him to love me.” And I thought that was great development of him. It was a great honesty, and it also showed maturity for him at a young age that he could recognize that, because what would you wanna say?

“No, he’s mean. I don’t, I, I don’t like him. I bal-” You know, when you know deep down inside you’re really wanting their affection. So I thought, you know. 

[00:33:36] Tim: I listened to a dramatized version most recently. I, I listened to the books earlier. But the dramatized version does the first part, talks a lot about him being a third, and Peter’s crazy thing there where he says, you know, “You think that I’m gonna kill you now.

Well, I’m not gonna do that, and then I’ll not do it long enough, you won’t…” Whatever. That part was there. Then there was almost nothing after that. He sees Val later on at the end when everything’s getting worse toward the end, but there’s nothing else about the two of them. The world leader stuff, the trolling people, none of that’s in the dramatized version.

[00:34:14] Rebekah: I wonder if that’s because they didn’t do sequel stuff. 

[00:34:17] Tim: Well, I, I wonder, because it follows the movie fairly well. 

[00:34:21] Donna: Their storyline about them crafting all this, and Peter being mad because Valentine got more power than he did quick, more quickly, but then he ends up reusing it again, uh, using it and boosting his own power be- through her without her even realizing what he was doing.

I loved all that, and it was not in the movie. I was like, “Oh, dang.” I don’t know how they coulda put it together that way with what they did with the movie. 

[00:34:51] Tim: Part of it would’ve been crazy. So all you got in the movie was basically that Peter was a psychotic- crazy man and that he loved his sister Val, and she still loved him and talked him into going ahead and finishing.

[00:35:03] Rebekah: I don’t know that I even understand why you would leave Peter in the film at all. 

[00:35:07] Donna: Why put him in there if you’re not gonna do anything with him? 

[00:35:10] Rebekah: I guess he does… There are some comments made about how, like, his brother… Like, you said the same about his brother, and then you realize Ender’s not the same as his brother, and Ender does, like, fear becoming like Peter.

He says, “I feel Peter every time I, like, hurt someone.” I don’t know. I just… It- yeah, it didn’t work. It almost felt like why. 

[00:35:30] Tim: They felt it was important why Ender was the person they chose because he was a, the third. You know, there’s a talented brother, he could’ve been it, talented sister, she could’ve been the one, but we needed him, and they kind of had to explain why they needed Ender instead of the others.

[00:35:48] Donna: Another characterization change, Graff gets fatter in the novel. 

[00:35:55] Rebekah: Like massively fat, he is spilling over all of his clothing fat, people comment on it fat. 

[00:36:00] Donna: Yeah, and then at, and then at the end of the book after the wars, he loses weight. 

[00:36:06] Josiah: And is that because he says to Anderson that he eats when he’s nervous?

[00:36:13] Rebekah: Yes. 

[00:36:13] Donna: Did Harrison Ford call this in and go, “Hey, I’m a little tubby right now. Use me.” 

[00:36:19] Rebekah: They also made Bonzo shorter. He’s supposed to be, like, dominating. In the book, he’s very dominating, and they chose an actor for him that was, like, shorter than Ender by a lot, which kinda defeats his symbolic purpose. I also…

I didn’t even write this down, but there was a kid, one of the others’, like, squadron commanders that was really nice to Ender, and he ended up coming back and being one of his commanders or whatever they called them in the final, like, battle stuff. But they cut… You know, obviously because of it being a film, you see lots of students, but they cut the majority of the students that you meet and get to know other than, like, this core group of even fewer than the core group in the book.

[00:37:02] Josiah: Yeah. There’s Bean. Bean was a little meat puppet. He was the one they tied to a rope, right? So that was, that was- 

[00:37:09] Rebekah: That was his idea in the book … I 

[00:37:10] Josiah: was about to say, that was probably the only good idea in the film. 

[00:37:13] Tim: Well, he’s supposed to be shorter, but he wasn’t in the film, although he was a small person.

He was not as small as the books made him out to be, so that was a change. Bean is the focus of the future novels. 

[00:37:27] Rebekah: His genetic defect that causes him to be very short is a main focus of those novels. He’s Ender’s shadow. So the Ender’s Shadow series is about Bean. 

[00:37:36] Josiah: So let’s talk 

[00:37:37] Rebekah: about some plot and timeline changes.

[00:37:41] Josiah: Uh, Ender’s attack on the boy at his school on the day that his monitor was removed was less violent in the film It, uh, doesn’t seem like it would’ve killed the boy, which it did in the book without Ender knowing it at the time. Uh, it’s kind of vital to the plot that Ender gets super violent, uh, because of his reasoning, not fear or hate, but strategy.

That he was basically winning all the future battles by being super vicious now so that no fights would happen in the future. And that’s kind of what Colonel Graff sees in him and says, “Okay, he might be our guy.” That’s what gets him ex- accelerated into battle school. 

[00:38:22] Rebekah: This in the book was really good and very vague, and then you find out later that he died, okay?

So, uh, in the book it was really well done. In the film, I remember watching it and being like, “Well, there was glass on the ground. I guess it was pretty dangerous.” In the book it was very visceral. In the film it was, like, very soft, and it was the first time I went, “Oh, okay. That’s right. They do, like, really, really soften this for the audience.”

Not sure I loved it, honestly. Another thing that they changed was the zero-G game. They had more complex rules in the book. Like, there’s more people that have to touch around the entrance to the enemy’s gate in addition to one person going through. It’s not just that one person has to get through the gate.

There are, like, I don’t know, three battles in the film maybe, something like that. The book uses a really complex narrative montage to describe years and years of training. Y- honestly, he starts when he’s six, and he is 11, or he’s 10, sorry, by the time he goes to command school in a different place, and he spends six months on Earth.

So there’s, like, three and a half, four years, something like that, where he is, like, in this training, and he starts out as a launchie and then works, you know, his way up and becomes his own commander, whatever. And so the condensing of the film feels really unrealistic. It’s in the first battle where he disobeys his commander, and he gets frozen, but he’s, like, spinning with his arms out, and he’s shooting and all this stuff.

And Commander Graff is like, “Didn’t I tell you he was the one?” And I was like, “What about that told you he was the… I’m… What?” It’s very unrealistic. 

[00:40:02] Josiah: Disobedient and smiling. There was so much smirking in the film. During that scene, there were times when they were, like, all laughing ’cause, “Oh, we’re friends.

We’re having so much fun at school.” And Colonel Graff was smiling like the end of a really, uh, sentimental episode, uh, from, like, the ’70s. Ugh, yeah. He’s my boy. You’re trying to commit genocide. Stop smirking. 

[00:40:27] Donna: Another thing they do, Ender thinks he’s writing to Valentine after he first leaves in the film.

But the book was really clear they cut off c- all communications. 

[00:40:38] Josiah: Well, in the absence of sisterly affection, Petra s- sort of fills in- That, uh, female camaraderie with Ender. In the movie, they have a lot more one-on-one screen time together. In the book, it’s, you know, Petra’s another friend. I really don’t think Ender, in the book, thinks of Petra any differently from any of the guys.

[00:41:03] Donna: They made her to be a very strong soldier in the book. Like, she was very confident and intelligent, and I got the sense that if anybody could really challenge his level, I felt like they were trying to say it was her. 

[00:41:18] Josiah: I always feel like Petra and Bean were up there as his two almost equals. But, uh, yeah, in the movie it was not direct, but it definitely had the subtext of a romantic love story.

I thought it was unnecessary and weird. 

[00:41:39] Tim: Well, and that’s one of the things about changing their ages as opposed to the book. You open the door to romance, whereas a 10-year-old isn’t concerned about that. 

[00:41:51] Donna: We see a lot of that though, don’t we, in film? Even like Hunger Games, like we were talking about before, how they ramp up in the film the possibility of Katniss being with Gale, when really in the books she questions her emotions for Gale, but it’s very clear she’s not romantically inclined.

And like even now, like with Project Hail Mary, there was a lot of criticism that they tried to give some sexual tension to Grace and Strat. Another, uh, plot timeline change, in the Dragon Army at the end of Battle School in the book, they brought launchies back for whatever reason. There, there was justification for it in their heads.

But in the film, they brought back his friends. It was that point where he was excited to see that they’d actually brought his friends back to him, people he knew, rather than him dealing with strangers again. I could see where you wouldn’t wanna bring a bunch of strangers into the film, where in the book you could make that work.

This was their strategy to keep him from being compassionate toward his, towards his friends. He, he, you know, I, I think that had a lot to do with it. They didn’t want him to think, “Oh, do I need to put my friend out there in danger? So I’ll put these launchies out here that, you know, I don’t have connection with.”

But in the book they, they went a different way, and I think that was all right. I mean, I g- I get why they did it. 

[00:43:13] Tim: The mind game, the little video game that, that they play, the game of the film diverges from the one in the book after the giant dies. Uh, the film focuses on the Formics and Valentine in a fallen castle.

The book has some of it, but there’s a conflict with a wolf and snake. The snake does appear In the film, sorry … the snake appears in the book, uh, th- and the film. It’s a little different. This comes back in a later book as meant to connect Ender to the Buggers by connecting him to a queen’s pupa, and that’s at the end of this film, they make a strong connection to that.

[00:43:48] Rebekah: So in the book it is more unclear, and then it gets cleared up in, like, later books. In the film, they basically just showed you kind of the end result of what was really supposed to happen by him just finding the pupa. It’s… By the way, I don’t know if this was, like, clear. In the book, Ender was communicating by Ansible, which they mention in the film, uh, to do all of the stuff with the ships.

I don’t think that Command School was on a colony planet of the Formics. In the film it was. In the film, their base was on a colony planet where they had pushed the aliens back, and on that colony planet is where he finds the queen’s, you know, cocoon thing. In the film, that’s, that happens, like, literally the day of the final battle.

In the book, it’s not till later. He’s in his 20s, I think, when he and Valentine have, like, gone off to a colony planet. They’ve only experienced, like, two years to get there, and then they’ve lived there for a little bit. At that point, Earth had been… Like, based on light speed travel and stuff, Earth had o- gone through 50, 60 years or something.

And so he doesn’t find it until over 50 years after he murders them. Like, he was… Only it had experienced a few at that point, but yeah. It’s, uh, easy to follow in the book if you’re just reading it, but in the film they, they very heavily condense all of it all. 

[00:45:05] Josiah: Yeah. Y- you’re saying that in the film, Command School was near the Bugger planet?

[00:45:11] Rebekah: In the film it was on a Formic colony planet that they pushed the Buggers away from. That’s why all of the alien stuff was there. The aliens had originally had a colony on that planet, and they pushed them out of it. In 

[00:45:21] Josiah: the book, it’s in our solar system, but it’s a Bugger outpost in our solar system. 

[00:45:27] Rebekah: In the film it’s not, ’cause he goes into hyper sleep- Yeah

and, and then he arrives there, and it’s, like, close to the Formic home planet. 

[00:45:34] Josiah: That’s crazy. Yeah, ’cause he… They mention, and I ju- I guess I just assumed it was the same in the movie, which is very unsafe to do o- on this podcast. I shouldn’t l- I should know by now. But yeah, it covered it in the book where it was like, “Yeah, it’s really weird around here because it was, uh, the Formic outpost, and this was how we found them because Eros stopped generating light.”

Or, like, reflecting light, I mean, ’cause they were cloaking it. 

[00:46:01] Rebekah: So in the film, after Ender hurt Bonzo, he and Petra see Bonzo having surgery on his, the back of his neck, like, on his spinal column And then later he then travels with Bonzo, and the lake where they’re at that in the book was North Carolina but it was filmed in British Columbia, which is also not Great Britain, that is when Ender makes a comment in the film about how he’s been sitting by Bonzo’s bed every day hoping he’ll wake up, but maybe he’ll never wake up.

So in the film, he doesn’t actually die. In the book, the book doesn’t make it clear if he graduates or gets removed from school, and Graff basically said, “We sent him home to Cartagena.” He’s back in Spain, and then, uh, slightly later we learn that he died. And at the end of the book, we find out that Ender killing Bonzo was, like, on video, as was the video of him killing the kid at the beginning of the book, both of which were used in trials where Colonel Graff was tried to be held responsible for his war crimes.

None of this is in the film. This is all in the, in the book only. And once they showed the full footage and it was clear that Ender was not the person who started the fight, basically no one thought worse of Ender for it. They just thought worse of Graff for not stepping in and stopping these things occur.

In the book, it makes it very clear that both of them are deeply violent. Like, both of them are very violent attacks, and they are hard to watch. Now, I do think that they did… I will say, I thought that they did a great job with Bonzo’s death in the film, but when he falls back and his head hits that little corner in the shower, every time I’m like, “Oh.”

Like, it hurts to watch. It’s really well done. 

[00:47:44] Josiah: And you touched on something that I really missed from the movie, is that I was gripped whenever they cover off outside of Ender’s perspective. You know, e- ear- earlier, like the first half of the book, you get Anderson and Graff talking to one another kind of as, uh, omniscient narrators that, about stuff that Ender doesn’t know.

And one of the things Anderson is like, “You’re gonna let this boy die because you know that he’s gonna get ambushed in the shower by these violent boys who intend to kill him.” Yep. And Graff says, “I’m sorry, but I think I’m willing to risk it all because I think that Ender still believes adults will come in to save him, and I need him to know that adults are not gonna come in to save him if something goes wrong, even in the real world.”

And you’re like, okay, so that’s kind of like telling not showing me, you know, Graff’s- ideas are and stuff. And then later in the chapter, Ender thinks, “Oh, well, the adults will come and save me.” I was like, “Okay, there’s the showing.” 

[00:48:48] Rebekah: He does. 

[00:48:49] Josiah: He- yep, Graff is exactly right. 

[00:48:50] Rebekah: Yeah. And I will say we talked a lot about how some of this is, like, very unrealistic ex- especially the use of, like, children.

But the book does make it clear that after the Formics are defeated, Colonel Graff is held responsible for those war crimes. Like, they try to have a trial, and they stop the use of child soldiers, and they realize how horrible it is. So it’s like it was … I think Card was trying to make a parallel of, like, the horrors of war and, like, the lengths that we would go to to do war against, like, a foe that we can’t otherwise defeat, you know, and, and the lengths we would go to do these horrible things.

But it does also acknowledge in the book that that was horrible and not just a fun thing. 

[00:49:31] Tim: One of the things that you may not be as aware of is that Card would’ve written this book during the time of the Vietnam War, a very unpopular war. Wanna know what else was written about that time, about, uh, someone, a young person becoming almost like a messiah and destroying people?

Dune. That was another comment, a commentary on the times in which they were living. 

[00:50:01] Josiah: There’s less time spent in the film at the lake. There’s a line that Ender says kind of at the beginning of the lake scene where he- about sitting by Bonzo’s sick bed. I am not convinced, but, uh, others say that that means that Bonzo is by the lake.

In my head, it doesn’t make sense that Ender is living at Bonzo’s. The book has hi- Ender at the lake for six months. Uh, Valentine in the book appeals more to Ender’s love for her personally to convince him to return. In the film, what did she even say? 

[00:50:40] Rebekah: She kind of talks about how, like, everyone will die if you don’t go.

I know you don’t wanna go, but, like, it’s bigger than you and all that. She actually does the things that in the book sh- they, it … She didn’t do. It 

[00:50:51] Josiah: actually- Because anyone could tell him that. Like, they brought Valentine to the lake specifically because she was the only one who could get him to return.

But the thing she says in the movie, it’s like Graff coulda told him that. Why did they need Valentine to come and convince him? 

[00:51:10] Rebekah: So in the book, I noticed that there’s a very clear delineation after years and years of battle training, and he goes through, uh, battle school, and then he goes to command school with that little time in between.

He’s done all of these fights and- At command school, Mazer Rackham is there, and he starts training him, and they go through months and months, and it’s all the training, and all the battles, and all the practice, and he doesn’t even realize when he turns 11 because the, he’s so caught up in that, and he’s falling apart.

Everybody in his command is exhausted, whatever. There’s a clear point where Mazer Rackham essentially says, “Starting today, you’re gonna be fighting against me,” essentially saying, “You’re not, you are no longer fighting against the simulation, which is what you’ve been doing to this point.” He says the same thing in the film, but it’s, like, right before he starts the fights in command school.

And what ends up being unclear is in the book when Mazer Rackham says, “I’m your enemy now,” like, the, “You’re fighting me now,” from then on out, all of the battles, including the last battle but not just that one, for weeks and weeks and weeks, all of those are real battles against the Buggers, and Ender did not know that the entire time.

And so the film makes the note of, like, Rackham becoming the enemy, but it does not at all make it clear that what is actually happening is, like, many battles against the Formics are being fought. 

[00:52:32] Josiah: I was so confused in the movie when the final battle happened. First of all, it was underwhelming that in the movie it’s just one final battle that he, is real.

Like, I g- I get it and know it’s a twist, but it’s like, really? You let this kid… What was he doing this whole time? Was he actually just like, “This is just one battle that it all depended on,” and his strategy was meat shield? I was so confused after the final battle. He said something like, “It’s him. It’s, it’s Rackham that I beat ’cause he’s controlling the games.”

I don’t remember him ever being in charge of the games in the movie before that. 

[00:53:18] Rebekah: He says the same thing. He’s like, “Starting today, I’m, you’re fighting me. I’m the enemy now,” or something like that. He does make that comment in the film. But again, it’s not clear that he means he’s developing, he’s supposedly developing the fights and stuff.

[00:53:30] Josiah: Well, it’s not clear. 

[00:53:31] Rebekah: But I think it’s supposed to. I 

[00:53:32] Josiah: think that what they did was they realized, “Oh, no, we never established that, uh, he’s supposed to literally be controlling these computer simulations.” So after it matters, after the twist is already happening, they give Ender this ham-fisted line of, like, “Audience, this is what I think is happening.

I should have told you that earlier, but I forgot to tell you how I th- felt and thought.” And then during the final battle, Mazer Rackham is just standing there watching. He’s not- commanding anything. So that was a bit of a plot hole in my opinion. Wasn’t, wasn’t a big fan of the final battle, basically any of it.

The visuals looked nice. The, the film had some pretty nice visuals, but I was not a fan of the final battle. But 

[00:54:24] Tim: what do you think about the, the world-ending device, the molecular disruption device, or little doctor, uh, that destroys a planet, destroys matter, uh, disassembles matter, excuse me, at the molecular level?

That was the final battle. That was the big, big deal. It was used twice in the film, once in training, more of a training, and once in what turned out to be the last battle. It was only used once in the book, though. 

[00:54:51] Rebekah: It was twice in the last battle, and I thought that was so weird. They never mention in the book whether or not it’s rechargeable.

Like, I assume you could use it more than once, ’cause Ender makes the comment, like, “If I use it, I can only use it once ’cause they’ll never form up like that again.” And so then they remove all of these other battle formations and things from the book in the last battle, and then they kind of create a ticking time bomb in the story by making the recharge where he’s got the meat shield.

I hate you for making me saying that. Now it’s all I can think about. But they create the ticking time bomb while the meat shield is, like, dying and going away and going away. 

[00:55:25] Josiah: Yeah. I was a little disappointed in the film at the little doctor just being the ultimate weapon, and then I read the book and I was like, oh, it is kinda the same way in the book.

[00:55:35] Tim: It is exactly the same kind of deus ex machina or whatever however you pronounce that, ex machina. How do we get rid of them? Well, we have a weapon that destroys everything. 

[00:55:46] Rebekah: It could have only destroyed it the way that it did based on the fact that it destroys things that are… Like, they have to be really tightly clustered up.

It doesn’t just destroy everything. Ender was the one who decided to use it against a planet, and in the book he even has this mental thing going. He’s like, “No one expects me to do this ’cause no one would ever do this because this is insane.” Like, he acknowledges no one would’ve ever used it to destroy a planet, and then he does.

[00:56:11] Josiah: So I s- didn’t like the little doctor in the book, but I did like that, one, there were a bunch of battles leading up to that that Ender was required to win. It wasn’t like in the movie where it’s like, okay, all the adults got the fleet to the planet. There were no outposts we had to do or we- or Mazer just dealt with them, so don’t worry about that.

But in the book, they need him for the whole war, which, one, makes it better, and two, they do try to carry a little weight for why no one had thought to use the little doctor on a planet. I think that either Mazer or Graff says something like, I think Mazer says, “I would not have been able to do that, like even if I had thought of it, because I knew that it was real.

I would not have been able to genocide an entire planet with the reckless abandon that you did.” So the fact that Ender was not informed that it was real, I think is the second thing that makes that plot point more swallowable in the book. 

[00:57:16] Tim: I was just thinking that, uh, when Card wrote this 50-plus years ago, he was only dreaming about these kinds of things, you know, having children, uh, fighting these battles, and they’re ruthless, and then they find out, oh no, it was real after all.

Now we have people that are playing video games that are, you know, real player video games that they’re supposed to look like real people. It’s supposed to be real battle. It’s all simulated, but it’s video games. And me- so I can see where what Card was imagining has become a reality. So what would happen if, say, the government said, “Okay, by the way- Now there is no such thing as this enemy because actually all of you playing the video game, you were actually doing that.

You were operating drones that actually took care of that stuff. That’d be pretty mind-boggling. 

[00:58:13] Rebekah: I think Dungeon Crawler Carl is trying to make some of those same points in the more serious parts when it kinda gets away from just the silly stuff and all of that. Like, part of the point that it’s making is, like, when people see this as just a video game and they don’t really perceive it as real, regardless of the reality it is for cer- some people, they are willing to do horrifying things.

There’s a point in one of the books where Carl, like, stabs someone in the neck with a pen and kills them in their real life that’s not part of the dungeon, but who’s, like, horrible and supporting what’s happening there. And they want to, like, execute Carl, and he literally is like, “What are you talking about?

I’m in a game where you execute us for fun on TV, and you let people participate and play the game themselves without fear of being killed. The point is that you are doing this, and then you act like when I do it, I did something really bad, and oh, that’s so crazy.” As we wrap up, we’ve, I think, discussed most of what happens in the movie.

Not quite everything, but… So there’s this kind of last chapter. It is formatted a little differently in the audiobook, so make sure you listen to the end credits if you listen to the Ender’s Game audiobook, not the full dramatized version. In Speaker for the Dead, that, which is the chapter name, not the book name, there is a lot that they pack in the epilogue of this story.

From earlier in the book, we kind of mentioned it in passing, but Valentine and Peter, Ender’s brother and sister, they, using their genius, develop two personalities. She is Demosthenes, and he is Locke, and everyone knows that these are pen names No one really knows who they truly are, although a few people do figure it out by the end, and they are essentially…

It’s all manipulation because Demosthenes and Locke are against each other, and one of them is, like, pro-Russia, and the other’s kind of the, the middle man, but kind of anti-Russia in that world version of what’s happening politically and all this stuff. In the epilogue, Demosthenes, who’s the one that Valentine wrote as but was not, you know, using her own opinions about lots of things, Demosthenes leaves the scene.

And basically what happens is she sets up Peter, records all this stuff to show the world who Locke is. He’s not a reasonable person. He’s actually a serial killer kinda guy. He’s a real lunatic, whatever. After Ender defeats the Buggers, literally the next day, the League war begins, which lasts five days long and is the entire human civilization fighting against itself.

It ended quickly, in part, I think, to Demosthenes and Locke, uh, and their, like, online discussions and things like that. And also the Hegemon. So the Hegemony is the leadership of, like, the United States, and the Hegemon i- or not the United States, the wor- like, the world leaders. Non-Russia allies. And the Hegemon is h- the Hegemon is the leader of that.

That person resigns at the end, and then we find out later that Peter became the Hegemon, and he was, like, the ruler of the actual Earth, which is crazy. They cut all of this out because in the film they had not set any of it up, which is funny because I think they were trying to set it up to do a sequel to Ender’s Game , the film.

Uh, and they didn’t because it bombed, uh, which we’ll discuss. But it is kind of funny that they didn’t include so much of the actual setup for the setup. 

[01:01:41] Josiah: Interestingly, the film shows Ender finding this queen egg thing on that Formic colony world outpost thing that’s near the home world. But the book has it happening years later on a Bugger colony planet while he’s searching for a place for a new group of Earth colonists.

This is years later. This is where he learns that the aliens read mi- they communicate via telepathy, and they have actually been reading his mind since before the genocide. They got to know him very well. I imagine it was a comfort. I don’t know if it was explicitly stated that this was a comfort to Ender, that they understood That he didn’t know that he was genociding them 

[01:02:26] Donna: Let’s break down this book and film by the numbers.

The book released in January of 1985, and I do think now realizing, I didn’t realize before how long before that he had been writing it and putting it together. So I think that’s, thought that was very interesting 

[01:02:44] Josiah: Short story published in ’77, and it was expanded upon into the novel in ’85 

[01:02:50] Donna: The movie released on October the 24th of 2013 in Germany.

L- just another week later on November 1st in 2013, it released in the US and worldwide. Uh, the book received a 4.31 out of 5 on Goodreads. That’s 54,000 reviews. And on StoryGraph, it pulled a 4.2 out of 5 with 113,000 reviews. The movie received a 63% critic’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an audience score of 65%.

The IMDb rating was 6.6 out of 10. The production cost of the film was between $110 and $115 million. Opening weekend, it pulled in a whopping $27 million. The USA/Canada gross was less than three times that, 61.7 million. The international gross, just a little bit more than that, 63.8 million, for a total box office pull of 125.5 million.

Sadly, this tells us that they lost money 

[01:04:03] Rebekah: I need to say this. 

[01:04:04] Donna: Yeah? 

[01:04:05] Rebekah: Do you guys know one of the main reasons why the movie flopped? 

[01:04:08] Josiah: Nope. Was there a boycott? 

[01:04:09] Donna: Was it because of the, was it because of the b- boycott? 

[01:04:12] Rebekah: It was a boycott 

[01:04:13] Donna: A group called Geeks Out. It’s a New York-based nonprofit who, I think they formed in, like, 2010.

They promote the wellbeing and encouragement of, the term that I read was queer geeks. But they did not like the fact that Orson Scott Card was not in favor of same-sex marriage 

[01:04:39] Rebekah: And to be totally clear, it is, it’s not just he was not in favor of it. He was on, like, committees and supported organizations, and there were a bunch of things, but one of them being he made a comment, which is interesting ’cause I’ve heard people say stuff like this before, which is not

It’s, it’s interesting the way it comes off now, is that he basically said, “If you say that, like, two women or two men can get married in the same way that my wife and I are married, then the foundation of much of culture, um, in the West becomes eroded And like, and the culture will fall. He was like, it wasn’t just, “Oh, he goes to church,” or, “Oh, he said this thing that might be h- uh, homophobic.”

It was like he was actively fighting against the legalization of gay marriage from around 2000 and on, and so once all of that came out… And he’s, as far as I know, he’s never rescinded any of his thoughts. He’s been basically canceled since then. I think that he’s published books, but I don’t think that they’re published by major houses or anything like that.

It’s been just, like I think he publishes them himself. 

[01:05:43] Tim: That’s pretty sad because if he’d had the opposite idea and said that heterosexual marriage is a horrible thing, so many would say, “Oh, we’re gonna publish everything that you write,” you know, all those kinds of things. These are opinions, and individual human beings are allowed to have opinions.

It is incorrect for people to say, “Because you have an opinion that I disagree with, I think you should be canceled.” I think cancel culture is a detriment to free speech. Even stupid free speech needs to still be free because it is self-regulating. If it is stupid and l- enough people hear it, they correct it.

It corrects that way. But to force people not to say what they believe is wrong. 

[01:06:27] Donna: I did find that interesting because to your point, Rebecca, he made a few statements to basically say, “This book, what does this book and film have… It has literally nothing to do with that. It is a political war ba- I mean, it, it doesn’t deal with those issues.”

[01:06:47] Rebekah: I don’t think the point was about this book. I think it was canceling or trying to cancel the author and, like prohibit him from get- But 

[01:06:53] Donna: that’s- … benefiting from the movie … but that’s what I mean. He didn’t, he didn’t try to do anything to lift himself up, to defend himself, to justify himself. He just said, “This, this is a, a, a work, a novel that’s h- turned into a film that has nothing to do with this topic.

Why can’t we, you know, watch it?” And I, I think that obviously that is the argument of the day, um, whether it’s J.K. Rowling and her stand on trans and non-trans or whatever, which feeds into what Tim said. True free speech is r- is self-regulating. People will look at that and say, “I still want to be involved in Harry Potter.

I still want to watch it and read it and, and take it in and be a fan of it, whether I agree with what she says or not.” And I do think that’s a… I find that, you know, it, it will prove it out. 

[01:07:44] Tim: We’re living in a period of time where we find it very easy to look back historically to people that were older than us or lived long before us, whichever way, and we choose to judge them and all of their actions by what we think today, and it’s so anybody that did anything that we wouldn’t do today was bad.

So nothing they did was good. So we can’t have heroes, we can’t have statues, we can’t honor anyone. You know, and that’s, that’s a tough standard because in 100 years people are gonna look back at us and say, “Those people were crazy.” And you could say, “Oh, but I was trying to do the good thing. I was trying to stand up for this.

I was trying to do the right thing.” Nope, you’re a bad person ’cause you said this thing that made everything that you ever did worthless. That’s a terrible standard to set. 

[01:08:43] Rebekah: Yeah. I get 

[01:08:44] Donna: what you’re saying. And I’m, and I’m sorry that I… I- if that is the primary reason that the movie failed- 

[01:08:49] Tim: That’s pretty sad

[01:08:50] Donna: I, I mean, I didn’t care- Well- … for the movie, but I do agree- Look, all of you- … I think it has 

[01:08:54] Tim: something 

[01:08:54] Donna: to 

[01:08:54] Tim: do with it That’s at least- … you said it wasn’t very good. That’s at least a reason it failed. Well- 

[01:08:58] Rebekah: Yeah … 

[01:08:59] Tim: my problem with it is it condensed it so far that it took out, it took out too much of the plot to get a movie done in two hours.

[01:09:09] Donna: So let’s wrap up with some other, some might call it useless trivia, but I enjoy talking about these things. So we’re just going to go through a few little rapid fire, uh, trivia points. For the rest of my podcast crew, I have a question for you. The cast includes two Oscar winners and three Oscar nominees.

Can you name them? You don’t have to even name what they were awarded for. Viola Davis. 

[01:09:39] Rebekah: Harrison Ford. He’s 

[01:09:40] Donna: something. Okay, wait. Probably. Viola Davis was which? A winner or a nom? She won. 

[01:09:45] Tim: I believe she won, did she not? 

[01:09:47] Donna: Okay. 

[01:09:48] Tim: She did- Not 

[01:09:48] Donna: for 

[01:09:49] Tim: this movie, but- 

[01:09:50] Donna: She did win. She did not win for this movie, no. Um, to me, Viola Davis in this movie was Judi Dench in Artemis Fowl.

Viola Davis was a winner, so who else? 

[01:10:02] Rebekah: I said Harrison Ford. 

[01:10:03] Donna: Okay. Do you think Harrison Ford is a winner or a nominee? 

[01:10:06] Rebekah: Nominee. 

[01:10:07] Donna: Good job. 

[01:10:08] Rebekah: Yes. Okay. The guy with all the face tattoos. 

[01:10:11] Josiah: He was for Gandhi. 

[01:10:13] Donna: Who’s that? 

[01:10:14] Josiah: Gandhi. 

[01:10:15] Rebekah: I 

[01:10:15] Josiah: got 

[01:10:16] Rebekah: it too. What’s his 

[01:10:16] Josiah: name? Ben Kingsley. 

[01:10:17] Donna: Ben 

[01:10:18] Josiah: Kingsley. 

[01:10:18] Donna: Ben Kingsley. 

[01:10:19] Josiah: Oh, okay. He won for Gandhi many years ago.

I feel like such a bad 

[01:10:22] Donna: parent when, when she says their names. I’m 

[01:10:24] Josiah: just 

[01:10:24] Donna: helping. He was 

[01:10:25] Rebekah: the 

[01:10:26] Donna: Mandalorian. Ah. Okay. So Ben Kingsley, so that’s three. Ben, Viola, and Harrison Ford. Two others, and I will give you a clue. Hailee Steinfeld. They were both females. Hailee Steinfeld, okay. She was a winner. Oh, we got the two winners.

We got Ben Kingsley, Viola, so yes, she was- She was 

[01:10:45] Tim: in True Grit. 

[01:10:46] Donna: Yes. She was the girl. 

[01:10:48] Tim: Nice. 

[01:10:48] Donna: You didn’t know- 

[01:10:49] Tim: I didn’t recognize her. I, I- 

[01:10:50] Donna: And now I know where your daughter gets it from. Hmm. Okay. 

[01:10:53] Tim: I recognized her from- What did 

[01:10:55] Rebekah: I do to any 

[01:10:56] Tim: of you? … 

[01:10:57] Donna: from the star, 

[01:10:58] Tim: from the mu- music movie. 

[01:11:00] Donna: Mm-hmm. You’re welcome for this 

[01:11:00] Tim: podcast- Yeah, I can’t ever remember the name of it

[01:11:02] Rebekah: everyone … the title of it. That’s all right. You’re 

[01:11:03] Donna: so welcome. She is. Now, what music movie? Was Hailee Steinfeld in a 

[01:11:08] Rebekah: music movie? Pitch Perfect number two. 

[01:11:11] Donna: She was in the second Pitch Perfect, yeah. I was like when you said music movie- Oscar 

[01:11:16] Josiah: nominated- … 

[01:11:17] Tim: I was like, “What? What?” … Pitch Perfect 

[01:11:25] Donna: Two. I said it the other day and she was like, “What in the world do you mean by a music movie?”

I don’t know wha- 

[01:11:33] Rebekah: I’ve 

[01:11:34] Josiah: never seen 

[01:11:36] Rebekah: it. I only 

[01:11:38] Donna: watch it a thousand times a year. Don’t tell me how often I watch that movie. Another female? Okay, last one. Another female, and I did not know this, I don’t know her at all. There were other women in this movie? Valentine, but I don’t know 

[01:11:52] Rebekah: who that was. His mom.

Where were they? Oh, was it his mom? Let’s see. Hang on. I’ll, I’ll tell you to make sure I’m, I’m saying the right person, ’cause 

[01:12:02] Donna: like I said, I don’t remember. Yeah. Oh gosh, good call, Valentine. Abigail Breslin. So there, you… We got them. We got them somehow. The objects used for cover against laser fire from an opposing team called The Stars each weighed 1,300 pounds.

I’ll go into a final verdict. The book was better for me. I had issues with the book. There were some things that bothered me about the ways he went in certain things, but I was very intrigued by Peter and Valentine’s trope. I loved that the thought of these two kids, and it made me think of people today like, well, like Asmongold, who is just this dude, and unless he’s really fooling everybody, he just kinda comes across as a homeless dude that happens to have a home, right?

But he is giving this social commentary that young people are following and picking up, and he’s, he’s gotten a lot of traction just even in recent months with a lot of political commentary and stuff like that. So Peter and Valentine coming from a, a different direction and like, yeah, there’s genetic engineering and all the stuff that happened in this world, but I thought of it kind of the same way, just they used their knowledge to do this thing, and I hated that that couldn’t be in the movie.

They would have had to be very, very, very closely aligned with novel to be able to pull it off. But I missed that in the movie. Again, casting, casting, casting, I felt like the casting was a miss. And so I guess those two things together, I’ll definitely put the book over the film. Uh, I’ll go with seven-ish, 6.5 or so, so seven out of 10.

Movie, trash fire. I mean, I know, I can already… I’ll just leave it there. I could go on all night and I’d come back to this very same thing. 

[01:13:34] Josiah: My final verdict is as thus: The book was very good. I’m struggling, ’cause often when I do these out of 10 sorta ratings, in a lotta different contexts, not just this one, I try to think, “Well, what would I have done differently, or what was done incorrectly?”

And I work backwards from 10. But I’m just struggling to think, like, what would I change about it? I don’t know that I would change anything about it And I don’t really wanna give it a 10, but it’s at least a 9.5 book for me. I think it’s a classic. I think there are multiple reasons why it endures as a modern classic.

It’s a little later than other sci-fi classics. I mean, I’m trying to think of a more recent sci-fi novel that has the same level of success, uh, and I’m s- I struggle to think of one. There’s not much I would change. I think it excellently captures what it feels like to be young. It feels like you’re getting pushed and pushed beyond your breaking point.

Feels like the world is on your shoulders. Oh, my goodness, I have to decide what I’m gonna be. I have to be an astronaut when I grow up. Oh, my goodness, all this pressure from my parents, and my community, and my teachers, and my friends. There is a special connection that everyone, including adults, can have with Ender’s Game that connects to their childhood and how it feels to be a kid, even if it’s not literal.

I will go on to the movie, which I think was written, and acted, and directed badly. I wonder if this is my second least favorite, uh, film we’ve covered because the visuals were truly great. There was not really weak visuals. I’m, I’m gonna go up to a three and a half, four sorta area on the film, but, uh, it was enraging to watch this film after I was enjoying the book so much 

[01:15:45] Rebekah: I’ll go next.

I really actually enjoy both of these. I love the book. I, I gave it a four out of five out of… 4.5 out of 10, so 9 out of 10 for me, just personal enjoyment level. I do, uh, kind of understand Josiah’s 9.5 score. Yeah, I love the book. I actually think I’m gonna go ahead and maybe read the next book again.

It’s been, like, probably a decade since I read it last. I don’t know. Josh and I both really like the movie for what it is. I don’t expect it to be, like, an Oscar-worthy kind of thing. I do believe that the main character’s actor was just really poorly done. So it definitely comes off a little more YA than it should have.

I wish that, that it had been darker and grittier in a lot of the ways that made the book a really interesting and unique read. I would probably give the film, like, I don’t know, like, a 7.5 out of 10. Like, it wasn’t a good… It wasn’t a great film, but I love it a lot for what it is, and so I’ve re-watched it a lot.

It’s a re-watcher for me. So yeah, I was, like, surprised that you guys hated it this much, actually. 

[01:16:46] Tim: The book I would give a 7 out of 10. If I were judging it on its content, on the subject matter, I would probably not go above five. I don’t like where the subject goes. I think the children are too young to be as violent as they are, and as- Mm-hmm

it is disturbing. There’s a- Yeah … disturbing part to it. So it’s well-written, but it’s disturbing. So I’d give it a seven. I would probably give the movie a 6.5. It is a watchable sci-fi film. The science and tech are fine. I don’t look at it and say, “Oh, well, that’s, that’s cheesy.” I can see where, uh, you know, this.

Yeah. I can see that. I thought the special effects were well done. I thought Asa Butterfield did a terrible job. He… If the character was supposed to be nondescript and forgettable, th- he pulled that off very well. I think it was less about the writing, though I do think there were problems with the writing, the adaptation.

I think the bigger problem was the direction. I would give the, the film probably, probably 6, 6.5. It misses the mark. It’s not as good as the book. 

[01:17:55] Rebekah: All right. If you enjoyed any of that, leave us a five-star rating or review. Uh, please support us on Patreon. It is a big, uh, it’s a big support when you support, you know what I’m saying?

Uh, there’s a link in the episode description for that, and you can find us on social @bookisbetterpod, or join us in Discord, uh, through our Patreon if you want to hang out, talk to us, ask our opinions, tell us why we’re dumb. You can do all those things and more on social media. You can find us everywhere @bookisbetterpod.

[01:18:26] Tim: Yay. We accept other opinions.

[01:18:41] Donna: I’ll say it. Mom. There. On three, let’s do it. The plot. One, two, 

[01:18:45] Rebekah: three. 

[01:18:45] Donna: Let’s do some plot line changes. So let’s talk 

[01:18:48] Tim: about the plot timeline changes