Ender's Game

Gavin Hood’s 2013 film is set in a school where children are raised as commanders against an alien attack. The biggest adaptation decision is a calendar one: Hood says that in the novel Ender starts at six and finishes at twelve, while the film compresses that into about one year for one actor. Promotions arrive fast. The zero gravity Battle Room was built, not faked: ring rotators, puppeteered wire rigs, bicycle saddles. VFX supervisor Matthew E. Butler said the hard part was constantly fighting gravity. Digital Domain kept the actors’ faces but rebuilt their bodies’ movement, computing each character’s centre of mass. The face you see is real; the drifting body is not. As the film opened, Geeks OUT launched its Skip Ender’s Game campaign, urging people to keep ticket money from the novel’s author. Orson Scott Card, a former board member of the National Organization for Marriage, replied that the book was written in 1984 and has nothing to do with issues that did not exist then. Against a 110 million dollar budget it took 125.5 million worldwide, and no sequel followed. A good fit if you accept that most of the running time is drills and simulations, the war itself one sequence. Not for you if the argument about the author belongs in your ticket decision.