Are You Excited for Ender’s Game?

You’ll usually find Ender’s Game and Dune taking top spots on lists of the greatest Science Fiction or Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels of all time.  On my own top ten list, they’re constantly battling over the #2 slot (for me, The Lord of the Rings is unquestionably #1).  Now the movie version of one of those books (Ender’s Game) comes out in theatres this Friday.

But we all know what Hollywood sometimes does to popular books.  Just look at what happened to Dune.  The feature file version is… well… some people liked it, I guess.  So as we approach the release date for Ender’s Game, I’ve been both excited and apprehensive.  Will they ruin Orson Scott Card’s best and most provocative book?

So it was with a great sense of relief and reassurance that I read this interview with Gavin Hood, the director of Ender’s Game.  This is a man who seems to understand what this story is about beyond the epic space battles and explosions and such.  In the interview, he said, “There’s always a theme I’m drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad.  We’re all a mixture of both.  We can have great compassion or commit great violence.”

Ender’s Game is about a lot of things: war, space, childhood, video games… but in that statement, Gavin Hood has captured the soul of Orson Scott Card’s work.  If he can do that in three sentences, I’m sure he can do it in a two-hour movie.

So this Friday, when I walk into the local movie theatre and give them $9.00 of my hard earned cash, I will feel confident that I’ll get to see the real Ender’s Game on the big screen, and not some Hollywood bastardization of the book I love.