Ender's Game - Book and Movie

I really enjoy listening to audio books on long car rides.  So on the drive to and from Tennessee last month, Karrie and i listened to Ender's Game.  Karrie asked if i could download it because she heard it was good.  I told her that i had downloaded it a few years ago but never listened to it.  I remembered that i downloaded a bunch of the "Greatest Sci-Fi Books of All Time" and Ender's Game was in with all of those other books.

So on the 10 hour drive to Tennessee and 10 hours home we just finished the book.  And by that i mean we were just about to pull in the driveway when the book ended.

The book itself was awesome.  I really liked it.  

I would compare it to the book The Hunger Games and The Matrix.  It had a similar concept where kids were competing while a mysterious government was controlling the twists and turns.  The difference is that they are competing in space to find the best kid to command the star fleet and save the world against an alien race called the Buggers.  The main character is named Ender Wiggens and he becomes the chosen one that has to make the decisions.  It's surprising that Ender's Game was written over 30 years ago, yet it still feels very modern. 

It was one of those books that i kept thinking about even after it had ended.  Luckily when we got home i checked and found out that after the success of the original book, the author had written many other books.  There are too many to list, but i did listen to the 2nd book in the series, Speaker for the Dead and another later book called Ender's Shadow.  The book Ender's Shadow takes place at the same time as Ender's Game but is focused on another character, Bean.  It gives his story and point of view, a picture that you never saw, where he, not Ender, could have been the one to save the world.  Speaker for the Dead was pretty good too, taking place years later when Ender is much older.

At the end of the audio book there was a directors commentary where he talked about the idea of a movie and how important it was for the kids to be kids, not teenagers.  Every movie studio that offered always wanted to change the age of the kids so that Ender could have a love interest and the author was very much against it.  Also since the book came out over 30 years ago i was sure that there would have been some movie made with some corny 80's special effects.  

So i was happily surprised to see that there hadn't been a movie made.  Instead the movie Ender's Game was just finishing being filmed and being released on November 1, 2013.  It will be starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.

Now i've learned my lesson with lots of movies like The Hunger Games and The Lightning Thief, that they can only fit so much into an hour and a half movie.  So i'm sure they will focus on the explosions and make up parts that weren't in the actual book.  Although i did hear that the actual movie would be a combination of the 2 books Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.  

In this picture you can see the characters playing Ender Wiggens (on the right) and Bean (on the left).  

I can't wait to see their idea of Battle School and the battles that take place in zero gravity.  From the pictures it looks nothing like i imagined it.  I guess the best i can hope for is for it to be good on it's own right, not when it's compared to the books.