Ender’s Game

Ender’s Game is based largely on battle and finding ways to beat the buggers, an alien race that looks a lot like large ants. Ender is a third. His parents were given permission to have him because of the potential they saw in his two older siblings. His older brother, Peter, was smart but too quick to get violent, too fast to kill, while his sister, Valentine, was too compassionate to fight. The government let Ender be born, in hopes that he would have a balance of the two. In the book, Ender gets chosen to attend battle school at age six; however, in the movie he looks more like 13 or 14. The movie actually left out a lot of elements from the book. For example, in the book, Ender’s brother and sister, Peter and Valentine, took over the networks disguised as “Locke” and “Demonstheses”, writing articles to persuade the thinking of certain important people, while Ender was up in battle school. In the movie, Locke and Demontheses were not even mentioned, which changed how the movie should’ve ended.
The movie was short and to the point. Ender arrived at battle school and was almost immediately designated an army, Salamander army. Bonzo, his commander, who is much shorter in the movie than I pictured, refused to make use of Ender due to his age and lack of experience, but that didn’t stop one of the girls, Petra Arkanian, to take him under her wing and teach him everything she knows. At the end of his first battle with Salamander, he was already assigned an army of his own to command. He trained his army for a couple days and was given his first battle, only this wasn’t a normal battle; he was assigned two armies at once, one of which was Salamander army. Ender won, despite the odds against him, by sending his man to the enemy’s gate, sheltered by a bunched of his other men, and passing him through. That night in the showers, when Ender was alone, Bonzo and his group of older boys showed up. Bonzo threatened Ender and came at him ready to fight. Ender had no choice but to fight back, shoving Bonzo to the ground where he slid into the footstep of the showers and hit his head. Bonzo was then taken to the infirmary where I think he died. Ender, of course, blamed himself. He was over it, done with the games and fighting, done being Peter. He quit. He refused to fight and so he was sent back to earth, to a house on a lake.
After a couple months of rest, and being talked down by various people, including Valentine, he was ready to go back to training; only he wasn’t going back to battle school. Ender was being sent to planet Eros, where he would attend command school. Eros wasn’t a human planet; it belonged to the buggers before we took it over. Ender continued his training on a simulator, commanding an entire fleet along side his closest friends from battle school. He was given a teacher, Mazer Rackham, who led them to victory in our last battle against the buggers. Mazer, from then on, controlled all simulator battles. Battles got increasingly harder as the days went on and Ender was growing tired. He ran on only a few hours of still managed to perform well. Then came the real challenge, his last battle.
A bunch of people gathered to watch. Ender was told that this was his final test and that he was to perform at his very best. The simulator came on and it glowed with tens of thousands of enemy ships. The odds were completely stacked against him. The buggers outnumbered us by far. Entire fleets were destroyed at a time and we were firing like crazy, desperate to make a dent in the enemy ships. The whole thing was complete chaos, until Ender had a brilliant plan. He aimed “the little doctor” at the bugger’s home planet and fired. Everything in its path was destroyed. Our ships were the first to go, then their ships and then it hit the planet. Slowly the planet was destroyed, like a chain reaction bombing that stretched across the entire face of the planet, and then it was over. The room went dark. Ender watched as people cheered and congratulated him. He was so confused. It was just a test right? He beat Mazer Rackham, what was the big deal. Little did he know that the battle was real; all the simulator games were real battles with the buggers. No one told him because they thought he wouldn’t perform the same if he knew, and truth is, he wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have destroyed the planet and their entire species had he known that the games were real. Everything was real.
There were a few major themes in this book/movie. The most important theme, to me, is compassion. Compassion played an important part in Ender’s life throughout the entire story. It’s compassion that saves Ender from becoming a power hungry, killing machine like his brother, Peter. And it’s due to his compassion that he can make up for destroying of the bugger population by giving them the chance to start anew at the very end of the movie. Compassion provides hope for the future. Ruthlessness is an important theme in Ender’s Game, but one that, if not matched by compassion, could be dangerous. Ruthlessness came to Ender’s
rescue a few times in his fight against Bonzo and early in the book with the kids who beat him up in school, but it’s not to be used often, it is a last resort.

The movie, in my opinion, was just as good, if not better than the book, which usually isn’t the case. I would recommend the book and movie to any sci-fi fans or anyone into the action or young adult genre.