Well, Ender's Game. Too soon?

I thought the movie was wonderful. I enjoyed the faithful adaptation of the book, the pure sci-fi presentation, the Battle School and Battle Room and Command Center exceeding my own imagination, the first-rate performances.... I was most impressed by the way the story was compressed. They managed to overcome many troubles I had thought might be insurmountable.

This is not to say that the film didn't have serious problems. Most all of the difficulties were due to runtime and budget. There are only 120 minutes in two hours. After all of the begging, borrowing, and stealing, the budget is what it is.

Most of the other problems were due to the very faithfulness to the book which I loved.

I thought all of the actors were great, especially HF. It was possibly his most human performance as the grisled and haunted Headmaster of a military academy. He wasn't Han or Indy or AF1 Prez. No running or flipping around. I think that's what threw general audiences. I was slightly thrown because I had always envisioned Graf as Euro.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

The three great problems were presenting a credible (within sci-fi realms) universe, creating "buy-in" for the concept of turning over a multi-trillion dollar space fleet to a kid, and preserving surprise. It was a great universe. The other two fell short from the limited time and budget and faithfulness.

The movie proves that it can't be done in 115 minutes. It also shows, through it's ingenious compression, that it might barely be possible in 180 minutes. A titanic story needs a Titanic runtime.