Blog | jlake.com - Part 9

http://www.jlake.com/blog/page/9/

After Lisa came home, we tooled up and rented Ender's Game. Setting aside both my memories of the book and my feelings about OSC, it was a pretty good movie. A lot of the plot was forced, but then, that was kind of the point. With occasional clicks of the pause button for discussion, the_child understood how Ender's entire existence was being managed by deception and manipulation. Since she'd never read the book, she didn't know the stakes in the graduation battle sequence until Ender himself found out, and she very much shared his profound sense of anguish and betrayal. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed this film so much if I had not been watching with a teen aged viewer, but I did. Afterwards, when we were talking about Ender and the adults in his life, and the Formics, I was able to explain that the man who wrote that book so full of human understanding and real pain had long since turned into a very sad, vile person who worked very hard to do evil to many other people. She opined that OSC's personal story was sort of like Ender's story, which I thought was a fascinating insight.
---Steve