Title: Review: Ender’s Game (Movie vs. Book) – Diabolical Plots
Headings: Review: Ender’s Game (Movie vs. Book)
Review: Ender’s Game (Movie vs. Book)
The Book
The Movie
The Ending (Herein Be Spoilers)
Conclusion
Published by
David Steffen

Content: The Ending (Herein Be Spoilers)
Okay, now that we’re being the cloak of a spoiler warning shield, let’s talk about the ending. The ending is one of the things that really makes the book worthwhile. For most of the book, he’s in battle school with all the other kids, much of that time being spent in the battle room. As he’s learning to combat other strategies, he’s also constantly revising his personal relationships with the other children as he rises in the ranks to commander. By the time he leaves Battle School he’s proven that he is the beset of anyone there, at a younger age than most, even though the school at the end is intentionally weighing the game situations against him. Finally they graduate him and send him to Command School where he starts running complex simulations where he has control of a fleet of ships facing off against alien ships as he is in command of commanders who each control a subset of the fleet. These simulations are grueling, always against overwhelming odds, often several times a day, and are meant to be a simulation of what the attack on the aliens actually will be like. By the time he gets to the end of the simulations, some of his commanders have broken beneath him and had to be retired, he has worn himself to exhaustion, and when he reaches the enemy’s planet he decides he wants to win spectacularly but in a way in which those judging him will never possibly consider him as a leader–by destroying their homeworld. And he does this, only to discover that this wasn’t a simulation after all. While directing what he thought was a simulation, he has destroyed an intelligent species.