Ender's Game (PG-13) - Off the page

The bard himself recognized the massive difficulty of cramming a sprawling tale into narrow confines. Shakespeare's classic "Henry V" opens with a prologue, apologizing for the inability of the author to fit "vastly fields" and large armies onto the stage of his oval theater in London. He added another plea after being forced to crunch years of time "into an hourglass."

Writer-director Gavin Hood faced a similar dilemma in bringing the 1985 novel "Ender's Game" to the small screen, in a manner suitable to restive audiences. Orson Scott Card's popular science fiction story devoted pages to fami...