I thought the movie did a pretty good job tbh. It's just that Ender's internal monologue is so important to the novel that it's hard to translate that into a film.

Of course, I also blame Ender's Game for every shitty YA series having a War Academy arc, so I just don't care about its legacy that much.

the borg are artificial and have the goal of assimilating as many people as possible, a realistic alien hive species wouldn't particularly care about that beyond the inherent benefits of diversity and a higher population.

Their goal would, much like ours and that of any species, be to proliferate but primarily ensure they don't get wiped out, which requires a lot more nuance than "resistence is futile".

They would also inherently have a decent amount of independence, because that's specifically how hives operate: it's a large group of individuals operating on similar logic and working together to create what is effectively a superorganism. Bees and ants aren't controlled by some hive mind, every individual makes small decisions and as influenced by the other individuals, and eventually one or two decisions become the most popular and are acted upon.

Hives are basically anarchic democracy taken to its absolute extreme.