I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
(Not that you can tell too much from photos this early, obviously, but there are a lot of idiotic things they could have done that they don’t seem to have…)
Other than they screwed up the battle room in the poster [it was NOT outside] and they seem to have changed all the kids to teens…
… and the kids aren’t naked…
My biggest surprise is that this exists at all. How many times now has an Ender’s Game movie tried but failed to get off the ground?
Not a chance it will be done well. As mentioned, replacing kids by teens is already a significant treason of the idea. I also doubt that they"ll show the dark aspects of the protagonists (the shower room fight as depicted in the book, for instance).
It’s going to be a movie about nice teens instead of something closer to “The lord of flies”, as it should.
Oh wow, I was just re-reading these books and wondering if there’d ever be a movie. Could be interesting.
Reminds me of The Hunger Games. Bleh.
Card is co-producing, so the movie will probably be a train wreck.
It looks like they stole the sets and costumes from the Starship Troopers movie. :rolleyes:
One would think that being able to see the earth out of the window would certainly give a sense of orientation. That’s going to be rather problematic…
I haven’t followed this closely but I have to say changing the age of the characters to be in their teens pretty much entirely removes the psychological impact of the story. WTF???
I am afraid it will be just like I Robot or Starship Troopers. They take the name, a little of the plot lines and fuck the rest of it overall.
I agree with Onomatopoeia but in a different way from aruqvan’s idea. I think that considering Card’s religious bent, it may spend way too much time in the subplots, which seemed more important to him than the main plot.
They’ll probably screw up the canon, but that’s okay because movies aren’t books. I’ll watch it with as uncritical an eye as possible in that regard… hopefully it’ll be interesting enough to do well on its own merits.
If you can think of a more exciting sci-fi plot than a couple of pre-teens writing a blog, I’d LOOOOOVE to hear it, buster!
I know. This movie has been in a tentative pre-production for years and years. It’s the oldest movie I heard of that is actually going to come out.
You nearly broke my snerker.
I’m very pessimistic about this.
I just don’t think it’s really a filmable idea in the USA: bunch of pre-pubescent genius children raised in a military-school environment and groomed to be sadistic morals-free killers. Maybe in Japan, maybe if it was animated… live action? No way.
I read somewhere that the official reason for altering the kid’s ages upwards was two-fold.
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They really wanted Asa whatsisface to be Ender, and he’s 15 already (boggles).
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There was some concern about the filming schedule, and how pre-teen boys have this awkward habit of hitting growth spurts and puberty at awkward moments between 9 and 15ish, creating difficulties like voice changes and height differentials.
Since movies aren’t filmed sequentially, that makes for nightmares logistically. Apparently Skandar Keyes, the actor who played Edmund in the Narnia series, nearly caused the death of the costume designer and director, because he grew something like 6 inches during one of the films, and his voice changed halfway through it.
However, making them teens just changes everything about the idea to me.
So are we supposed to expect that these boys (and should be girls also) have BEEN in battle school since they were 4 and 5 years old? And now they’re nearly grown men and women? This was an awful LONG RANGE emergency plan, if so.
The harshness and the disorienting methods used on Ender and the others are less psychologically disturbing if done to more powerful looking young men and women, instead of to smaller, more vulnerable (naked) children. That automatically puts the administration and the teachers into a vastly different light.
Teens have… um… sex drives. Ignoring that is going to be a really weird omission, and dealing with it will again make vast changes to the feel of the book.
I don’t even know what to say about the Battle Room being outside in space. I just… It’s just wrong on so many levels. That’s not what Battle Room was about.
And with Card as a co-producer, I just worry about the impending religious overtones. I hate that.
So, no. Not looking forward to this at all. Which is a shame, because it was a very enjoyable book.
I don’t understand what everyone’s complaint is with the Battle Room. It’s still a room. It’s still got walls (transparent walls). Still can bounce off the wall boundaries as a tactical maneuver. Actually, if they’re simulating space battles, having no walls is even more realistic from a tactics perspective.
If the complaint is that transparent walls can’t exist – well, they could be glass or force fields.
If the complaint is that the walls shouldn’t be transparent – well, they apparently chose that for movie aesthetics. Too bad it doesn’t fit with your mental image when you read the book.
If the complaint is with the spherical geometry of the walls – well yeah, no more corner triple bounces.
Seeing stars, planets and other reference points may interfere with the whole “the enemy gate is DOWN” thing.
As **Frodo **very succinctly puts it, the enemy gate is DOWN.
That becomes SO MUCH LESS IMPORTANT and meaningful, when there is a GIANT BLUE EARTH hanging out at a specific and permanent point to orient yourself against.
Part of the point of battle room (perhaps even the *main *point, given how tricky the instructors were) is that people don’t function very well spatially when they don’t have any reference points, and that disability gets much worse when you’re working in an extra dimension (up-down) as well as all around on one plane. That’s not even getting into intersecting planes where other people are oriented to a different plane than you are. It was a mental workout - like a rubix cube - specifically designed to weed out the smarter/more intuitive/cleverer/more spatially aware of the recruits.
See where I’m going? If there are TRANSPARENT walls in Earth orbit, then all of that mental effort just goes poof. No way to tell which recruits are really THINKING about tactics in the new way necessary to space warfare. If that’s so in the conceit of the film, then *obviously *they’ve already taught or decided to ignore this, and so that makes the whole battle room pretty much useless altogether - it’s a *giant *waste of energy and time as an exercise if everyone has no difficulty orienting themselves.
If they wanted to have transparent walls, then that’s fine - just put them into a holodeck and have them visualized as in deep space with no MASSIVE ORIENTING OBJECTS just hanging out there.