It’s probably a good thing Oblivion got its spare, desaturated thing out there, and that After Earth is already nearing release- Ender’s Game seems bent on making some of the year’s other scifi look small.
The trailer is here for Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s seminal science fiction novel, which spawned a series that is now a dozen and a half books deep. The first look at the film concisely sets up the stakes and the unique nature of the conflict, is packed with clear, large-scale scifi imagery and seems to be a good start towards making this an event film. Summit pulled it out for this one. It’s got a nice 80s sensibility to it, but with a modern sharpness. Cue the harping on lens flares, teal & blue and other visual tangibles, but I don’t see any argument that this looks pretty slick. (And like a real movie! More than you can say about Hood’s X-Men work…) Steinfeld and Davis will be great, Ford and Kingsley are coin tosses (but they’ve done good work this year!), and Butterfield seems to have his hero game on point, so there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic.
And while I would typically be unabashedly pleased to have a new pop-scifi film to look forward to since my interest in Star Trek has diminished so quickly, there is the sticky issue of Scott Card being an aggressive proponent of backwards social agendas and other insidious bigotry. It makes Bob Orci’s retarded conspiracy theorist nonsense look quaint and harmless, so it’s too bad Card’s a part of the much better looking movie.
Honestly, I just can’t wait until Gravity starts its engines to hopefully get us ready for the real scifi business.
I’m curious to take the pulse of the Chewers out there on how this plays. How does this compare for you to Star Trek and the other scifi stories crammed into this year? Any concerns about the figures standing behind these films and their personal agendas?