I can’t tell you just how excited I am to see this movie. Ok, VERY EXCITED. I recently read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, a couple months ago. It was one of the best books I’ve ever read. It had everything that I love from a sci-fi novel. Brooding, intelligience, alien-bug species, and a twist ending that came completely out of nowhere and left me shocked. I still have to read The Ender Saga, but I know that I will, and probably before the movie releases next year.
As much as I’m excited though, I’m a little apprehensive. The movie is directed by Gavin Hood, who directed Wolverine: Origins. Which, if you’ve ever seen that movie, you’ll know why this worries me. It’s also a book that I LOVED. How often do the movies compare to the book? I can think of a few: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (the movies EXCEED the books in my opinion), Interview With A Vampire, and Fight Club. Most of the time though, we get a Hunger Games or a Harry Potter or a I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. In their own right, the last 3 movies aren’t even all that bad to me, but I have to take them as MOVIES and almost pretend the books don’t exist so that I don’t fall into a Eragon (the movie)-like hellhole and want to get scorched alive by a dragon.
So, we shall see. The movie stars Asa Butterfield (Hugo) and Harrison Ford (do I even have to add anything in here?), both who I think have the acting chops to get get the job done. I’ll judge a little more when a trailer comes out and the excerpts from the interview I have below have quelled my fears…for now.
When asked about the translation of the book’s internal dialogue:
We have a muppet of the Colonel who narrates the whole thing from the future. Oh, no wait, different movie. I joke because that is a great question and I think Gavin would tell you that it was the biggest challenge he faced in composing his script. It was also the most challenging aspect of the casting process. So here we have two things that really make it happen. First, we got such an unbelievable group of actors who can convey so much with their faces and body language… frankly, with their performances, which is something a book is denied using to convey inner emotion or thought.
And secondly, of course, Gavin elegantly translated some of the inner thought into action or character decisions in his script — drama — and that allowed him to find natural places for the characters to speak about what they are going through.
For fans of the character, Bean:
Bean who? Oh, Bean! You should know how much Orson Scott Card advocated for as much Bean as we could muster, and really encouraged ways to make him pivotal. You’ll decide if we succeeded! I think we did. And we’re even more excited for you all to experience Aramis Knight’s fantastic portrayal of Bean.
Are you curious about the futuristic design of the costumes, especially the flash suits?
With science fiction, there’s a danger in creating a look that seems so foreign it becomes alienating. For ENDER’S GAME, we wanted to make a future that looked both functional and logical. We wanted it to be a future where you can picture yourself in their shoes.
But of course, it is the future. For the uniforms, all synthetic materials were used, meaning no loud silk florals. And for the flash suits… well, we actually had to create them out of thin air.
Christine built the flash suits from virtually non-existent fabrics designed by our incredible production team. The idea was to take cues from “extreme sports” to inspire our design, using real world practicality as opposed to the heightened reality of superhero spandex and a cape.
Production designers Ben Procter and Sean Haworth talk about the task of creating sets with a futuristic look made by human hands versus that of an alien design:
As Ben described it, the most fun was creating the two contrasting cultures of Human and Formic technology and architecture.
“We tried to imbue the spaces and vehicles with a gritty, engineered realism that would help sell the seriousness of the training our hero kids are going through. The visual style of the Formics, on the other hand, needed to be both exotic and beautiful to represent a society not deserving of extinction.”
Ask them to describe the Formic world and you’ll get excited tales, imagining a Formic method of manufacture that was distinctly inhuman — a kind of biological 3D printer, with the drones building living spaces and spacecraft layer by layer.
Starring Butterfield, Abigail Breslin, Harrison Ford, Sir Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, Hailee Steinfeld, Nonso Anozie, Aramis Knight, Han Soto and Moises Arias, Ender’s Game will be released in IMAX and regular theaters on November 1st, 2013.
Interview and scoop brought to you via Collider
~Chaz
