I know virtually nothing about the upcoming Ender’s Game movie, based on the sci-fi novel by Orson Scott Card. I’ve posted a few items about the movie, but have done my best to erase any memory of what I’ve written from my head so as to go into the film completely oblivious… It’s worked quite well so far.
Today a new piece of the marketing puzzle has been revealed as Yahoo has premiered the first poster for the film, revealing what director Gavin Hood described in a blog post over the weekend as “the battle room”.
The film begins on Earth after an alien attack, when gifted children are recruited by a government desperate to fight back. The kids are taught a competitive game that’s a cross between the Quidditch matches of Harry Potter and the Jedi light saber battles from Star Wars. Only the best and brightest will be chosen. A young boy emerges as a genius strategist, and the planet’s best hope to destroy the alien Formic race.
Hood described the battle room as seen in the teaser poster below, saying, “This is the high school football field, only it’s in three dimensions. It’s the size of a football field in all directions: up, down, left, right. And the idea is teams jump out from opposite ends of this amazing space and play this amazing game of 3D paintball, almost.”
Apparently the battle room is a cube in the book, but the film will turn it into a sphere. Hood adds, “What if we could see through? What if we could see out of the space, and we’re moving around the Earth and turning at the same time?”
In his blog post yesterday Hood wrote
We are now well into post production and the famous zero gravity battle room scenes are looking fantastic. We started a year ago by sending our talented young actors off to a “space camp” to train under the guidance of real NASA astronauts. They learned to move in zero gravity environments and experienced the wonderful feeling of weightlessness. Mix in some truly incredible visual effects work and today we are looking at battle room scenes that will blow your mind!
Hugo‘s Asa Butterfield stars as the title character, Ender, and he’s joined by Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Ben Kingsley, Abigail Breslin and Viola Davis. The film hits theaters on November 1 and a trailer is expected shortly.
Check out the poster below.
