Ender's Game Trailer

[TimothyC]

I'm thinking it's in the "Rent, Maybe" category at the moment.

[Thanas]

Aside from the special effects the story seems to be crap, just judging from the trailer.

Also, the visual design seems pretty much ripped from several Sci-fi sources.

[Jub]

Honestly the trailer showed that it's following the base plot of the movie. Given the time it had I think it gave enough that we can hope for as decent a story as the source material allows. The only thing I caught that I really didn't like was them fighting the buggers in Earth's atmosphere, I always pictured it as a space battle with some orbital bombardment and very little interatmospheric action.

[TimothyC]

Honestly the trailer showed that it's following the base plot of the movie. Given the time it had I think it gave enough that we can hope for as decent a story as the source material allows. The only thing I caught that I really didn't like was them fighting the buggers in Earth's atmosphere, I always pictured it as a space battle with some orbital bombardment and very little interatmospheric action.

Looks like they are merging the first and second invasions (the first invasion was fought on Earth and in low orbit while the second was fought out near the orbit of Saturn).

[Jub]

I haven't read the book in a while so I forgot that the first invasion made it to Earth,

[Imperial528]

Is it just me, or did they give the buggers the biotech treatment? The bugger tech in the books was definitely alien to humans, but it was still, well, technology.
Spoiler

Also, nice way to give away the ending with the trailer, there.

[Jub]

If you read the book you already know the ending, if you don't it just seems like a tense moment.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I remember the short story better than the novel, because it was a much better read. So, it seems to me that Ender's Game was always more of a Twilight Zone, "What a twist!" story than an actual novel that could support a movie. Also, Orson Scott Card is probably somewhere between Santorum and Fred Phelps on the unlikeability scale, which is going to hurt PR for the film.

[Jub]

The PR will be bad, but misdirected, you shouldn't hate the works for the artist.

[Patroklos]

Most people who see this will never know who Orson Scott Card is. A good subset of those won't even know it is based off of a book. What they will know is that is got spaceships and explosions and Harrison Ford.

[Admiral Valdemar]

He's a bit of a twat anyway, so if people don't know of his work being adapted, I'm not going to lose sleep. The trailer is, however, terribly derivative and dull. When you focus on telling the viewer how many Academy Award nominees/winners are in your picture, you fail marketing.

[FSTargetDrone]

OSC will never get my money, be it from his books or films based on them.

That aside, Ford's narration sounds like he was just rudely awoken from a few hours' sleep after a long night out.

[Vendetta]

I remember the short story better than the novel, because it was a much better read. So, it seems to me that Ender's Game was always more of a Twilight Zone, "What a twist!" story than an actual novel that could support a movie. Also, Orson Scott Card is probably somewhere between Santorum and Fred Phelps on the unlikeability scale, which is going to hurt PR for the film.

Ender's Game was rewritten into a novel halfway through the writing of Speaker for the Dead because someone told Card that "hey, we liked this character you made and think you can crowbar him in here". So he did.

This made Ender's Game into a worse novel than it was short story, and all but completely fucked Speaker's pace because Ender really wasn't necessary for the telling of that story.

[Sea Skimmer]

Ford sounds awful, not a good sign for Star Wars. Exploding F-35s seem like the best part of the movie.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Yeah, but we get real F-35s making their debut in Man Of Steel (with Superman Returns having the first CGI F-35 appearance). I'll take Supes over genetically enhanced teens.

[Ahriman238]

Doctor Device!

Okay, the rest of the movie looks like shit, but I like the kid starring in it enough to give it a try anyways.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, but we get real F-35s making their debut in Man Of Steel (with Superman Returns having the first CGI F-35 appearance). I'll take Supes over genetically enhanced teens.

That can't end up being very cool though, given the flight performance restrictions on real F-35s at the moment, and the fact that the US military wouldn't support a film in which hoards of them explode. If I want to see a military plane do three G turns I'll watch the clips of the B-47 doing an Immelman.

[TOSDOC]

If you read the book you already know the ending, if you don't it just seems like a tense moment.

Yeah, but it's a tense moment spoiled when you're watching the movie--you know how it's going to play out just from having seen the trailer. It seems to permeate a lot of trailers nowadays.

For instance, I remember when watching Phantom Menace, I suddenly realized Qui Gon was going to bite it about 10 minutes before it actually happened, just because I remembered Obi Wan's scream from the trailer.

[Hawkwings]

That's totally not how Dr. Device was used at the end of the book anyways. I'm gonna guess dream sequence. I'm also gonna guess that they will show the ending of the final battle fairly straight from the book, as that scene makes for good cinema.

[Darth Lucifer]

In the site search engine I searched for threads with the word "Ender" in it. Turned up some awesome threads, some of them go back as far as 2002. Great reading.

Old Ender Threads

[Ahriman238]

New Trailers up, 2 of them though all seem to have the same dialogue. Also, holy hell, that thing with the fighters in atmosphere was supposed to be the Second Invasion? Mazer Rackham is just a fighter pilot who kamikazed the mothership?





Suddenly I'm a lot less eager to see this film.

[Gandalf]

I thought the mothership was supposed to be way less obvious, and that the genius of Rackham was that he saw this one central ship amongst all of the chaos?

If it's playing cheap, I might watch it. Otherwise I doubt it.