OT - Ender's Game Trailer
It's the dog days of the off season, wherein only Baseball, Softball and a few assorted -ball and non-ball sports are played. There's little news other than recruiting tidbits to share. Furthermore, we are composed of mostly 40 and under nerds and nerdettes (Herm notwithstanding), so I figure nobody will likely complain if I suggest we all watch this over and over and over.
More than anything else, I just want this movie to prove that traditional sci-fi (future setting, aliens, unexplained technology, etc), still works when the writing is strong. The crop for this kind of sci-fi has been so weak lately.They've all been either present-day/one-day in the future kind of things that try to basce it all around sounding legitimately sciency, or really, they've been flops. I'm counting on this to live up to one of the best books ever written, and right a stricken genre.
The Trailer looks promising. For those of us who have read the book (probably 90% of the audience), however, some of the suspense will just not be there.
Yeah, but I can re-read that book and enjoy it just as much as the first time, so I'm not too concerned.
One of my great pleasures was reading it to my daughters. (BTW: All parents out there, I STRONGLY urge you to read to each of your children each night until they insist you stop. I read to mine until my last one made me stop when she started High School. Good for the kid. One of the fondest memories I have. I look forward to reading to my grandchildren this book.)
You're probably right--it'll still kick ass.
What the heck took them so long to make this movie?
The need for very advanced CG and convincing Mr. Card that it was ok to not have the Battle School kids be 5 and 6 year olds? Kinda hard to get a toddler to do the green screen acting for Zero G fights scenes. And the extremely brutal beating in the shower.
Plus considering Petra is naked or half naked so often, hello child porn charges.
I just hope that they didn't have to make too many changes to make it family friend. If they replaced "8 year olds murder each other in the shower" with a "suddenly feminine Petra" and "angsty tween love story", I'm hitting up AA Torch and Pitchfork after the showing.
I read that one of the biggest problems was Bean. They had to get Ender old enough that people would believe that someone younger could be more intelligent. Lot of suspension of disbelief to get behind the youngest kid in the school being the most intelligent person on earth.
CGI wasn't there - had to have a two large space fleets in realtime and in a computer simulation. It would have looked really fake 15 years ago.
Also, there is box office trend of "coming of age children in peril in battles" successes like Harry Potter and Hunger Games. Hollywood is all about jumping on trends like the 10 superhero movies every year.
So Ender's Game is a good book? My kindle has "recommended" it to me a few times, but I haven't clicked on the buy button yet.
So Ender's Game is a good book?
You fail at punctuation. The correct phrasing for that sentence is, "So Ender's Game is a good book."
Read it. Then read Ender's shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets. Read Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide somewhere in the middle there if you want, though they're quite different books.
Why would he end his question with a period?
It's an amazing book.
Loved Ender's Game, but could never get into the other ones. Granted, I was probably in middle school but I never cared for Bean's perspective and the time gaps were confusing to me.
The books after Ender's Game read better if you're an adult I think. In elementary school I only liked Ender's Game, but in college I enjoyed the entire series on a reread, although Ender's Game is hands done the best of the bunch.
For me the sad thing about Card is that the Shadows series felt like it rapidly turned into paint by the numbers SciFi designed to extract cash from the fanbase as quickly as possible. I highly suggest Card's Worthing Saga though, it gets a little weird at the end but overall it is a solid book.
It was good through Shadow Puppets. It fleshed out the universe a bit (especially the conditions on some areas of earth), and I felt like he had more to say about the development of some of the characters and their evolution. After Shadow puppets, it definitely got a little cookie cutter, but meh. Write 5 or 6 good books and you'll probably end up following a pattern as well.
I was not aware of the Worthing Saga. I will check that out!
If you have kids who have read Ender's Game but can't get into the later books, give them the Homecoming series. It is a step up in age range, but doesn't jump as far ahead as Speaker did.
I personally loved both Speaker of the Dead and Xenocide. Not the same sort of books as Ender's Game, but still absolutely fantastic. To be honest, I'd place Speaker of the Dead just a hair above Ender's Game, with Xenocide just below it (the subplot is a bit annoying at times).
One of the best books I have ever read. I recommend clicking the buy button.
If I knew your Amazon account I would buy it for you right now.
It's good but keep in mind it's written for middle and high schoolers. Most of the fans here probably read it in high school so their standards for writting are a lot lower than for an adult.
I first read it in 5th grade. I'm 33 now. I read it once a year. It doesn't matter how old you are, Ender's Game is an amazing book.
I'm 25 and I still love it but that might be our nostalgia. I don't know how much I would've liked it if I read it for the first time as an adult.
It looks ok, as long as Katniss doesn't marry Peeta. She belongs with Gale, totes.
Ben Kingsley's sportin' some bitchin ink there too...
I hate you.
I know. I felt like I was poking a bear when I posted it. Just know that you have brought the series onto my radar and I'll add it to my must read list.
You're just presaging the future. Seriously, this is a quote from the Fandango message boards today:
Dec 5th 2012 11:17AM iamgus11 said... this looks like a ripOff of the Hunger Games
@mgobaran - Call in sick right now, go home, and read the book. It's that good.
I just had two former students email me today about this trailer. I assign Ender's Game as an optional component of my 9th-grade physics curriculum. My former students are excited, to say the least. One of them said that he was planning on naming his first kid Ender. He was joking, I think (maybe Andrew, which Ender is short for). Whatever. They're pumped. I'm pumped.
I had very low hopes for this movie, to be honest. Stuck in development hell for decades. Harrison Ford didn't strike me as the right Graff. Asa Butterfield - meh, I thought. Didn't know about the director. But this trailer has me super excited. It looks great. The tone sounds perfect.
not ashamed to still call this my favorite book of all time. already hoping they include some of Ender's Shadow in the movie as well
But it would really confuse the plot to some extent. As soon as you potentially take away some of the power from Ender, his decisions, evolution and emotional turmoil become less important.
I won't say any more than that, because THPOILERTH!
I believe Card had several suitors for the film rights going back the 1980s even, although I don't know how this would have looked with 1980s effects technology - likely not 1/10th of the trailer that Blazefire posted. It looks awesome - thanks for sharing this.
I think Card was interviewed a few times in the 90s about making "Ender's Game" into a film, but as I recall, he would discuss where he wanted to take any such attempt, never committing to anything. I remember hearing once that this film was within earshot of being a go in 2003, and that Wolfgang Petersen was supposed to direct it. That fell apart obviously.
I will echo the recommendation of "Ender's Game" - if you haven't read the book, definitely do so.
I just read "Ender's Game" last week for the first time - great book. So good that I finished on the plane from Midway to LAX and picked up "Ender In Exile" to read on the flight back.
I didn't know this was out. If I was going to rate the three best Sci-fi books of all time, Ender's Game would be one of them, along with Lucifer's Hammer, and the quirky but hilarious Drunkard's Walk.
Then again, my tastes are just a tad out there, there are no current generation writers on it, and the list doesn't even include Robert Heinlein or Joe Haldeman.
I don't know anything about Ender's Game except for that trailer. At first look when I saw the kids I thought "Ok, they raise them a birth to be soldiers and I'm seeing the early stages to set everthing up." I was hoping as the trailer went along they would be adults by the time war came. They were still kids so I'm kinda "I dunno." Kids are , you know, kind of annoying in movies. Is there something someone can point out that starts off with "I hear what you're saying but don't worry......"
In the meantime I'll be here trying to prepare myself emotionally for the Red Wedding in a few weeks.
Lets see...
A: They are the most intelligent (tactically) kids in the universe.
B: They have to be kids. It's required for the story to work.
C: There is no whining, no games, nada. You're gonna grow up, and you're gonna do it fast.
D: These are the most awesome friggin kids in the history of kids.
They're not annoying because the military would screen the whiners out of their program due to lacking the required drive to be a military officer. These kids are all the result of highly targetted recruitment. The closest thing you get to annoying is Ender's sometimes annoying sister who is back on Earth and a secondary character. Her whole plotline actually might have been scaled back for the movie since it isn't that key.
They're planning to stay true to the book and cause some serious emotional breakage.
They're still played by kid actors, so the level of annoying they reach is still to be seen.
But George Lucas isn't directing it, so the kids have that going for them.
Can't wait for the movie, I head that they are using dilithium to power the battle school. Is it a rumor?
I'm a guy who isn't an avid reader by any stretch of the imagination (thanks, short attention span!) and I've read this book 3 times. I can't wait for this movie to come out.
This is perfect timing, now we have more of a shot that Andrew Wiggins' nickname can be 'Ender.' Though it'd be more exciting if he was coming here instead of UK, KU, UNC, or FSU.
Well deserving all of its awards. I had heard they were making the movie, but didn't realise it was this close to release. I imagine the CGI had to catch up with the story to make it work. In the meantime, I would really love to see William Gibson's Neuromancer made into a movie....
Now THAT would be kick-ass.
Not so sure about Neuromancer as a movie. I'd much rather see Burning Chrome (the Gibson short story). Gibson and Stephenson novels don't seem like they're demanding to be movies. Snow Crash, maybe, yeah, I could see that. Neuromancer was great, but its greatness wasn't all about story. Its story and characters were just kind of pretty good.
The real question is why hasn't Stranger in a Strange Land ever been made into a movie?
/too lazy to go look it up