As the release of Ender's Game approaches, that steady trickle of promotional content that's been coming in for the last couple of months appears to be turning into a virtual flood, with new TV spots, photos and other tidbits giving us new glimpses of the sci-fi film. That includes the above TV spot, titled "Morality," as well as a very spoilery peek at the giant featured in the Mind Game, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film.
First up, we have "Morality," the latest TV spot, which has Harrison Ford's Colonel Graff openly admitting that debates of morality should be shelved until after the war. "When the war is over, we can have the luxury of debating the morality of what we do," he says. I suppose that applies best to the fact that the military is training children to fight in this war. A price may need to be paid for turning their youth into warriors, but that's a consideration for a later time.
But it's not all about war. There are also games, like the ones they play in the zero gravity Battle Room, which is glimpsed in the above promo. Check out that sequence gif-ified.
And then there's the Mind Game. The trailers have shown us nothing from that aspect of the story yet, though we know it's coming. Ender's Ansible included this photo in a review of the upcoming companion volume Ender's Game: Inside the World of an Epic Adventure, which gives us our first look at the giant Ender faces off with while playing the tablet "Mind Game":
IMAGE REMOVED BY REQUEST.
Green and sort of Swamp-Thing scary! Ansible states that the companion book reveals that director Gavin Hood lent his voice and gestures to the giant in the Giant's Drink part of the Mind Game. When I talked to Hood and producer Roberto Orci at Comic-Con, they told me the Mind Game sequence was done with a blend of effects, animation and motion capture included:
We did motion capture, put on suits, ran around the room. They filmed it in a virtual world. Once you’ve captured that motion you can film what you captured digitally and then we handed that off to an amazing animation company in Barcelona, who’ve done the most beautiful work. Obviously, we did a lot of drawings and how's it going to be? And drawings of the mouse and all those things, but it is a shorter version than in the book, because the whole story of the book is compressed into about a one year period as opposed to happening over 18 years.
Finally, we have this HBO First Look video, which shows some of the cast talking about the film:
Ben Kingsley describes the film as "Very powerful, thrilling and deeply moving," which could certainly be said about the source material. Let's hope the adaptation proves to live up to that description!
Ender's Game arrives in theaters November 1. Check out the previously released clip here.
