And there it is. The poster for the movie about a game, presumably played by one called Ender. The kid lit book of adolescent kill schools and Starcraft as a strategy text is coming to screens this November. Yahoo! has the poster, along with an interview with director Gavin Hood, who explained, among other things, what went into the look of the Battle Room, which is what you see in the poster:
Hood said that the design of the Battle Room was the first challenge his and his production design team tackled when they began work on “Ender’s Game” over two years ago. Before they had a cast or even their full financing in place, Hood said, “We put together a 45-second teaser based around the idea of a character jumping out of a gate into zero gravity and just floating into this amazing space.”
So how big is the interior of the Battle Room? Hood said, “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.”
One deviation from the book is that in the original text the Battle Room is described as being a giant hollow cube. But Hood felt that to really convey the size and dimensionality of the space, it should be spherical. Hood said he then proposed, “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?” He said he felt that would create “a really strange, disorienting experience,” that would better capture the notion in the book that in space there really is no up or down.
I’m not the biggest fan of the book. Or even the most medium-sized. But maybe Hood was able to make it something interesting or at least entertaining. We’ll find out November 1st.
