Anyone who’s read Ender’s Game can tell you that a large portion of the book concerns competition between teams in a sort of laser tag/capture the flag/rugby mashup that all takes place in complete zero-gravity. One of the many questions one might level against a movie adaptation of Ender’s Game (other than “What are you going to do with the naked-pre-teen-shower-murder?”) is “How are you going to do the anti-gravity games of Battle School?
Roberto Orci, a writer attached to the current film adaptation of Ender’s Game that’s struggling through the pre-production process, answered:
You’ve got to have zero G training sequences. Are you kidding? We’re talking about shooting it every way you can: using tanks, using motion capture, using amazing acrobats, using an amazing space. But you have to have it, that’s part of the movie.
Many fans of Orson Scott Card‘s classic novel are skeptical of a big studio putting it on the big screen: the book is about young children doing very violent and psychologically damaging things, and we can understand why an authentic adaptation might be a hard sell. But Hood had this to say to fans:
The hardest part is adapting a classic novel faithfully. And I think before, people were trying to get too clever with it and change things that didn’t need to be changed. Gavin Hood wrote an amazing script that is extremely faithful to the book, including the twists in it and the themes in it. And I think that will be the difference to getting it made.
(story via io9, pic via XKCD.)
Published: Apr 4, 2011 12:38 pm