As promised, the first official poster for Ender's Game has arrived, and it looks great! The image shows us the back of Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) as he stands at the gate of the zero gravity battle room, dressed in his flash suit, fists clenched and his weapon at the ready. It's a pretty fantastic hero shot and a great little tease for what will hopefully be some spectacular visual effects when Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's popular sci-fi novel finally hits theaters this November.
I like that the poster looks almost like an illustration, but (one minor criticism), I think I would've preferred a tagline rather than a reminder that this is an adaptation of a popular novel at the top. It's also worth noting that this poster follows the back-to-the-camera trend for 2013 movies.
Ender's Game is set in the future during a time when man is at war with an alien race. Butterfield plays Ender Wiggin, a particularly gifted boy who's recruited to join other children in a space-set battle school where they're being trained to fight in the coming war. Ender's something of an underdog, but he proves to be particularly good at strategy, which comes in handy in the battle room as well as his attempts to find his place among his peers at battle school.
This poster, which comes courtesy of Yahoo, follows two previously released stills from the film, one of which shows Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, the man responsible for Ender's training, and the other shows Hailee Steinfeld (playing Petra) and Ender sharing a meal and maybe some battle plans in the mess hall.
As exciting as it is to see the poster and some stills for the film, we still have six months to wait for the adaptation to arrive in theaters, November 1. But that also gives people plenty of time to read (or reread) the book, which is the first in a series of novels. And if you've already read it, try Ender's Shadow, which is a parallel story to Ender's Game from the perspective of Bean (Aramis Knight). Not only does the follow-up offer some fascinating insight into the calculating mind of one of Ender's closest allies, but it also fleshes out the story. It'll be interesting to see if anything from Shadow works its way into the movie.
