The man who brought the world the Academy Award-winning **Tsotsi **and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Gavin Hood, has a big challenge on his hands in adapting a much-loved series of sci-fi novels with Ender's Game, but at least he's passed the first challenge: the teaser poster test.
Doing exactly what a teaser poster should - i.e. tease you, but not in the playground bully way - it shows young Asa Butterfield (Hugo, Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang) as the film's lead, Ender Wiggin, squaring off in space against another ship.
No look at his face, no mention of his big-name co-stars like Harrison Ford or Ben Kingsley, no guns or blades or anything stereotypically postery. Just... him. And an awkward and somewhat blunt tagline, sure, but if you leave that to one side for a moment it's a pretty impressive piece of postering.
Ender’s Game, drawn from Orson Scott Card’s novel, takes place in the near future, where Earth is under threat from a hostile, insectoid alien race called the Formics. After two devastating attacks, the world’s forces have rallied to defend against the next, setting up battle schools to pick and train the most gifted children in the art of war.
One of those, a shy but strategically talented lad named Ender, is plucked from school and quickly earns the respect of his peers and senior officers, including Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) and wartime legend Major Rackham (Ben Kingsley). Of course, it’s not as simple as that – nothing ever is in wartime – and soon Ender must make sacrifices as he enters an epic battle that will determine the future of the human race.
Ender’s Game lands on October 25 in the UK, but as you may have worked out from the American poster above, slightly later in the US.