A film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel Ender’s Game has been in the works for years now, hampered at various turns by Card’s frequent falling out with various producers and directors who want to make it a kick-ass war movie. So fans should probably take this announcement with the usual wait-and-see attitude: Gavin Hood, the writer-director of Tsotsi who made the jump to big-budget sci-fi with X:Men Origins: Wolverine, is the latest name attached to Ender’s Game as both writer and director, hoping to provide yet another take on a script that’s gone through at least four drafts in the past decade—including several from Card himself. The author has yet to comment on Hood—who must now succeed where Wolfgang Petersen failed—but as this 2009 interview from the L.A. Times reminds us, Hood’s challenge will be addressing Card’s biggest hang-up, which is that the film about a young boy transformed into an alien-crushing super-soldier by playing flight simulator games not be a “tough-hero action film,” but rather one where “human relationships are absolutely essential.” But it can still be in 3D, right?
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