Film Preview: Enders Game (2013)

Poster

Additional posters can be found below.

Trailer Link

Release Date:

November 1, 2013

Synopsis:

From IMDb: “70 years after a horrific alien war, an unusually gifted child is sent to an advanced military school in space to prepare for a future invasion.”

Poster: B / C+ / C+ / C+ (2) / B- (6) / C+ (5) / C+

Review: It’s an interesting design and could prove attractive to young, curious audiences. The trailer might change that impression though.

The second design is a more richly detailed one, but it keeps the protagonist in silhouette and minimizes his importance to the plot.

They tweaked the format (of the first design) and then added crass individual portraits that only serve to diminish the rest of the design.

Now they’ve taken a page from the J.J. Abrams’ book of filmmaking and stolen their best material from other sources. How much this reminds me of the Star Wars designs directly relates to how little I care much for it.

Sometimes you get great character posters and sometimes you get bad ones. Then there are other times when you get above average ones that play loosely with traditional size and somewhat redeem the worst designs.

The next five designs are somewhat like motivational posters design to encourage enrollment in the youth military project the film portrays. Not a terribly original concept.

Finally we have an amalgam of every bad 1990’s poster design and with what’s come before it, there is nothing particularly original about the vast majority of these designs and embodying that in this 16th poster just makes me care even less than I already didn’t.

Trailer: C / B

Review: This is a trailer for a film that has the potential to be an abject box office failure. Gavin Hood’s prior flirtation with genre features was the poorly received X-Men: Origins: Wolverine. Nothing in the trailer suggests a better set up or film.

This is a far more exciting trailer than the first, which could boost attendance; however, science fiction in the holiday season doesn’t always do well.

Oscar Prospects:

With its end-of-year positioning, it could be an easy mark for lazy Oscar voters to check off a few tech categories. However, there are a lot of sci-fi films in 2013 and more of them seem like potential Oscar nominees than this film.