I hate being that guy who judges a person based on material (or vice versa, in this case), but fuck Orson Scott Card.

Card got his money when it was optioned, so not seeing it hurts him not at all.

I loved Ender's Game. Liked Speaker For the Dead. The only other thing I've read of Card was a strange book he did after Speaker about a boy raised to be a songbird. I've ignored everything of his since then, but go back to re-read Ender's Game. I'll see the movie if I hear good things.

The words 'winner' and 'nominee' make no difference but the words 'Academy Award' or even 'Golden Globe', depending on the movie, do.

I still think it's a weird sales pitch: spaceships, 'splosions and serious actors, together at last!

Arguably, the BBC did the same thing with the relaunch of 'Doctor Who' when they cast Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, and had Russell T Davies as head writer. In Hollywood terms, that was like casting Kevin Spacey and having Aaron Sorkin in charge. But although that helped to sell the idea that the show was being taken seriously as a drama to snooty reviewers and jaded forty-somethings, I'll wager it meant nothing at all to the vast majority of the target audience.

Likewise, I suspect that this movie's ideal demographic isn't that interested in serious actors seriously acting up the joint, even though the movie will probably be better for it.

But if you're an audience member who knows who Ben Kingsley is, you'll know that his name on a movie poster today is as much a guarantee of movie quality as Michael Caine's name was back in the 1980s, Oscar or no Oscar.

Moreover, Ford's near-Oscar was almost thirty years ago, with no further Academy recognition since. It might as well say "nearly award-winning star of 1985's blockbuster 'Witness', Harrison Ford" for all the value that adds, at least for me.

Piling all that variously dated Academy recognition up in the trailer actually puts me off a bit, because it's like the trailer makers are grasping at straws by boasting about their actors' resumés to convince me of their movie's worth, rather than using the movie itself to do that.

What's next?! They'll be telling us doctors recommend smoking cigarettes!

Hah, preposterous. Why would anyone do a thing like that?

You had me, and possibly my money, at Kim Basinger

The first book also features a very, very violent Ender, while Speaker he is much more subdued and reserved, like the wise old man of the space lanes.

I'm not interested in seeing it because the movie looks lame, but I generally wouldn't hold a person's personal beliefs/actions over their art, no matter how stupid. Whether it's Polanski, or Mel Gibson, or Tom Cruise, if the art is good, I'll watch and support it.

And Mel Gibson thinks jews are evil and the holocaust never happened, doesn't make his performance in Lethal Weapon any less awesome, or Apocalypto any less kickass.

Or put another way, its kind of easy to boycott the movie in this case, because the movie/story looks lame and uninteresting to begin with. However, if hypothetically a really good looking movie like Elysium, or Children of Men, had been based on the work of a noted bigot/crazy, and they might slightly profit from it, would you still boycott it? I don't think I would, though its hard to say.

I just find the whole book of Ender's game to be rather dumb and uninteresting. Some decent  concepts in there like the combat training but beyond that it's just not my thing.

Also, we all know how FIYH feel about kids in movies