‘Ender’s Game’ first official trailer: See it now

The child soldier space adventure “Ender’s Game” was originally published in 1985; it’s taken almost three decades to get it to the screen. The film is coming this fall.

In the first official trailer for the movie, Harrison Ford, one of the adult stars of the film, narrates its premise. Humans are in trouble; to fight a space war, they need children to fight the aliens. It’s a last ditch-effort, and the kids look pretty small up against those big spaceships and extra-atmospheric weaponry.

With the plates that note which of the “Ender’s Game” stars have won Academy Awards (Ben Kingsley) and which have received Oscar nominations (Ford, Viola Davis, Hailee Steinfeld, Abigail Breslin), the trailer is in part playing to an adult audience, proving that it is real quality entertainment.

But it is in part geared to potential viewers who are fans of the book and series by Orson Scott Card. “Seeing the trailer as an adult evokes all the usual excited pulse-quickening reactions that these kinds of trailer do, but it’s overlaid with the unsettling realization that you’re getting excited about seeing children go to war. It leaves you tense and distinctly uneasy, which is a perfect evocation of what the plot of ‘Ender’s Game’ ultimately ends up doing,” Chris Lough writes at Tor.com. “And if you’ve read the book and know what Ender is actually doing in this trailer then that unease ratchets up even more.”

See the trailer now.

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