Turn on the spotlights, round up the guards: we’ve got an escapee from Director’s Jail. South African helmer Gavin Hood was sent down for an indefinite term after last year’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” a film notable only for making Brett Ratner’s “X-Men” movie look like “Battleship Potemkin.” While rumors of studio interference may spread some of the blame, the fact remains that Hood thought it was a good idea to both shoot and include three separate shots of a character sinking to his knees and screaming at the heavens, and as such deserves whatever he had coming to him.
It’s been very quiet for the once Oscar-winning helmer for some time (go on, type ‘Gavin Hood’ into the search box above, see what comes up), with only a couple of TV gigs keeping the wolverine from the door, but the LA Times now reports that Hood’s finally lined up a potentially high-profile return to the big screen, in the shape of an adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel “Ender’s Game.”
Set in the future, where Earth is at war with an insectoid race named the Formics, it follows Ender, one of a group of children being trained to be military commanders. Wolfgang Petersen was previously developing a D.B. Weiss/David Benioff-penned adaptation of the novel, but that fell by the wayside, and now Hood’s come on board the new version, set up at Odd Lot Entertainment, and is rewriting a script by Card himself.
We’re unfamiliar with the source material, so can’t speak to its quality (although, if we were to literally judge a book by its cover, every example of art for the book we can find is fucking horrible), but it has a sterling reputation among sci-fi fans. We imagine, however, that despite Card’s involvement, fans of the book won’t be too delighted: Hood’s is a persona non grata in geek circles after “Wolverine,” and production company Odd Lot are best known for the laughable Elijah Wood soccer thug movie “Green Street Hooligans,” and “The Spirit” (though to be fair, John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” are theirs too).
As for us, we never particularly cared for Hood’s films “Tsotsi” or “Rendition,” so we’re fairly indifferent about this one too. Five’ll get you ten that this doesn’t get made anyway: a mega budgeted sci-fi war movie with a cast full of kids, from a small production company? Not exactly the safest bet in town.