Late yesterday, we finally got our first look at the long-awaited movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s novel about the child soldiers trained to fight in a war against alien invaders. The movie looks visually impressive, and there’s no denying the appeal of its cast, which includes Asa Butterfield as potential military genius Ender Wiggin, Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, the administrator of the Battle School in which Ender is enrolled, Haileen Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian, one of Ender’s classmates, Viola Davis as Major Gwen Anderson, one of Graff’s colleagues, Abigail Breslin as Ender’s sister Valentine, and Ben Kingsley as Ender’s teacher Mazer Rackham. But the trailer also leaves out five key elements of Card’s novel—and the decision to exclude them in favor of action sequences gives a sense of what kind of movie Summit Entertainment wants us to think Ender’s Game will be:

1. Peter Wiggin: Ender’s sadistic older brother, Peter was the first of three attempts to breed a perfect general from the Wiggin family. Because Peter was too aggressive, and Valentine too empathetic, Ender’s family was allowed to have him as a third child in defiance of the United States’ population laws. Peter viciously bullied Ender while the two of them were growing up, and after went to Battle School, enlisted Valentine in a scheme to gain political power through an early form of blogging. He’s a painful illustration of the price of greatness, and one of the key people through whom Ender’s Game explores international politics in the wake of alien attacks.

2. The Fantasy Game: We see the children in Battle School playing with powerful simulations on computers, but we don’t get a glimpse of one of the novel’s most interesting devices: a video game that’s personally tailored to each student’s experience, and that Battle School uses to monitor their mental health.

3. Alai and Bean: Two of Ender’s best friends at Battle School are Alai, a talented Muslim student, and Bean, a younger boy who comes under Ender’s command as he rises through the ranks of students. Alai, who begins as Ender’s equal, is a reminder of how the drive for excellence can alienate even your closest friends. And Bean is an illustration of how to bring out the excellence in someone else.

4. Bernard: And just as we’re missing Ender’s friends, the trailer doesn’t show us Ender’s greatest human enemy at Battle School, a French student named Bernard. There’s no question that the advertising for Ender’s Game has to outline the main conflict between humans and the Buggers, the pejorative name for the alien invaders. But it’s losing a lot of Card’s point if the movie forgets that the conflicts between humans are just as important as space opera.

5. The Net: Much of Ender’s Game is set at Battle School, but the story back on Earth, where Peter and Valentine become powerful political commentators on the Net, Card’s version of the Internet, is equally important. The Cold War between the United States and its allies and the countries aligned under the Warsaw Pact has an enormous influence on Battle School’s commanders and the way they push Ender and pace his training. And Peter and Valentine’s very different feelings about the influence they accrue offers an important contrast to Ender’s command of his troops far away in space.

Now, I assume most of these elements will appear in the finished film that we’re going to get in November. Peter, Alai, Bean, and Bernard all are in the cast list. Major Anderson is the character who oversees the Fantasy Game. But given that much of the power of Ender’s Game comes from the fact that the war on the Buggers takes a surprising turn, and the question of whether humanity wins or loses it becomes much less important than issues of psychology and ethics. I understand why Summit feels more confident selling audiences who aren’t familiar with Card’s work on a major space war than on a meditation on empathy. But I hope that the film itself stays true to the best, most penetrating aspects of Card’s work, and the trailers are as much of a bait and switch as the one Ender’s subjected to throughout the novel.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of days about how to approach Ender’s Game, Summit Entertainment’s forthcoming adaptation of the beloved science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card about children who are trained to fight off an alien invasion at an elite military academy to which they’re removed early in their childhood. I think I’m not alone in finding Ender’s Game to be a foundational text—Valentine Wiggin, the younger sister of the main character, who becomes a sort of proto-blogger, is one of the reasons I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing. And at the same time, I find the political views that Card holds abhorrent: he’s a member of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, and has publicly committed to fighting back against a government that, to his interpretation, would change the established definition of marriage. As someone who’s volunteered with Freedom to Marry, and who holds marriage equality as one of my political priorities, I have no interest in giving Card any of my money to pursue an agenda I find hateful and dangerous. I’m trying to figure out if Card has points on the back end, and if purchasing a ticket would mean, even in an extremely small way, giving him money above and beyond what he’s already received for the film rights to the novel.

But at the same time, Card’s involvement as the creation of the work that’s the basis for the movie isn’t my only interest in it. As someone who thinks the emergence of Abigail Breslin, who will play Valentine, and Hailee Steinfeld, who will play Petra Arkanian, one of the child soldiers in Battle School, as young action heroines is a significant tool in bending the curve on career trajectories for Hollywood actresses, I feel a strong desire to see Ender’s Game succeed as a way to credential them for an audience of genre movie fans. I’m also curious to see what Gavin Hood, as a politically engaged South African director, will do. Card, to me, is not the only person who matters here.

But he’s also a particularly noxious illustration of a paradox that plagues politically engaged consumers of culture: a terrible person who has made significant art. I’ve never given Roman Polanski any of my money, even though I think he’s unlikely to commit sexual assault again, because I have no interested in financing his ongoing mockery of the American justice system—but I also haven’t felt particularly drawn to any of his recent movies, with the exception of The Ghost Writer. I don’t believe in piracy as a means of consuming art while causing economic harm to someone I find objectionable, if only because it’s a form of subverting the system that isn’t targeted: lots of other people suffer losses when someone who was legitimately potential customer, as opposed to someone who never intended to purchase the product in the first place, pirates a work rather than purchasing it. So what’s a customer who wants to consume ethically to do? All of these suggestions come out of my thinking about Ender’s Game, but they’re equally applicable to almost any situation where a person with deeply harmful views has created something worth consuming on its own merits.
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I wrote last week about how to respond to the hiring of notorious homophobe Orson Scott Card by DC Comics to write Superman. Today, Andy Lewis and Borys Kit at the Hollywood Reporter explore how Card’s noxious, anti-gay views pose a challenge to the movie adaptation of his most famous work, Ender’s Game:

Now Summit faces the tricky task of figuring out how to handle Card’s involvement. The first big challenge will be whether to include him in July’s San Diego Comic-Con program. Promoting Ender’s Game without Card would be like trying to promote the first Harry Potter movie without J.K. Rowling. But having Card appear in the main ballroom in front of 6,500 fans could prove a liability if he’s forced to tackle the issue head-on during the Q&A session.

“I don’t think you take him to any fanboy event,” says one studio executive. “This will definitely take away from their creative and their property.” Another executive sums up the general consensus: “Keep him out of the limelight as much as possible.”

Ender’s insiders already are distancing themselves from the 61-year-old author. “Orson’s politics are not reflective of the moviemakers,” says one person involved in the film. “We’re adapting a work, not a person. The work will stand on its own.”

This seems like the most appropriate way to go in a situation that’s the opposite of DC’s decision to hire him. Summit may have had to give Card money for the right to adapt his material. But they don’t have any obligation to give him a platform. And I hope that Summit feels comfortable exercising their free speech rights as a corporation and as individual executives to make clear what they found valuable in Ender’s Game, and how it’s separate from their opinion of Card’s work to not just oppose equal marriage rights, but to push for the recriminalization of homosexuality. Maybe Card will revel in nine months of condemnation, and he’ll get to feel self-righteous about what’s happening to him. But I do think there’s something fitting about the forthcoming illustration that fiction isn’t bringing more people around Card’s way of thinking. Instead, his bigotry is going to drive people away from some of the best work he ever did.

In a fairly predictable cycle of events, DC Comics has hired Orson Scott Card to write Adventures of Superman, and large segments of the internet are displeased. As Comic Book Resources reports:

An online petition calling on the publisher to drop the “virulently anti-gay writer” has already drawn more than 4,800 signers. And while comic book fans and petitions seem to go hand in hand — it was just last month Marvel was being called upon to cancel Avengers Arena – this effort is being spearheaded by All Out, an initiative of the Purpose Foundation advocating for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. The drive has already attracted the attention of mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

Although Card is best known for his award-winning 1985 novel Ender’s Game, he has become notorious for outspoken views on homosexuality and his advocacy against gay rights. A board member of the National Organization for Marriage, a group dedicated to the opposition of same-sex marriage, the author has tried to link homosexuality to childhood molestation, advocated home-schooling to ensure children “are not propagandized with the ‘normality’ of ‘gay marriage’” (with Card, the phrase is always in quotation marks), and floated slippery-slope scenarios in which marriage-equality opponents one day will be classified as “mentally ill” and parents who encourage their children to pursue heterosexual marriage “will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.”

I’m of two minds about the petition. As much as I find Card’s views abhorrent, I do believe that he has a right to work, which of course is not the same thing as a requirement that anyone hire him. And I think it would be worrisome to set a precedent that political views which are unrelated to the content of a person’s job should be the grounds for firing them—obviously, Card’s views on homosexuality and gay rights would be a reason not to, say, put him in a position to make benefits determinations for gay families, or to decide whether or not to prosecute hate crimes. Now, obviously Card’s views have affected some of his creative output, and I’d be willing to listen to an argument that they affect even his works that aren’t primarily concerned with adult sexuality (though I think it would be a very heavy lift to convince me that Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead, as stand-alone books, are noxious works).

The really interesting question for me is who else other than Card DC considered to write Superman, and why Card’s pitch, whatever it was, stood out to the company. Card seems to me to be someone who has been coasting creatively on the reputation of Ender’s Game for an extremely long time, rather than a genuinely exciting active talent. But I wouldn’t be surprised if DC went with him because, if nothing else, he’s a recognizable brand name. That’s a kind of hiring laziness that is infuriating, particularly when, as Joseph Hughes wrote in a great piece at Comics Alliance earlier this month that inspired predictable-but-still-depressing hysteria, “There is currently not a single black writer working on a monthly series for either of the two biggest comic book publishers in the United States, and precious few working for any of the others.” Hiring a white, once-innovative writer whose attitudes both offend potential readers in general, and have the potential to seep into his work in a way that makes it deeply unappealing, is apparently still more attractive to DC Comics than seeking out a new and refreshing voice, no matter what body that voice is housed in.

Over at New York Magazine, Heather Havrilesky has a great piece that posits an answer to one of the things that gets me twitchiest about post-apocalypse stories: the lack of an explanation for how everything got so terrible in the first place. She argues that the point of shows like The Walking Dead or novels like Colson Whitehead’s Year Zero is to clear away some of the complications of modern society and to let us revel in the possibilities of stark choices or stark scenarios: the opportunity to wander around a city alone, unencumbered by security guards or a need to justify turning up someplace, the possibility of nobly sacrificing yourself for your baby, the opportunity to demonstrate your love and commitment to someone you love who is in danger in a visceral, even violent way. She writes:

The focus of these novels isn’t on the shape and form of the catastrophe; those details are often pretty vague. The apocalypse mostly serves as a way to turn up the contrast on a hero’s solitary battle to adapt and sally forth. Stripping away the complications and distractions of the modern world, what is our protagonist left with? The same melancholy and longing he or she always had, of course, but with far more of an excuse to feel these heavy emotions at every turn. Instead of injecting desperation, romance, solitude, and morbidity into a banal tale, these qualities are encoded in the apocalyptic novel’s DNA, minimizing the trivial clutter and heightening the stakes. Values and ideas about morality are stripped down to their essential nature: Kill or be killed? Conform and tolerate oppression or escape and risk death? Somehow, though, even in older works like Ballard’s The Drowned World, such disturbing questions are savored and relished. There’s an obvious delight taken in the awfulness of the transformed planet. In his survey of science fiction, A Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss refers to this tendency of authors to concoct enviable end times as “the cozy catastrophe.” As others suffer and die around him, our hero runs wild, enjoying the fruits of the worldwide holocaust.

This fascinates me in part because I think my reaction to post-apocalypse fiction, and really, all sorts of futuristic narratives, is to be more interested in how we got there than what we do when we’re there. I love the first two books in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because they’re all about the choices the characters make to extend their lifespans, to terraform Mars, to embrace new religions, and ultimately, to declare independence from Earth, but I’m relatively bored by the third novel, which is about all the sex and drama a new generation has once the future’s finally arrived. Reading The Hunger Games, I always want to know how the Capitol seized enough power to bring the Districts to heel enough to set up the Games in the first place. I wonder about first contact and the Bugger Wars in Ender’s Game, though I think Orson Scott Card is smart enough to weave a lot of backstory about the way the world changed into his story about what it’s become now. I love Contagion so much because it’s the rare, beautifully optimistic movie about how we avert a post-apocalypse, rather than bowing down to the inevitability of disaster.

Haywire, Stephen Soderbergh’s bone-crunching action movie starring mixed martial arts fighter-turned-actress Gina Carano hasn’t made its budget back yet, but Carano’s just signed up to star in another action movie, this one from director John Stockwell, who helmed surfing flick Blue Crush and thriller Into the Blue. Saorsie Ronan, who first came on the scene as a nosy child in period movie Atonement turned to action as a teenaged assassin in Hanna, signed up to star in Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction thriller The Host, and just, to some commentators’ surprise, just committed to star in a third action movie. Hailee Steinfeld, who came to prominence as a girl hunting her father’s killer in the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit will have another chance to hone her action chops playing female child soldier Petra in the adaptation of science fiction classic Ender’s Game. And Chloe Moretz’s outings as a pint-sized, foul-mouthed superhero in Kick Ass and a vampire in Let Me In haven’t prevented her from playing sweet and girlish in movies like Hugo. IConsidered together, that’s a pretty incredible crop of young action heroines on the rise. And it’s fascinating to contemplate what their collective impact could be on the industry.

In the past, it’s seemed like we can really only have one major female action star at a time, and that taking on that role can come with some limitations. Sigourney Weaver’s had that lock for her generation, and even when she takes on lighter fare, she ends up playing a heavy, or a character defined by her aggression. In You Again, ostensibly a female comedy, she’s a grown-up high school mean girl. In Red Lights, a paranormal thriller that was picked up out of Sundance, she’s a scientist defined by her intellectual certainty: she has a son, but the movie never gives us even the slightest inkling of a husband or partner or an explanation of whether she had her son on her own in the first place. It’s never a bad thing for an actress to get those kind of roles—I can’t say how excited I am to see Weaver play a vampire queen in Amy Heckerling’s Vamps along with Krysten Ritter and Alicia Silverstone—but being a competent action star shouldn’t mean that an actress can’t also nail a romantic comedy (or her male co-star in that action movie). Angelina Jolie’s allowed slightly greater range in her action roles, but seduction tends to get treated as part of her killer toolkit. When she takes on non-action fare, it tends to be as a historical figure like Mariane Pearl, or to play a woman in a different kind of extremis, as she did in Changeling.

I’d be curious to see if these younger actresses coming up a generation or a generation and a half behind Jolie can forge a new course, where they can do action movies and work in other genres. Some of it may simply be a chops issue: Jolie is just not a very funny actress, where as Moretz has charisma to burn in that particular space. And it would be nice to have female action heroes for whom action is an expression of other concerns. In the Mission Impossible movies, Ethan Hunt’s ass-kicking gets to be an expression of concern for his wife. James Bond’s womanizing and his action as a spy are both expressions of his lack of regard for himself—Daniel Craig’s elevated the act to a kind of exploration of self-harm. So it would be nice to see more female action characters with larger concerns other than lioness mode, who are allowed to protect people and interests other than small children. While I’m not a huge fan of the way The Hunger Games books ended, I do think that’s precisely the kind of franchise that could wed a woman’s ability to be a credible killer to a complex larger set of concerns.

It would also be nice to see more creative thinking about how to direct action sequences. I’m fine with certain female action stars getting choreographed the same way that men do, if they’ve got the stature for it to be plausible that they can plow through a crowd of heavies. But I also think it’s worth considering what kind of approaches slighter women would have to take to get the same result as male action stars who are bigger than them. Are there different schools of martial arts that would tip the balance? More inventive use of equipment? Differentials in vulnerabilities that female fighters could exploit? There are physical differences between men and women, and fight choreographers should think of that as an opportunity to try new things rather than as a reason to treat women as if they aren’t plausible action stars.

Not only is Viola Davis going to be in Ender’s Game, but they’re creating a role that’s not in the books, or at least is split off from Colonel Graff’s duties, for her: “Davis will play a military psychologist who oversees the emotional welfare of young trainees. She also helps design the games that test their skills and resilience.” This sounds terrific to me, honestly. In the novels, the characters that Graff argues with about Ender’s well-being aren’t really fleshed out at all—it’s more a conversation between him and Valentine. So giving Graff a clear adult partner in trying to figure out how to calibrate Ender’s training makes a lot of sense, particularly given that Harrison Ford, who’s playing Graff, has essentially regressed into a single cantankerous emotional range in recent years.

And even as someone who didn’t grow up playing video games, the Fantasy Game in the novel has always been one of the literary devices from that period of my reading life that stuck with me most strongly. In the novel, it’s a computer that keeps expanding the game for Ender after he beats what should have been its highest-level, overcoming a no-win scenario through a burst of unexpected violence. In the world of the novel, particularly given the way artificial intelligence evolves and the roles it plays in the subsequent books, it makes sense that an AI would be able to create a detailed psychological response to Ender’s pain. But I think in the movie it makes more sense to give us a person who’s designing the game, to personify that exploration of Ender’s psyche and the creative process that leads to its most stunning revelations.

It also makes the ending of the novel, in which the aliens Ender’s exterminated build a replica of the game to communicate with him after they’re gone, even more poignant. In the novel, Ender and the Hive Queen have learned their way towards reconciliation and forgiveness, and Ender takes on the task of making up for his crime after he’s reached that place of understanding. But by putting a person behind the fantasy game, Ender becomes a point of convergence for humanity as a whole and the Buggers: he’s someone they both need to understand, and he becomes them the first thing they truly have in common. In the novels, Ender’s xenocide set the stage for regret and a too-late desire for reconciliation, and he provided the intellectual framework for those emotions. But personifying the Fantasy Game plants the seed of that framework even earlier. Now, if only the movie or a sequel will give us a sense of the Hive Queen.

My original choice for Valentine Wiggin would have been Chloe Moretz: thanks to Hit-Girl and Let The Right One In, we know she can play awfully tough when necessary while still retaining her girlishness. Plus, she and Asa Butterfield’s developed a really nice dynamic in Hugo.

But failing that, I’m delighted to hear that Abigail Breslin will be playing the part. Since her debut in Little Miss Sunshine, she’s been doing a series of roles that are solid but have none of the oddity, vulnerability, and conviction of that breakout part. Now, she has one.

I’m sure I’m not the only lady blogger, or lady nerd blogger, to feel like Valentine Wiggin is part of the reason we do what we do. I had no desire to manipulate the players in the Cold War when I was as young as she is. But the idea of finding a place where you can have a running conversation with anyone you want? Starting off playing pretend and finding your own voice–and then learning other people find it powerful? That’s a compelling pitch, particularly when you take away the potential-serial-killer-turned-world-leader older brother and the younger brother the state wants you to manipulate into committing xenocide.

The bridge is yours.

-For the distinguished meth or television connoisseur in your life, Walter White sneakers.

-The cultural exchange that made the Tintin story The Blue Lotus so good.

-Watchmen 2 is a thing. Everything is terrible.

-Sounds like Valentine Wiggin’s going to have true grit.

-Are we on our way to usage-based billing?

The bridge is yours.

-Should I give Work of Art a shot? An increasing number of my critic pals love it, but I’m curious as to your takes.

-I really hope the folks making Ender’s Game remember that Mazer Rackham isn’t white.

-Time to catch up on everyone’s favorite prematurely-canceled private detective show.

-Game of Thrones is going to start diverging from A Song of Ice and Fire.

-Yay Girl Talk!