The Ender's Game movie scares me. It was such a great book, and I have no faith at all that Hollywood can show restraint and produce a movie that fits the book. Kind of like World War Z, which could have made for an interesting take on the zombie genre instead of just being Brad Pitt vs. the Zombies.
Oh yeah - Samuel Jackson has been in a lot of over 200M movies - looks like 6 as well (1 being the Incredibles). I assumed when guys like Tom Cruise didn't have that many that it was more rare, but truthfully, I'm not sure you could say Samuel Jackson was the main star in many of these movies which was sort of the point of the article - is Brad Pitt a leading man blockbuster star?
Well, avoid Z if that is your criteria. Brad Pitt is completely anonymous in this movie in the sense that there was no time for him to build a character at all. Any living body could have inhabited that role.
if you become privy to some of Spielberg's comments about Falling Skies, you will learn that for him the drama is about family, the relationships between people and, by extension, groups that share or do not share a common perspective or purpose. thus, one of the central crises in FS is that the sons of Tom Mason, and later, his wife, are beset by/with strong influences from non-humans. a source of tension in Z is that Pitt must choose to leave his family to pursue a "higher calling". the human race's future depends on his choices and commitment to what we all share, our fundamental humanity. the moral question for Pitt, who, incidentally is a government operative, revolves around whether his allegiance is to Mankind or his immediate kin. there are factors that complicate the issue, but it seems to me that the crux of the drama in the story is in that tension.
Except that Pitt didn't leave for a "higher" calling. He left because the general blackmailed him into it. The ship was only for indispensable people, and if Pitt wasn't going to help then he and his family were just refugees. And when everyone thought Pitt was dead, his family was dumped ashore.
it wasn't his higher calling, it was a higher calling for his race. his motivation was ultimately partly/mostly selfish, but he accepted his mission and carried it out with singular dedication.
i get where youse are coming from, but i think that's just part of the drama in the movie. if Pitt's character doesn't have any conflict about going/not going to Korea, it makes his choice a simple one. it's a plot device. we know in advance he's not going to die and his family isn't going to be set back in NYC or South Philly, but there has to be that conflict. we get manipulated all the time in these movies. my view is that the blackmail and the issues surrounding his wife and kids being dumped in Zombieland are typical measures to show how screwed up the military and government are.
Huh? How screwed they are? Because they didn't give him free shelter and food to his family while he didn't do anything for them back? If anything that was one of the good things in the movie in that they base it on reality of a crisis and not a fake entitled reality.