'Ender's Game' trailer debuts

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The highly anticipated first trailer for "Ender's Game" has arrived at long last, giving fans of Orson Scott Card's beloved 1985 science fiction novel their first look at adaptation.

Ender's is a tale of a child pressed into defending Earth from alien attack, manipulated by adults to fight their very real war games. Nearly 30 years after the book's publication "Ender's Game" strikes at a moment of when intergalactic epics like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" have seen renewed interest, along with the extraordinary popularity of dystopian teen adventures such as "The Hunger Games."

Starring Asa Butterfield ("Hugo") as the titular Ender Wiggin, buoyed by a potent supporting cast featuring Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Abigail Breslin, Hailee Steinfeld, and Viola Davis, "Ender's Game" hits theaters on November 1.

Card said the film's adaptation fuses the events of "Ender's Game" with those of "Ender's Shadow," a parallel novel through the point of view of Bean (Aramis Knight).

Both screenplay and direction for the film are by Gavin Hood ("Tsotsi," "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"), although the script went through a number of iterations between 1996 and 2011, when production began. "Ender's Game" author Card wrote several versions of the screenplay himself, and has been closely involved with the filmmaking.

Anticipating the fears of die-hard fans, Butterfield jumped onto the Reddit thread where the trailer had been posted. He answered fans' questions and soothed worries of the "film being all 'Hollywood.'"

"I can say that there is no need to be scared," he said. "The heart and soul of the story are as much a part of the film as they were in the book. Ender's 'inner struggles' are still key in the film."