His résumé is relatively brief, but there’s some impressive work on it. His most famous effort has to be the 2005 film Tsotsi, a story of a South African teenager who tries to find redemption and escape from a life of crime. It’s encouraging that this movie, which won the Oscar for Foreign Film that year, was also focused on a young protagonist, apparently an area in which Hood has interest, experience and success.
That was almost a decade ago, and in the years since he directed the topical and confoundingly underrated 2007 film Rendition, which featured an all-star cast and was based on a true story, indeed probably dozens of true stories. This was still a movie with a fairly sharp focus. Then, Hood went big in 2009 when he directed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a much more poorly received picture, although again, I found it a little puzzling that it drew so much ire from critics.
It’s Tsotsi and Wolverine that seem most relevant in trying to speculate whether Hood was the right person to lead the Ender’s Game project, given their combination of subject and scope, although his evident passion in taking control over the script to the point of getting sole credit as screenwriter at the very least speaks to his level of passion for this story. For me at least, he’s done enough to earn my trust.
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