After giving up 2.5 episodes in, the only thing I can compare this show to is Battlefield Earth.
It's incredibly, spectacularly bad!
When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
151–160 of 498 posts
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say that Dune, as a single book, is a metaphor for a local Arab community rising up to overthrow a pair of colonial powers (Brits/Harkonnen and American/Atreidis) to take control of their own oil reserves (spice). It is a story about Jihad, a word that is used many times in the books but is notably absent in the latest film. Start changing too many characters and the metaphors to our real world fall apart.
It's about a marginalised community's manipulation by a cynical religious cult, which indoctrinates them to await a messiah, then provides them with that messiah in order to usurp power over their entire society for the cult's own nefarious ends.
Your forgetting the surprise twist though. The cult loses control of that very society in part due to that very indoctrination.
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#153Unpopular opinion: Foundation, as written, would probably be very niche TV. A straightforward adaptation would be terrible, albeit interesting if seasons were launched in the order of the books the way Asimov fused his Robots, Empire, and Foundation series. Even then, you can get away with a lot less detail in a book than you can with a TV series - you need to flesh out cultures and characters that, in a book, you ca…
I think this is a very outdated view of the way series and streaming platform have evolved. There’s no “slot” to fill. There’s no need for universal appeal.
“The Crown” is a good example. This would never have been made into a show before streaming.
The Foundation could have been a intellectually stimulating sci-fi show that appealed a lot to a smaller audience and it still would have been successful.
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#154I've been rather impressed with Villeneuve's Dune. It's not perfect, I feel that there's not enough backstory and context for those not familiar with the novel (not explaining CHOAM and the landsraad makes the emperor's actions confusing), Jessica is a bit too wimpy for a Bene Geserit who is supposed to be in control and I reserve judgement about the changes with Lyet Kynes. That said as someone who loved the books,…
How far into the first book goes the new movie?
I'm rereading the book and am now at "Book 3: The Prophet".
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, if "Foundation and Dune are almost impossible to translate to screen faithfully," why are we translating them to screen, instead of writing a new work for which screen is the natural medium? With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"
I would reject faithfulness as a measure of success. I'd much rather have "That's not Foundation!" I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story. Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Ad…
Annihilation did that rather well, I think—the source material is about imperfect clones, that had the same structure as the original but weren't the same inside. And then they released a movie that had the structure of the book, but wasn't the same inside. I thought that was quite clever.
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#156I've been rather impressed with Villeneuve's Dune. It's not perfect, I feel that there's not enough backstory and context for those not familiar with the novel (not explaining CHOAM and the landsraad makes the emperor's actions confusing), Jessica is a bit too wimpy for a Bene Geserit who is supposed to be in control and I reserve judgement about the changes with Lyet Kynes. That said as someone who loved the books,…
I felt that Dune didn't leave enough time to actually think about what was going on. Concepts from the book like the Missionaria Protectiva and Butlerian Jihad were given minimal lip service or not mentioned at all. But these are the best bits of Dune for me. These are what make it science-fiction rather than space opera. As a space opera Dune is good. As science-fiction it's great.
I haven't seen Foundation (and won't), but it sounds like a similar story.
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#157I've been rather impressed with Villeneuve's Dune. It's not perfect, I feel that there's not enough backstory and context for those not familiar with the novel (not explaining CHOAM and the landsraad makes the emperor's actions confusing), Jessica is a bit too wimpy for a Bene Geserit who is supposed to be in control and I reserve judgement about the changes with Lyet Kynes. That said as someone who loved the books,…
How far into the first book goes the new movie? I'm rereading the book and am now at "Book 3: The Prophet".
It doesn't go that far.
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#158This sums up my feelings about the show pretty well. Loved the books, hated the show. It gets rid of everything that was interesting about the books - the high level narrative about civilization and power projection mechanisms and replaces it with generic Hollywood sci-fi tropes, with cringy romance subplots thrown in. The second episode was so bad I stopped watching.
Did you consider that with such a complex story and large cast the show might take more than one and a half episodes to show you everything? The show has indeed been about power projection mechanisms, once it set up the universe and cast enough. It's one thing to watch an episode and a half and say "eh, not for me." It's another entirely to declare you know "the show" and speak authoritatively about it as a whole whe…
I’ve watched five episodes. It didn’t get better.
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#159There are a lot of people really hating on the TV show here, so I’ll offer a slightly contrarian take:
I would say the biggest problem is the marketing that implies they faithfully are telling the books, when they’re not. The TV show is not faithful to the books.
That said: the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction. It works well because they are _short_ stories, and following the span of history, frequently jumping ahead a generation, is cool. But it would’ve been very difficult to render that as-is for television and have much of an audience. Also, the original stories were written in the 1940s and some parts feel quite dated (everyone is smoking all the time, the hyper focus on nuclear power, the relative role of women). So whoever picked the stories up, they were going to make a lot of changes.
If you think of the series merely as “inspired by” them not “based on them,” then the show isn’t bad. It has some corny flaws like most TV (the combat, just terrible), but they’ve developed a few good characters, added some new mysteries, and the order in which they’re unfolding events over time is interesting.
So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)
Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dune wasn't exactly untouched by Hollywood politics. They completely eliminated the themes of European/Arabic cultural conflict (replacing everyone except the bad guys with a generic box-ticking multi-ethnic cast) and they completely nuked Kynes' character to replace him with a forgettable "generic strong woman" character.
Oh come on. Atreides, Haleck, Hawat, Yueh, Idaho, Mattai. No hints of ethnic diversity there in the book at all? Really? I thought Sharon did a fantastic job as Kynes, one of the more naturalistic performances in the whole movie.
The descriptions of Atreides in the book didn't strike me as particularly western. Dark hair, olive skin, etc.