191–200 of 498 posts
Unpopular 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…
The economist Paul Krugman of all people wrote a 'review' of Foundation versus Dune : > “Foundation” might seem unfilmable. It mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year. The story spans centuries; in each episode everything appears to be on the brink, and it seems as if only desperate efforts by the protagonists can save the day…
I love that Paul Krugman implies that Foundation copied Star Wars. (Ie Foundation was the original Empire Space Opera from which many Sci Fi authors cribbed including George Lucas)
And while not identical, Smith's Lensmen and Lucas' Jedi Knights have a great deal in common.
The economist Paul Krugman of all people wrote a 'review' of Foundation versus Dune : > “Foundation” might seem unfilmable. It mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year. The story spans centuries; in each episode everything appears to be on the brink, and it seems as if only desperate efforts by the protagonists can save the day…
I love that Paul Krugman implies that Foundation copied Star Wars. (Ie Foundation was the original Empire Space Opera from which many Sci Fi authors cribbed including George Lucas)
Mind you, Lucas cribbed from everything in sight; samurai movies (Hidden Fortress), Westerns, war films (the trench run is from 633 Squadron). Partly why it was so successful.
There 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_…
The ideas are all new to me and I have no idea where the story is going.
Man, reading through this thread, I feel like such an odd man out. I'm enjoying Foundation. Sure, it's not amazingly intellectually stimulating, and it's not really based on the books, but I find it fun to watch. As it's own thing, it's entertaining to me. I also really enjoyed The Flash (up until season 6 or so when it just got too repetitive). It seems like there's a lot of people that can't seem to enjoy things "j…
Humanity traveling faster than light? Check. Woman using stupid bras? Check. Radar that maps entire cave? Check. It doesn’t flag a creature 5m ahead? Check.
For many, these details are unbearable plot holes. Watching science fiction require you to be able to skip these and focus on the story (girl in love, sucking at survival sim).
In the books, the significance of the Vault is purely about ideas -- what its revelations mean for civilization. Whereas the showrunners needed to exaggerate its spectacle -- "You dumb TV watchers aren't going to get how important this is, so we have to shove it in your face. See? Giant floaty alien-looking thing? Must be important, right?"
Another example is how the decline of civilization isn't supposed to be obvious to the people living through it. At the time of the events of the first episode, the decline is supposed to be manifesting itself in extremely minor ways -- an extremely subtle "atmosphere of decay". Expressways aren't being maintained as well as they once were, and deployment of new elevator technology is held back by pessimism. People wouldn't have noticed these things any more than a Roman in 200 AD would have seen a crumbling road and caught a glimpse of the fall of Rome. But instead of showing the elevator industry resting on their laurels, the showrunners have to show a spectacular terrorist attack on a space elevator that kills 100 million people. "See! The empire is falling apart. Get it?"
The showrunners are trying to paint a picture with a paint sprayer instead of using fine brush strokes.
My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology, pretty much all of the main themes of the books. I actually liked the imperial cloning elements, as they fleshed out well an ossified society, but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic. I can only wish that the writer's room of…
That's a quite accurate observation. Even for the largest budgets people tasked with story telling are almost always the weakest element. Who makes them? What kind of education do they undergo to be this wrong about reality and storytelling? Are they such small and in-bred group that they are all so wrong in such similar ways?
This reminds me of another weird thing. In games, various NPCs often say the same dialog line just in different voices. So the bottleneck is writing few words? Not hiring voice talent, not recording it in the studio and postprocessing it? But writing few unique words less is where you get your savings?
"Asimov's Vision". The guy himself has said in interviews that it was entirely inspired by gas/fluid dynamics theory, where you could predict the motion of the whole but individual molecules would be random, and then "what if that could be applied to people". Everything else is just exploring and extrapolating. It's far from perfect but I feel that if it was a new IP work the reaction to it would be very different. A…
My greatest gripe with the show is that none of the writers seem to have any understanding of science, technology and have only a vague understanding of sociology, pretty much all of the main themes of the books. I actually liked the imperial cloning elements, as they fleshed out well an ossified society, but every other plotline seems to just happen because of pseudo-magic. I can only wish that the writer's room of…
I can usually forgive some tech contradiction details, but its really annoying when there is faster than light travel... But to create contrived suspense because no technology exists to make a flashlight strong enough to illuminate a cave for 10m ??!?!
Back here in the real world we have more light than we know what to do with. We have things that seem to light up the world accidentally, like the screen of our phones, better than flashlights can do the job in the future.
There's some other tropes where super-futuristic, sci-fi technology is noticeably worse than our real-world technology (weaponry in particular, most "ray guns" are noticeably inferior to real-world guns in almost every way except perhaps ammo capacity), but none I can think of where the every day experience of everybody now is so readily at-hand to know better.
No one learned anything from Game of Thrones. The show was absolutely amazing when it could follow the books. The definitive show everyone talked about. The moment the books ran out it started to go downhill. And when they couldn't easily extrapolate from the books the show fell apart completely. The showrunners and writes for the show weren't good enough to make Game of Thrones on their own. No offence, but that tak…
I actually find GoT later and dumber episodes most re-watchable. I imagine it is hard as hell to film shows that are both smart and cinematic. Nolan seems to be the only one who can consistently accomplish this