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When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

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Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#341

Post by criddell »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #329
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have your cake and eat it. Apple made a ton of buzz around the TV show, and it took _because_ they use the Asimov work. Apple did the Apple thing, they overhyped a product that they then designed according to their own rules, expecting everybody to just eat their crap and smile as usual. But it turns out people liking classic SF books are not your average fanboy, and they don't like being lied to. It's not…

For God's sake, Apple didn't "design [the Foundation TV show] according to their own rules". Apple bought the rights to a TV show created, developed, produced, and run by people who do not work for Apple. Yes, Apple is signing checks, yes, that I get that means they have some influence -- but that doesn't make the show into an "Apple product" the way an iPhone or a MacBook is. It just doesn't. There is no one at Appl…

Well said.

> Is it turning a cerebral almost action-free book series into an action epic?

This pretty much has to be expected. Text and film are wildly different formats and have different strengths and constraints.

I can understand people giving it a thumbs down, but the responses that sound almost angry baffle me.

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#342

Post by scotty79 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #328
scotty79 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it. 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…

How many actors can you name? Directors? Screenwriters would seem to be critically important, but writing is hard, often slow and converts much less recognition than other roles in the industry. Further, there are innumerable points in the production chain in which the (necessary!) decisions of other crew members can alter/dilute/confuse the intentions of the screenwriter.

Recently I'm learning a lot of names of screenwriters exactly because they tank show after show but they are given yet another chance by producers because one of the things they wrote was mediocre.

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#343

Post by dkonofalski »

allturtles wrote: post #322
dkonofalski wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really... most television needs to clear the bar of being something that you watch when you're bored and then get hooked into. Otherwise, you'd only have viewers that are familiar with the source and that's not a great way to grow viewership. It's how Game of Thrones grew so quickly for HBO. That show was a confusing mess with tons of characters but it was interesting to watch if you're bored because there was en…

Maybe this is just because of where I am in life, but between work, children, and hobbies, I don't have time to be bored. If I'm watching TV it's because I'm choosing to do it instead of something else I should be doing or want to do. I will only even try shows that receive high praise from people I trust or from a lot of reviewers. If a show's only function is to kill time it has negative value to me.

Sorry... to clarify, I'm not suggesting that that's the function of the show. I'm just saying that shows, nowadays, need to be simultaneously easy to get into to start but also in depth enough to keep people hooked. We're still early into the show so I think we're still in that "simple" stage.

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#344

Post by scotty79 »

seanalltogether wrote: post #270
scotty79 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it. 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…

Because writers don't fund movies and tv shows, and are almost always left out of the decision making process for what elements need to appear in the story.

So the problem is that writers don't write the scripts? I know directors don't actually direct them since there often is director's cut, that is supposed to reflect better the intentions of the director.

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#346

Post by simonh »

_ph_ wrote: post #201
k__ wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The descriptions of Atreides in the book didn't strike me as particularly western. Dark hair, olive skin, etc.

But they trace their line to the ancient greek Adreides which fought in the siege of Troy. So their origin would be Greek, whatever mixed in over the millenia.

Genetically it doesn't make sense to privilege one ancestor or ancestral line as 'their origin', over others that are merely 'mixed in'. They're all just ancestors. Take Paul for example, is his ancestry Atreides, or whatever Jessica's background is*? He's just as much her son as he is Leto's.

* spoiler alert

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#347

Post by addingnumbers »

Lochleg wrote: post #224
jerf wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The humble flashlight must be one of the most abused pieces of modern technology in fiction. According to video games, it doesn't matter what century you're in, it is impossible to create a flashlight that lasts for more than a few minutes, and only provides a feeble cone of barely-light for that time. According to science fiction, despite the fact ~98%+ of the people reading this literally have a flashlight in their…

Even when LED flashlights were first popularized (more than a decade ago), it was believable that batteries always seemed to be on their last legs, especially in the wilderness. It's probably not supposed to be a thing on Terminus unless there's a missing plot point that explains why they couldn't use or were preserving their pocket nuclear reactors / batteries that can power force fields among other things.

In the book it took them eighty years of being metal-starved on Terminus to develop pocket reactors, with everyone else in the galaxy incredulous that it was possible.

Bulky power sources at this point in the timeline are entirely consistent with the book. What's wildly inconsistent is that Cleon has a personal force field that's supposed to be invented a hundred years later, on Terminus, isolated from the Empire.

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#348

Post by zarkov99 »

browningstreet wrote: post #298
burlesona wrote: post #159

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_…

Ignoring the lack of faith to the source material: It's bad.. the dialogue, conflict, etc., are far below the levels we've come to expect in sci-fi shows like Expanse. This is a complete waste of Jared Harris' talents. In the last episode, the resolution of his incomplete download was dramatized by a bit more screaming, then he was all good. It doesn't feel elevated or sophisticated at all... it does look very pretty…

It is horrible. And you could predict it was going to be horrible as soon as you saw the obvious distortions caused by Woke nonsense: gender swap of not one, but two of the central characters, the not so subtle hints at the horrible religious fanatic and climate change denying people who so oppressed poor Gaal, etc. Apple's Foundation follow the familiar Hollywood woke playbook: do not create new stories, because of course that would require actual creative talent, instead correct (maybe desecrate is a better term) old great stories to comply to SJW messaging. The new Dune is another example but Villeneuve actually has talent, and though he did pay the Woke vig, which is sad, he managed to appease the lunatics without impacting the story too much. I guess that is the best we can expect from Hollywood these days.

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#349

Post by skocznymroczny »

ianai wrote: post #214
robbiep wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. It took me a while to get my head around the approach they were taking (I re-read the whole series prior to it airing) but what struck me most on re-reading was how completely boring it would be to be faithful to it. Even just getting rid of the 1950s stereotype gender roles - which is the obvious place to start - doesn’t change the long arcs of obvious dialogue. It’s a really grand scope for a univ…

It's been a while, but I remember Asimov leaving a lot out of the books. i.e. Stories would start after the violence or some clever twist would side step it altogether. He left a lot for a visual medium to add-in. The core is there so far: psychohistory, robots, huge Trantor, planning to 'save' a galaxy amount of culture and info for a galactic reboot, etc. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's the first li…

Arguably, the departure of Gene Roddenberry was what made TNG what it was after the 2nd season. Giving more spotlight to Klingons and Romulans, violating the prime directive, made for a more interesting show. Later DS9 improved on these concepts, by showing a Federation that is willing to bend the rules when desperate times, using deception (forging evidence to disrupt the Dominion-Romulan alliance), covert operations (Section 31) and even planning a genocide (infecting Odo with a disease to spread the disease to other Founders, also Hugh in Star Trek TNG).

Re: When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

#350

Post by [deleted] »

rory wrote: post #233
simonh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always envisioned each planet / great house / ethnic group to be ethnically homogeneous, although different from each other. I don't think it's very likely there would be some black Fremen and some mediterranean looking ones in the same sietch. Even if the planet was colonized with a diverse population, it would have been blended out by the time the events Dune take place. But also it's soft sci fi so tons of thing…

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