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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

#471

Post by LegitShady »

abecedarius wrote: post #254
nextaccountic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LotR movies aren't book-accurate. But they are great!

Those movies are outstanding on multiple axes, but in terms of story I hate what they did to the source. Yes you need to mess with it to make a movie that works as a movie, no that doesn't mean your Aragorn can murder an emissary on a parley. These changes aren't just unfaithful, they're standard modern Hollywood tropes, subtracting rather than adding interest.

The movies seemed to try to make Aragorn a lot more relatable than the books do.

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

#472

Post by LegitShady »

unicornmama wrote: post #121
xref wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure Jordan’s books can be ruined, if anything I’d hope a TV series can correct a lot of his fatal flaws like truly awful writing of female characters. Sanderson tried to fix some of that after Jordan’s death, but when did he come in, book 12 or so?

Yeah I look forward to hours of screen time of Nynineneave riding a horse and kuckling her back.

I read and liked most of those books and I still have no idea how to pronounce her name.

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

#473

Post by chaostheory »

TheTrotters wrote: post #427
chaostheory wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also Hardin being a Chosen One and the producer insisting on reddit that "it's not really so Almost all modern TV in the Scifi & Fantasy tropes relies on the the Hero's Journey. It is very hard not to use it especially if you want a large audience. To faithfully recreate Foundation for TV, you'd have to make a fake documentary and that just doesn't draw enough people to make the budget work

But if you want your show to be a success you have to take chances. If they make just another derivative show they can’t be surprised by the poor reception. (Besides I’m not sure I agree with the premise. Game of Thrones was a big success and it was much more complex than a simple Hero’s Journey.)

GoT was also a Hero's Journey story. The difference is that it involved more than one character i.e. the Starks, etc...

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

#474

Post by chaostheory »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #417
chaostheory wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steven King was not a fan of Kubrick's The Shining.

And it still was a much more faithful adaptation than Foundation. Foundation is like a boomerang that was thrown three episodes ago, and hasn't come back yet to its source.

Not really. It feels very different from the book. It's more psychological and less supernatural even though there are elements of it from the book. If Kubrick was too faithful, it would not have been as scary.

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

#475

Post by chaostheory »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #444
chaostheory wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the books are fascinating, but they are almost more like historical documentaries then narrative fiction and this is why it's near impossible to translate Asimov's Foundation faithfully to TV. I don't understand why a lot of fans can't see this

I had the same idea of LOTR, with all their songs and heavy narrative, yet the Peter Jackson's adaptation was great, a love letter to Tolkien. He did show, not tell.

LOTR uses the same Hero's Journey pattern as StarWars. The main thing Jackson did was remove the songs and poetry. That's easy imo.

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

#476

Post by matthewdgreen »

jjk166 wrote: post #466
ASalazarMX wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a critical deviation, which shouldn't have been done on a whim. Seldon's psycohistory predicted the path of the whole empire with great accuracy, but knowing their destiny would make people act differently, so Terminus didn't have psycohistorians, just a vault that would open at crucial events and give information. It would have worked well until the Mule threw a wrench with its mental ability to tune other mind…

I think there's a wide gulf between predicting the entire course of the collapse of a galactic empire centuries out into the future, and being able to anticipate a meteorite impact fractions of a second into the future. At most, Gaal has had a vague, bad feeling about something minutes before it happened. While they may have the second foundation refine this ability and be able to predict things out over longer time…

The show seems to be heavily leaning towards the idea that this capability is going very important to the plot. A significant portion of the last episode consists of Hari Seldon explaining to Gaal how significant her powers are, and demonstrating that they can clearly predict complicated near-future events. I hope you’re right that the show will place tight restrictions on this macguffin, but I’m definitely worried.

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

#477

Post by tootie »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #406
tootie wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krugman has stated in the past that the entire reason he became an economist is because it was the closest real world profession to being a psychohistorian.

Amusing considering economists care more about their precious numbers than sociology, psychology and history.

I think you're confusing economists with economic policy makers. Economics is a science. The study of scarcity. It's not about money.

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

#478

Post by Vecr »

photochemsyn wrote: post #401

There's a fundamental problem with the Foundation series - it's based on obsolete scientific thinking about predictability. The concept of 'engineers of history' that the Foundation series is based on - i.e. that these white-robed geniuses could steer the course of future events, hundreds or thousands of years later, by making small key changes to the present - relies on a lack of knowledge of chaos and sensitive dep…

At least he got some of the reflexivity stuff right, but chaos theory was not very well developed at the time. If it was written in the '90s he could have put in some handwaving about strange attractors, but it's still not fluid dynamics...

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

#479

Post by TeMPOraL »

garmaine wrote: post #391
TeMPOraL wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a flashlight that lasts for more than a few minutes (...) despite the fact ~98%+ of the people reading this literally have a flashlight in their pocket or equally available right now A tangent: it dawned on me only a few years ago just how little power LED lights use compared to most other things we do with energy. I never had a good intuition for this, so I was surprised when I noticed that keeping my smartphone's…

This is not my experience on iPhones. This light drains the battery pretty quickly.

I see. To contextualize my observation, it is my experience with Galaxy S7 and S9.

I suspect your iPhones must be staying awake for the duration of using the flashlight, for some reason.

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

#480

Post by rbanffy »

Oddskar wrote: post #153
rbanffy wrote: post #127

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…

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.

> There’s no “slot” to fill. There’s no need for universal appeal.

That’s true, but, depending on your budget, you’ll need a large audience to justify the investment.

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