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

• geenew 5y ago
  There's an old BBC radio adaptation of the books that people here might want to check out: https://archive.org/details/foundationtrilogythe--bbc1973radiodrama8hours https://archive.org/details/foundationtrilogythe--bbc1973rad...
• Apocryphon 5y ago
  Breaking news: Hyperion by Dan Simmons will be adapted courtesy of Bradley Cooper: https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-warner-bros-with-graham-king-1234865881/ https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
  • saberdancer 5y ago
    Explanation that they are adapting it as a feature film instead of a limited series because they want to provide more breadth feels disingenuous. Limited series should provide more screentime than a movie. Also I feel that a tv show would work better - with all the flashbacks you need to have.
    • nottorp 5y ago
      > Limited series should provide more screentime than a movie. Yeah, like they did for The Hobbit.
  • mabub24 5y ago
    This has been in the works for years. I had high hopes for a limited series. A feature film sounds simply awful for the structured narrative style in Hyperion. Warner Bros will not make a Pasolini style Cantebury Tales. This movie will probably be lifeless.
  • rsynnott 5y ago
    ... Huh. At this point I'm beginning to wonder if they're deliberately choosing the most difficult-to-adapt sci-fi. I can't see this working, at all.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      Hasn’t Dune been a success so far? If so then between that and the OP we’re 0.5 to 1. Wheel of Time will tell.
      • rsynnott 5y ago
        Well, Dune has been a success, after 40 years, on about the fifth try. So we should expect the _good_ Hyperion adaptation around 2060, then :) (Though, I think Hyperion is actually a _much_ harder one to adapt than Dune, certainly into a movie. There's far too much in it.)
        • Apocryphon 5y ago
          If this feature film idea fails they can make a series. If they’re adapting neofeudal space dark ages sci-fi now, it’s time for someone to dip into games inspired by these works. Fading Suns and Traveller, and once the studio suits get the gumption for it, Warhammer 40,000…
• novalis78 5y ago
  Very true. Dune was a fantastic take on the motives and inspiration that Dune evokes. The Foundation needs another attempt. One day.
• Justsignedup 5y ago
  My #1 gripe with foundation has been the "lost" style of storytelling. A non coherent time line with multiple flashbacks and cutaway whenever anything interesting happens. Most the darn episodes feel like the who is cartmans mom part 2 episode.
• whatever1 5y ago
  The writing and directing are at times very sloppy. To the point that you lose the illusion that you are in a movie and you can clearly see the actors acting. Cannot exactly pinpoint why though.
  • smnrchrds 5y ago
    > Cannot exactly pinpoint why though. That's because there are so many examples it's hard to choose one. The population of planets shift by orders of magnitude between episodes; the spaceship apparently has a 'fifth quadrant [1]; the zephyr acts too melodramatically, even when she is supposed to be having an honest conversation in private, she sounds like she is speaking to the cameras at a political rally; etc. etc. It feels like they spent their entire budget on special effects and had to hire interns and volunteers for story and directing. [1] If it were fifth third, it could have been a nudge to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but fifth quadrant has to be an error.
  • weikju 5y ago
    I agree, especially the directing, and the over-reliance on end of episode cliffhangers, which are often not revisited until 2, 3 episodes later. I do like how the story is developing though, and I know that often it takes a show one season, one and a half, to really get into its groove. 3 more episodes to go before I can have a more full opinion... All in all so far though it really does seem like just one long drawn-out introduction, with the juicy stuff really starts in season 2 (as teased by Goyer in a reddit AMA - Hober Mallow, Church of the Galactic Spirit, a strong general and a weak emperor)
• malermeister 5y ago
  This 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.
  • mrleinad 5y ago
    Same here. That "twist" for the second episode was too damn much to keep watching them utterly destroy everything that Asimov wrote.
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    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 when you haven't seen four fifths of the material.
    • malermeister 5y ago
      Those two (not sure where you're getting 1.5 from) episodes have been completely incompatible with the source material already. There's no reason to go any further, in the same way you don't need to see the derailed train come to a complete stop to know it's not gonna make it to the station.
      • KennyBlanken 5y ago
        You said you didn't even finish the second episode. If that's not what you meant, chose your words more carefully. Tortured analogies ignored: you declared the series to be absent something that has been present in spades in the latter episodes and you still don't realize how that makes you look.
• sandworm101 5y ago
  They lost me in the trailer. Foundation is a story across centuries about elderly and ossified leadership structures, not attractive young people in spandex. It is about one faction rebelling against another, not kids trying to get out from under their parents. And I really don't mind changing the genders of characters but please don't do so just to create eye candy. Dune did this too. I think making Kynes female was interesting, although it certainly changes the male/female dynamics that are the core of the story. But making the character young and attractive is just pandering to male gaze.
  • edgyquant 5y ago
    Yeah. Dune can be (but I don’t think has been) done right as it’s still the story of one character and his ascension to the throne. Foundation can’t be done as a typical show due to the time span in which it takes place.
    • sandworm101 5y ago
      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.
      • simonh 5y ago
        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.
        • zaphar 5y ago
          Your forgetting the surprise twist though. The cult loses control of that very society in part due to that very indoctrination.
• kaczordon 5y ago
  This is also what happens when you re-write the core story to match a Political Correctness agenda. The producers should’ve taken a note from Denis Villeneuve’s treatment of Dune, the source book should be the Bible and you don’t mess with it.
  • bobsil1 5y ago
    Quite the opposite: TV Foundation’s terrorists are brown; Villeneuve’s Dune turns Muhammad into a white guy and defends oil/spice colonialism.
  • smnrchrds 5y ago
    Foundation, as written, does not lend itself to any medium other than text. Dune had already been adapted to films, TV shows, and games multiple times before Villeneuve's film. Yet, despite its popularity, Foundation had never been adapted into another medium before the current TV show. I agree that the Apple TV series does not capture the essence of the books, but no series or film possibly can. Best we can hope is a loose adaptation, which is what we have gotten now.
    • natechols 5y ago
      I still think "The Mule", AKA the second half of "Foundation and Empire", could make an excellent standalone - still one of the best sci-fi thrillers IMHO, and much more interesting characters than most of Asimov. But otherwise, there are so many better choices for translating to screen...
    • chrisfosterelli 5y ago
      On the other hand... Dune had also been widely considered 'unfilmable' in the industry and that same thing had been said about it: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/why-denis-villeneuves-dune-is-a-successful-adaptation-of-an-unfilmable-novel-10096271.html https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/why-denis-villeneuve...
      • smnrchrds 5y ago
• Afforess 5y ago
  I've read the books and watched the show as far as it's aired. I agree, but I almost think it's good that Asimov's vision is getting smoothed out a bit. After "second foundation" in the book series, the books go in a very different, unscientific "woo" direction. The end of the entire series is bizarre and controversial. I'm not all that convinced I want the original ending to be preserved - it wasn't that good anyway. The powerful bit about foundation was always the ability to predict larger events better than smaller ones, as well as criticism of empire and overdependence on interconnectedness. In that, the TV show preserves the themes very well.
  • Jtsummers 5y ago
    > The powerful bit about foundation was always the ability to predict larger events better than smaller ones, as well as criticism of empire and overdependence on interconnectedness. In that, the TV show preserves the themes very well. I can't see how you'd think this, with respect to the show. Seldon literally tells another character that that character's decision (on that day, apparently) will shape the fate of the galaxy. It loses the plot about psychohistory being about prediction of populations and turns it into predictions about individuals (and that's just the most overt example). Maybe they'll find a way to redeem it by the end of the first season, but so far several characters are presented as Chosen Ones, selected by Seldon to get through a specific crisis (or crises).
    • weikju 5y ago
      "presented as Chosen Ones" -- from the Goyer AMA, he said the show explores when believe think they are Chosen Ones, but that there are no Chosen Ones. In fact, the whole thing about Salvor believing she's a Chosen One is falling apart, as every one of her schemes (involving violence as well) are falling apart.. and it seems like she's where Gaal was supposed to be, therefore she's being mistaken as the leader that Gaal was supposed to be, and things are going off the rails as a result... What's sad is it took an AMA to fully understand this, rather than being understood via watching the show, at least in the first 7 episodes...
      • 5y ago
• yodon 5y ago
  The army combat sequences are inconceivably stupid. Dozens of soldiers firing sci-fi machine guns at unprotected opponents at close range and everyone magically avoids injury. It makes one wonder if Apple applied some sort of violence limiting clause to the production with absurd results.
  • rpmisms 5y ago
    I think if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it's that Hollywood collectively knows jack shit about firearms.
  • LegitShady 5y ago
    only stormtroopers are so precise. Personally these days when I hear they're making a book or book series I like into movies/tv I wait for the inevitable disappointment. I hear they're ruining Robert Jordan's books next, something I plan to skip entirely and just re-read the books instead.
    • 01100011 5y ago
      I'm looking forward to the day when we can just feed books to a DL network and have it spit out a rendered movie. I'd love to train it on the LotR movies and spit out a book-accurate rendition of the story with those graphics.
      • LegitShady 5y ago
        I don't think that's the way art I value would ever work. It sounds more like algorithmic factory production with no intention. "The algorithm thinks this will be like that other thing people like" is not a way to make novel and valuable new things, to me.
        • tobyjsullivan 5y ago
          I think you're 100% correct that it would not be work of value. On the other hand, "The algorithm thinks this will be like that other thing people like" sounds like the exact model used for the majority of film and television today. Not least, this terrible rendition of Foundation.
• jimbob45 5y ago
  IIRC the foreword to Asimov’s unproduced “I, Robot” script (vastly different from the released movie) was a recollection of his grievances in getting the movie made. He made mention of “eye-fi”, where the science and the social effects of the theoretical science take a backseat to the effects. I left feeling that he wasn’t a fan of modern Hollywood. That said, I’m guessing the estate knows that public interest in Asimov is dwindling by the year and that either something gets made now or nothing gets made ever. Recall that 2001 LOTR was originally supposed to be Foundation before things fell through - it’s that difficult to produce.
  • echelon 5y ago
    > 2001 LOTR was originally supposed to be Foundation before things fell through Could you expand on this? I've never heard this before. I'm glad we got the Lord of the Rings adaptation as it was truly a mastercraft, but I'd have loved to see the same talent do Foundation.
    • jimbob45 5y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series It’s under the heading “Film”.
• hardwaregeek 5y ago
  The show feels like the creators read the back of the book and nothing else. Adaptation is never a one-to-one translation but you need to keep the spirit of the show. Also the whole emperor lineage stuff feels like an attempt to add a Game of Thrones type plot to the show. I'm not far into the show, so perhaps they address this, but I'd love a more modern commentary on how the whole ideology of the Foundation is basically colonialism and manifest destiny. Having a civilization that is predestined to be the chosen holy empire is a common justification for invading and oppressing other civilizations. It'd be an interesting twist to argue against the Second Empire, in line with the modern re-evaluation of the so-called Dark Ages as not being so dark necessarily. I also don't get why the stories are intertwined and so stretched out. Well, I guess I do know why in that Apple probably wanted a prestige TV show that'd last 5-6 seasons. The adaptation would work better with 1 hour to 1.5 hour episodes, each adapting one section of the book.
  • KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > I also don't get why the stories are intertwined and so stretched out. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RotatingArcs https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RotatingArcs It's a pretty standard technique to have multiple arcs going on in an episode. The most ready example that comes to mind is Battlestar Galactica.
    • hardwaregeek 5y ago
      Yes, but why? I'm familiar with the concept and it can work well (see Robert Altman films), but why was it necessary for this show? I think the straightforward single story single episode would allow for continuity, narrative depth and emphasize the theme that these books span centuries and multiple lifetimes. One of the better aspects of the book is seeing Salvor Hardin go from young upstart to elder statesman to mythic legend.
      • megablast 5y ago
        You are familiar with the concept that is used in almost every single television show?? In fact, I can’t think of one it isn’t in. Ok. Why did they use it?? Hmm....
• satya71 5y ago
  I'm all for changing the "Vision", for the book is not easily amenable to a show adaptation. But this new version is just turning out to be trite lately.
• samplatt 5y ago
  "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. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, both Foundation and Dune are almost impossible to translate to screen faithfully and still appeal to enough people to have a decent budget. Why should we judge the show by the book at all, if that's going to be the case?
  • ddoolin 5y ago
    Just my guess, the folks creating the show probably do not care too much. The vast majority of people are going to be happy with the production while the hardcore fans, or those with fond memories who've spent a lifetime waiting, are going to be disappointed a la Star Wars sequels.
  • JasonFruit 5y ago
    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!"
    • jonnycomputer 5y ago
      I think this really gets at the issue. Calling it Foundation, but not keeping the spirit of the novel, is just basically exploitative.
      • klodolph 5y ago
        Who or what's getting exploited? The material itself? Or the audience? I think few people who read the SF classics will be duped just by the name.
• m0zg 5y ago
  I'm now glad Amazon decided not to do a show based on the Culture series by Iain Banks. I can only imagine how horrible that'd be, since they have even less taste than Apple or Netflix. Sci-fi is better for it, just read the books, they're excellent.
  • lostmsu 5y ago
    Don't roll a barrel on Amazon. They kept The Expanse alive (which is certainly better than Dune 2021).
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      Yeah but the fifth season wasn’t all that good (despite being based on one of the better books) and they aren’t adapting the last three books which are high fantasy. On a side note I felt the whole first 7 books were kind of just filler getting to Tiamats Wrath and Leviathan Falls (which comes out this month!)
    • m0zg 5y ago
      > _Don't roll a barrel_ on Amazon Speaking of, is this a common phrase? This exact phrase ("не кати бочку") exists in Russian as well, but I have never seen anyone use it in English.
      • lostmsu 5y ago
        No, I just literally translated the Russian one, hoping it might stick.
        • pbak 5y ago
          I don't know if it'll stick, but it works.
  • geenew 5y ago
    Iain Banks was famous for (tongue-in-cheek I think) saying he'd wouldn't mind changes Hollywood wanted in order to get a movie made.[1] The machine-machine conversations, virtual hell, etc. parts of his books would probably not translate well no matter who was directing. Otherwise, the material seems as well suited for adaptation as anything else. Consider Phlebas could be fantastic in a ~2hr movie with special effects worthy of the images he paints, a tone weighed towards realism, and an Aphex Twin / Caustic Window -like soundtrack. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090715133026/http://www.sffworld.com/interview/2p1.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090715133026/http://www.sffwor... "How would you like to see your science fiction books filmed, if at all?" "With a very, very, very big budget indeed. The one I'd most like to see done is Consider Phlebas; if they kept in the sequence where the megaship hits the giant tabular icceberg, the fist-fight under the giant hovercraft, the bit where the Clear Air Turbulence escapes from the GSV, and the final train wreck, I wouldn't even mind if they changed it to a happy ending!"
• wellthisisgreat 5y ago
  The show is just plain bad. It looks like a collection of tropes with thick layers of social justice agenda between. I am unpleasantly surprised that the idea of STEM = good can be discredited. I always assumed that in any movie / book I will sympathize with pro-science guys but Jesus this tv series demonstrated you can ruin anything if you lean onto it enough
• elil17 5y ago
  I think the show does plenty of focusing on “power and precarity.” It obvious to me that it works with a very different definition of psychohistory, one which is more accessible to viewers but is, in my opinion, much less neat. Beyond that, though, the differences between the books and the show seem to be done with the intention of coming up with a new and interesting narrative. I don’t have a problem with that. Also, I think it’s important to note that the show is produced by his daughter and that she wanted to take things in a different direction. Most of these changes were made with deep knowledge of the books and the authors vision.
  • light_hue_1 5y ago
    > Also, I think it’s important to note that the show is produced by his daughter and that she wanted to take things in a different direction. Most of these changes were made with deep knowledge of the books and the authors vision. Just look at Dune. Brian Herbert's books are an abomination. They completely butcher the story and betray its core themes. Just like with this show. Someone's child being involved doesn't mean anything. If they wanted to take the show in a different direction, they shouldn't have called it the Foundation series. This show has nothing to do with the books at all, aside from stealing a few ides about the basic setting and some character names.
    • Jtsummers 5y ago
      On the other hand, A Scanner Darkly was a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book, and because of PKD's daughters involvement (they recognized the book's importance to him and it weighed heavily in the creation of the movie).
      • Apocryphon 5y ago
        Christopher Tolkien also seems to be a pretty good steward of his father's estate.
        • liaukovv 5y ago
• pathxs 5y ago
  The first few episodes were a bit slow, but I like the Robot enamoured with Religion concept and the out of their depth Cleons. It reminds me of our present day leaders and the way they react with their subservient robot underlings to all events.
• light_hue_1 5y ago
  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 takes a lot of skill and luck. They were good enough to adapt it though. There's a reason why people love the Foundation. Why we read the books almost 80 years later. And it's not because of the title or character names (which is all the Apple show keeps). The creators of this show are extremely arrogant. They think they could have done better than Asimov given the setting. So they threw away the thing people loved and replaced Asimov's work with their own. Well, clearly they couldn't do better. The show is a boring disjointed mess of random scifi tropes. Hardin is now a "warden"!? Literally, the character with one of the most memorable sayings in all of literature "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is now all about violence. That's nothing less than a betrayal of the source material.
  • oldgradstudent 5y ago
    > Hardin is now a "warden"!? Literally, the character with one of the most memorable sayings in all of literature "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" is now all about violence. That's nothing less than a betrayal of the source material. They even pissed on the source material by having Hardin's father remind her of the saying and have her explicitly dismiss it.
  • rockemsockem 5y ago
    So glad I wasn't the only one to catch the contradiction with Hardin. Also we seem to be saying that Hardin and other individuals (e.g. the woman who was tossed off the colony ship who narrates sometimes) are very special, which is also totally counter to the most important themes of the book.
    • nonesuchluck 5y ago
      Now I've only watched to the 2nd episode. But there are _some_ very special people in Asimov's universe. I'm withholding judgement on who that pregnant woman might be, or who her child might become... it's a detail left mostly unsketched in Foundation & Empire, and might turn into an interesting tale.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I've sat through some bad film translations of books before, but Foundation is worse than any Stephen King treadmill. I think maybe Lawnmower Man was probably a bigger delta between book and movie than Foundation (a short story about a satyr who eats grass naked vs. virtual reality!)
• sersi 5y ago
  I'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, it feels mostly faithful and was very enjoyable. Not so for Foundation, there are some interesting ideas, I actually like the idea of the Cleon's genetic dynasty but overall it feels like a second rate star trek show where regularly I have to suspense my disbelief at how unbelievably stupid some of the plot points or character decisions are. It's nice eye candy and not awful. I'll watch it while doing something else and try to ignore the fact that it carries and betray the name of novels I revered in my childhood. But it's not a great show and it doesn't even compare to The Expanse, For all mankind and any number of nice Sci Fi shows.
  • k__ 5y ago
    How far into the first book goes the new movie? I'm rereading the book and am now at "Book 3: The Prophet".
    • globular-toast 5y ago
      It doesn't go that far.
  • globular-toast 5y ago
    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.
    • jerf 5y ago
      Dune in its full glory is simply unfilmable. Between the exposition that can be naturally woven into a novel that simply can not be naturally woven into a movie and the amount of the book that takes place as character's thoughts, to even the little things like the chapter headings being used for flavor text from a future encyclopedia, there's just no way to capture the whole thing on film. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I liked the sci-fi miniseries well enough. (As I've said before on HN, watch it as a very well-produced theater production and not a somewhat poorly-funded movie and it's really quite good.) So I'm not saying it's impossible to film something Dune and for it to at least be good. But it'll never be able to stand in for the novels. I would be amused to see some series get far enough to try to film Chapterhouse Dune, though, which in my opinion is even more complicated than the original Dune in the ways that would matter for a film. Books 2 and 3 would be generally simpler, you can tell they didn't get as much love. God Emperor of Dune I believe holds up better than 2 & 3, but it is still narratively simpler than the original Dune. The final truncated trilogy is quite complex, though.
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  I love the show but apart from the premise of long term mathematical predictions of civilization it has no relation to the book. Shouldn’t be called Foundation.
  • technofiend 5y ago
    I don't think Apple would have gotten as much traction if they just dubbed it "Set in the Foundation universe", or "Fanfic with modern FX" but that's kind of how I view it. I agree it's (so far) decent, though.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  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 can leave shallow. I’d say this is Foundation, but for TV. It’s a different beast and I’m curious how much it will deviate from the books big picture (which, in total, span a couple dozen millennia.
  • thom 5y ago
    I think Prelude to Foundation would work on TV, and I'm slightly surprised they didn't attempt that first, cos presumably you either do it now or never. But that probably would have been a weird thing for fans of the original book. You're right though, Foundation has an odd structure that doesn't at all match modern prestige TV templates, you'd do better with a sort of anthology series of some sort.
  • Oddskar 5y ago
    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.
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      > 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.
      • Oddskar 5y ago
        As opposed to the traditional networks the time you have to build that "large" audience is insanely higher. Who knows how long streaming services will be around for. People are still watching Friends for instance.
• mihaic 5y ago
  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 Futurama could have had a go at this. Writers today seem to not understand anymore how reality works, so they aren't able to extrapolate from it.
  • mdtancsa 5y ago
    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 ??!?!
    • jerf 5y ago
      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 pocket or equally available right now, they are rare things that you have to remember to take with you, and even if you do remember, they'd often be outshone by a 1970s campground flashlight. 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.
      • TeMPOraL 5y ago
• throw0101a 5y ago
  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. But after each crisis, Seldon’s prerecorded hologram appears to explain to everyone what just happened and why the successful resolution was inevitable given the laws of history. > So how does the Apple TV series turn this into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake “Star Wars” under another name. There are indispensable heroes, mystical powers, even a Death Star. These aren’t necessarily bad things to include in a TV series, but they’re completely antithetical to the spirit of Asimov’s writing. Pretending that this series has anything to do with the “Foundation” novels is fraudulent marketing, and I’ve stopped watching. * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/dune-movie-foundation-series.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/dune-movie-founda... * https://archive.md/YFxVi https://archive.md/YFxVi
  • juliangamble 5y ago
    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)
    • vermilingua 5y ago
      I don't see how he implies that at all.
    • mstade 5y ago
      I read it completely differently. To me it seems he’s saying the show Foundation is copying Star Wars, which in his opinion is completely antithetical to the novel and so therefore he’s stopped watching the show.
      • SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
• BurningFrog 5y ago
  After giving up 2.5 episodes in, the only thing I can compare this show to is Battlefield Earth. It's incredibly, spectacularly bad!
  • scotty79 5y ago
    I actually enjoyed Battlefield Earth. I enjoyed the movie because I immensely enjoyed the book. I almost always like SF that in large part written from the point of view of aliens. And some scenes in the movie were quite additionally surprising in showing the character of alien protagonist. I know native speakers can't not cringe on this movie. And there's an issue with who the author of the book was and what he did. And people can't get out of human perspective while watching this movie and can't believe how aliens can be this stupid to underestimate humans. In the book it's way better shown that aliens have as little respect for and interest in humans as workers do for the monkeys when the go out to clear the jungle with bulldozers and quibble between themselves over pay and job security. Book have many detailes way more flashed out, so knowing stuff from the book, movie looked way less stupid to me than to average viewer.
• burlesona 5y ago
  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_ 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 :)
  • chaostheory 5y ago
    > 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
    • AniseAbyss 5y ago
      Perhaps a lot of fans never asked for Apple to do this?
    • ASalazarMX 5y ago
      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.
      • 5y ago
• elzbardico 5y ago
  It was a great disappointment for someone who spent hours during my teenage years reading and re-reading it. Not to mention the terrible, terrible acting.
• globular-toast 5y ago
  They're scraping the barrel now for literature to adapt. The studios desperately want another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. I feel like Foundation and even Dune are just not fit for being adapted. Foundation is so easy to read that people should really just read it. It's such a shame that His Dark Materials failed as that would make an excellent adaptation and the source material is far superior to Harry Potter.
  • JamesMcMinn 5y ago
    His Dark Materials has a highly rated (and ongoing) TV series from HBO & the BBC: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5607976/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5607976/
• RHSeeger 5y ago
  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 "just for the fun" that I don't get.
  • villasv 5y ago
    I’m enjoying it like I enjoyed Black Mirror. Science fiction is very hard to worldbuild right, so often the science minded audience has to turn a blind eye to a few things and think in terms of metaphors. 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).
  • Mashimo 5y ago
    It's my favorite series right now. Always waiting for the next episode.
  • layer8 5y ago
    It’s not fun when there’s too much disbelief that needs suspending.
  • molsongolden 5y ago
    I haven't watched Foundation yet but I felt this way about Altered Carbon.
  • 542354234235 5y ago
    >As it's own thing, it's entertaining to me...It seems like there's a lot of people that can't seem to enjoy things "just for the fun" that I don't get. That is the main issue for most people. If they wanted to do their own thing for a new show, it would have been fine. Maybe you check it out, maybe you don’t. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. But they didn’t do their own thing. They made an adaptation of an iconic sci-fi series by one of the most famous classic sci-fi writers. They sold a bag of goods that had “Asimov’s Foundation” printed on the bag. So it can’t be too surprising when people open the bag, find it is a sprinkle of “Foundation” and mostly “generic sci-fi” sawdust filler, that they feel tricked. Bait and switch comes to mind.
• ddoran 5y ago
  I'm sticking with the show but as a huge Foundation fan, it's bitterly disappointing so far. For me the reason comes clear in the accompanying (official) podcasts. The writers are so enamored with their own smarts, that the story takes second place to literary navel gazing. Rock bottom for me was when Brother Day - a supposedly omnipotent figure - travels across the galaxy to quell a religious uprising but just stands silent as a new leader takes up the mantle with an overwrought speech, one of many in the show. The taking of terminus was another example of characters that speak with great intelligence and then act dumb. Ugh. I'm only hoping the writers take the feedback from Season 1 and change course.
• jccalhoun 5y ago
  I read the first Foundation book years ago. Some good ideas but meh on it overall. I haven't seen the latest episode of the tv show but the best parts of the show by far as the parts about the empire and the most boring are the parts about the foundation.
• TinkersW 5y ago
  The show is bad, and aimed at the recent Star Wars crowd, but thankfully Dune is great, so go see that instead.
• simmons 5y ago
  The TV show is actually better than I expected, although after watching the trailers I had low expectations. I was totally prepared for the major surgery required to adapt a work like Foundation to the screen. However, I think my biggest problem with the show is a complete lack of subtlety that was present in the books. 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.
• nabla9 5y ago
  There are many good sci-fi books that transfer into good TV-series. Only reason Foudation was used was because you can use famous name to trick people into watching it. It's a dark patter of entertainment industry. Another problem is that the ideas in the book are completely opposite to what the mainstream viewers want to see and are used to consume. The writers killed those ideas and tell the more familiar story of a prophet and chosen ones, where individuals are making the difference.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  So I have to subscribe to Apple plus to watch this?
• dtx1 5y ago
  Having read foundation and seen the show so far they are two very different stories and the show is mostly just off hand references to the ideas of the books. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad show though, because there's a lot of potential of cool stories to be told in the foundation universe. What does make it a bad show is that they writers fell into the Star Trek Discovery Trap of making it about not one but two diverse female space jesuses that save everyone. Arguably their depiction of woman in the show is just as superficial as asimovs depiction of them in the books, just the flipside of the coin. However, they sometimes have hints of the really interesting parts of foundation, which, in my opinion, is the thinking and planning on large time scales. Only the Empire Storyline has that kind of thinking truly ingrained and subsequently is the only interesting part about the show. I can't even remember diverse female space jesus 1&2s names.
• nottorp 5y ago
  So why is that surprising? There are few or no quality scifi/fantasy movies if you actually read scifi/fantasy books. Villeneuve did something competent-ish with Dune. Altered Carbon season one was decent. I couldn't watch the second season because they really went off the rails with it. That's about all lately. Funny enough, I think the best sf movies are the one that ignore the source material and do ... something else. Blade Runner for example. Or Tarkovski's Stalker. Note that they aren't named as the books that inspired them. As for Foundation, I haven't seen it and don't intend to. But judging by people's opinions it looks to me that not only it has no connection with the book. It's also a bad movie taken as a standalone movie?
  • throw0101a 5y ago
    > That's about all lately. Checkout the The Expanse. > ignore the source material and do ... something else. Blade Runner for example. Blade Runner did not call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Contrast that with the Will Smith movie I, Robot.
    • nottorp 5y ago
      > Checkout the The Expanse. That doesn't count because the books read like a film script (the authors are professional script writers). And yes, I've read them. Before they were made into a movie even. > Blade Runner did not call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Contrast that with the Will Smith movie I, Robot. "Note that they aren't named as the books that inspired them." i said :)
• dekhn 5y ago
  I dunno about anybody else but what really kills me is the combination of very poor scripting with very poor acting, and a total lack of perspective on the empire (1 trillion people, you basically never see anything about the empire).
• GeekyBear 5y ago
  If you're interested in the original works, IO9 did a deep dive into the Foundation series. >The books that came to be called the original Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) were not written as novels; they're the collected Foundation stories Asimov wrote between 1941 and 1950. Asimov wrote the first Foundation story when he was 21. https://gizmodo.com/isaac-asimovs-foundation-the-little-idea-that-became-s-5799655 https://gizmodo.com/isaac-asimovs-foundation-the-little-idea...
• andrew_ 5y ago
  While the first episode had me hooked, I've found it very hard to sit through the subsequent episodes. I find them dragging, future-past bouncing isn't congruent, and I'm often distracted while the show is running, coming back to it 20 or so minutes later feeling like I haven't missed anything important. I read the books when I was in my late teens and thought they were interesting, they kept my attention at the least. The show is, unfortunately, not something I'll clamor to watch, but rather something I'll likely keep on for background noise after the entire season airs.
• jordanmorgan10 5y ago
  Tangentially related, it always seems that for me if I read the book first, I like it more than the movie/series. And vice-versa. Every time.
• magoghm 5y ago
  I had very low expectations for this TV show, so when I saw the first episode I felt it was better than what I had expected. But when I tried to watch the second episode, it was so bad that I couldn't even bring myself to finish it (I saw less than half of the episode).
• OnlyMortal 5y ago
  I’m a big fan of the books. Probably the most well written sci-fi I’ve encountered. The TV series is, of course, quite different. It had to be really as viewers expect continuity of characters and an obligatory love-scene. It’s a reflection of our current TV viewing. I’m hoping they’ll take it new directions where the book doesn’t go and, after the first season, it’ll pick up like many other series have done over the years.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > viewers expect continuity of characters and an obligatory love-scene I mean, I am not in the target audience as I am committed to remain outside the Apple ecosystem but, if there was a Foundation series somewhere where I might consider watching it, pretty high on my list of things that would interest me in it as opposed to any random dime-a-dozen indistinguishable brain rot available in every streaming service is that it would not feature those things.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  Dune notably doesn't seem to have suffered this fate
• m3kw9 5y ago
  Hopefully Netflix learn from Apples mistakes when doing the 3 Body Problem series
• maxcan 5y ago
  One highlight for me - Hari Seldon being played by the same actor as Valery Legasov.
• jjk166 5y ago
  Foundation is the most confusing show for me. Somehow it's telling a story which is completely unrelated to the books, while also faithfully recreating certain key moments from the books pretty much exactly as I imagined them; it manages to completely ignore all of the themes and indeed the core thesis of the books, but somehow still feels respectful in how it presents the universe; I feel bad that some of my favorite parts of the original story are all but certainly written out, but I love that I have no idea where this is going. It feels a lot like the 1997 Starship Troopers movie where it was initially supposed to be an original work, but the studio said "hmm that's kinda like this classic story, can you turn this into an adaptation?" and the writer said yes but their fingers were crossed.
• aspaviento 5y ago
  I don't know why people keep saying that, since the books were narrated as a documentary, it's impossible to do a decent show about it. That's lack of imagination in my opinion. It would have been easily adapted with mini stories that develop based on previous stories. Yes, you won't have a main character for people to feel attached to, but you'll have the option to tell different stories by different directors like Dr. Who and create something more unique.
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  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 dependence on initial conditions (which to be fair only really came with the widespread use of computers, i.e. Lorenz 1963): https://www.astro.puc.cl/~rparra/tools/PAPERS/lorenz1962.pdf https://www.astro.puc.cl/~rparra/tools/PAPERS/lorenz1962.pdf However, the general concept was already known: > Poincaré, 1903: “A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.” Thus 'Seldon's equations of psychohistory' would almost certainly be subject to sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and would be no more useful than algorithms claiming to predict future financial market behavior, or the specific weather at a certain location on a year from now. It's not really Asimov's fault - this was also an era when people believed they could learn how to steer hurricanes with minor energy inputs, another topic where chaos demonstrated why that would be impossible to do with any confidence. However, it's also kind of hilarious that Seldon failed to predict fundamental changes in society (like women in leading academic or political positions), Asimov's vision is basically 1950s society projected into the future. I suppose some people have wistful longings for that era, but not me.
  • Vecr 5y ago
    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...
• sonicanatidae 5y ago
  I watched the first 5 episodes. Looks great, but pacing sucked and the story deviated quite rapidly. I hope others enjoy it, but it's not for me.
• jessaustin 5y ago
  It’s an approach that would have appealed to Asimov’s Lord Dorwin, a dilettantish dignitary obsessed with identifying humanity’s original solar system. Rather than search for it himself, though, Dorwin relies on the findings of long-dead archeologists. When Salvor suggests that he do his own field work, Dorwin is incredulous: Why blunder about in far-flung solar systems when the old masters have covered the ground so much better than we could ever hope to? In this case, surely Asimov better fills the role of "old master" than the anonymous screenwriters of various lasers-and-robots movies? Thus this conclusion somewhat undercuts the ostensible thesis of TFA.
• squarefoot 5y ago
  I like it, mostly, though it's probably because I didn't like the only one Foundation book I managed to finish some 30 years back. At that time I had already consumed a lot of SF books by well known authors and although I loved Asimov in his short novels, non sci fi novels and science books, found his longer works very hard to digest. My approach to this series is therefore sort of clean, I didn't even remember what the main plot was about, so to me is just a new series, and producers doing the usual Hollywood treatment by rewriting characters with gender, sexual orientation and ethnic differences in mind looks pretty normal to me; I don't expect studios to produce in the future anything inspired by old novels without this treatment.
• clarge1120 5y ago
  While lots of people are disappointed (to say the least) in the rendering of the books into a TV show, citing unfaithfulness to the source material and the spirit of the books, there are also a number of people who praise the representation of gender, approach to things like smoking, race relations, and other modern ideals. I see it differently. The Fallout video games put an interesting spin on the "future" by showing that what was once considered fashionable can become distasteful due to catastrophic events. With Foundation, it would have been more interesting to show how different events lead to the current state of society. The Battlestar Galactica TV series made a point to showing how society turned decidedly against digital communications because of how vulnerable it was to AI. Much like with A Handmaid's Tale, I wish they would have tried a little harder to bridge the gap between how we see things today, and how we could see them under different circumstances. 12,000+ years from now could be quite different from now in a lot of ways.
• hintymad 5y ago
  I just don't understand why the screenwriters thought they could create a better story than Asimov. And why is it so important to have a side story about some people's boring feeling towards each other? What's wrong with simply telling the story as told by Asimov?
• haspoken 5y ago
  https://archive.md/oKdBC https://archive.md/oKdBC
• CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Anyone else struggle to read Foundation? I'm a massive scifi reader, but have never made it through 50% of Foundation (1st book). I don't know if it's the style of the writing, or the lack of action, but it sends me to sleep. Dune of the other hand...is amazing.
• hdctambien 5y ago
  I think I would have rather seen a version of Foundation written by Aaron Sorkin.
• HouseOfBagels 5y ago
  Renewed my Apple TV+ subscription specifically for this show and waited for a whole year -- I'm in the camp that thinks no series or film is ever going to be better than the actual books, but in terms of what's playing and in production these days, I've been immersed in the series from the start as well as the Foundation podcast that dives deeper into every episode with some of the shows producers, it's similar to hearing the director's cut of a film.