3 ms·

I agree. The first two episodes of The Rings of Power are unbearably boring. But let's wait. Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I waste

• WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 The show is not faithful to the book but it has good production value, a fairly interesting story and is overall very watchable. The passing is sometimes questionable but 7.4 seems like a fair rating to me.
  • narag 4y ago
    Not faithful? More like it presents exactly the opposite ideas. Why choose Foundation if you hate every concept that the books stand for?
    • vkazanov 4y ago
      The show is kinda OK if you ignore the book, I.e. for general public. Expensive, good CG, etc. What does feel painful though is the wasted opportunity: chances are that Foundation will never get its Peter Jackson.
      • thom 4y ago
        The only way to faithfully film the book would be to make some sort of anthology series, and I don't think that format works well for big-budget prestige drama. As I've said elsewhere, might have been better to start with Prelude to Foundation, perhaps.
        • canuckintime 4y ago
          > The only way to faithfully film the book would be to make some sort of anthology series, and I don't think that format works well for big-budget prestige drama. It wouldn’t work on traditional TV but this is streaming on AppleTV. Budget was not a barrier AND ‘ratings’ don’t really matter for Apple either. That was the best opportunity during the period of PeakTV to just do what works artistically best for the adaptation with no constraints… If I were the producer I would have spent Apple’s money on actors instead of special effects. Every episode ~60 mins to 90 minutes~ would end on a Seldon Crisis. Hari Seldon, the mayor, the trader, the Mule, etc would be played by the biggest movie stars (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Chris Evans, Will Smith… or Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry etc) and that’s your hook for the mainstream audience. You offer the actors movie scale pay checks for limited season requirements and thats how you attract them. That’s an easy hit. Or hire David Simon to make ‘The Wire in space’. Update Asimov’s theory of empire evolution to acknowledge newer works like Guns, Germs and Steel. Easy Prestige TV adaptation. Instead we got this abomination of an adaptation where it’s clear this only exists because they shopped around for IP to make an action series to fight the streaming wars
          • thom 4y ago
            Well, there's still a chance that someone does the Elijah Bailey books separately, perhaps.
          • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
            You are not going to like what I’m going to say but I think the reason they rewrote so much of it is simply that the books are not particularly good in the first place. The ideas are very interesting but that was mostly kept. The prose and characters are rather poor and the stories mostly serviceable. I do wish there was less violence and more focus on trades and exchanges however. That would have been a better show.
            • canuckintime 4y ago
              > You are not going to like what I’m going to say but I think the reason they rewrote so much of it is simply that the books are not particularly good in the first place. The ideas are very interesting but... The prose and characters are rather poor and the stories mostly serviceable. I do wish there was less violence and more focus on trades and exchanges however. That would have been a better show. I like this > The ideas are very interesting but that was mostly kept. I disagree that the ideas were kept. For example the focus on the cloned emperor is the opposite of the ideas of the book (although Lee Pace was fun to watch)
      • vagrantJin 4y ago
        The missed opportunity seems to be too big to wrap my head around. It could have started something truly great, another Space Opera to rival Star wars and star trek duopoly.
      • narag 4y ago
        Frankly, it didn't seem so good for the general public either. It's very slow and confusing. The emperors' plot is actually more entertaining. Totally unconnected with the books' premise (empire crumbling under the weight of its own bureaucracy) but the actors are fine. The "good guys" on the other hand...
  • rebuilder 4y ago
    I found pretty much everything not directly involving the Empires pretty awful in Foubdation… Particularly the parts set on Terminus were just 90’s scifi junk.
• thom 4y ago
  Yeah, the difference to Foundation is baffling to me. I can only assume people developed strong feelings growing up with the LotR movies, but nobody is particularly engaged with Foundation (and tbh it's not an easy or fun book to try and adapt). Personally I think they would have done better to start with Prelude, which not only sets the scene, but has action, ass-kicking female characters etc. Instead they created something incredibly dull and slow, the highlight of which is the intergenerational psychodrama of the emperors which is entirely made up.
  • narag 4y ago
    Prelude was Asimov himself making a prequel, there was another one and some sequels to the original trilogy. Also the books are connected with the robot series. There are some differences in tone. But there are some coherent ideas. Religion is seen as bad, a tool for control. There are mental powers, but that's not magic, just advanced humans. Science is mostly presented as a good thing, with serious dangers that must be sorted, but there's a general techno-optimism that inspired several generations of readers. In the books we side with robots' nearly human condition. In tv show there's a question if cloned humans have souls. Religion is powerful and sometimes shown in a positive light. Humans can predict the future, not with science but with magical powers. All the dome thing is not science but a deception. A confident merchant character like Mallow, is now police with a tormented mind and now a personal tragedy. If you have the money and the inventive to create a big budget show like that, do it from scratch. Don't mutilate others's work just for the name.
  • vips7L 4y ago
    Foundation is one of my favorite books and I’m sad at how far off script they’ve already gone in the show. It seems to be missing the whole point.