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

It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's the first live action adaptation beyond the robot movie. Kind of always have to be forgiving with a first attempt. Even Star Trek TNG didn't get into a grove until 2nd or 3rd season.

Agreed.

The inspiration behind the Foundation series, setting out to shorten the Dark Ages after the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is great.

However, if you try reading those short stories again today, you're quickly reminded that early in his career, Asimov was already great at world building, but terrible with characters and dialog.

Add in the mismatch between the cultural norms of the 1940's (when the early Foundation stories were written) and the cultural norms today, and a rewrite was always going to be required.

What movies have you seen that have been faithful to the literary work but still were great movies? I'm struggling to come up with one.

For God's sake.

It's screenplay writers work to adapt. One did a good job if they create a nice screen play. If that work is simplified by a solid foundation (pun intended), we'd expect at least not worse off from starting from scratch.

Look at what we get in this visual carnage of garbage.

Of course they had to make some changes and flesh out some characters to adapt it for TV. They just made poor choices. Instead of going with chosen ones, heroes, and battles, they should have gone for politics in space.

Something like the political manouvering in A Song of Ice and Fire but in space.

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

IMHO, that matches the books.

They'd make terrible, boring TV.

I'm glad they've not attempted a shot-for-shot remake of the books as a TV show, and instead chosen to adapt by taking some of the core ideas and (thusfar) general gist of of the stories and turn them into something. I'm glad I get to explore those ideas further and put my head in that world a bit more. I like that they've added some other interesting ideas to play with.

I think the moaning is just the same general thing that comes up any time anything is adapted to screen. There's a huge contingent of people that, for some reason, seem to treat the source material as some holy text that's never to be changed instead of just being happy that some of the good and interesting elements are being carried over into a new story.

I don't get the problem with Foundation. Like why can't they take the source material and create their own interpretation? What's so wrong with that? Maybe someone will go on and create a Vorkosigan Saga interpretation too?

I read the books. Loved them. Really enjoying the show too.

The characters keep avoiding explosions and evading terrorists, mostly uninterested and unaffected by them, focused only on their eventual meeting with their CIA contact who is code named Godot.

Occasionally an unusually big action sequence will trigger an extended reflection on the banality of it all.

This and other adaptations were made to keep the same actors for the thousand years of chaos. Some were ludicrous, like Gaal being forcefully put in hibernation for 30+ years, but the Cleon clones idea was well done in my opinion. It transmits that Cleon is the Empire. If only their interactions took less screen time...

You could try, but it wouldn't be entertaining in a classical sense without deviating strongly from the source material. Animated shows would have the same problem.

> But it turns out people liking classic SF books are not your average fanboy, and they don't like being lied to.

It’s a bit silly to imply that the intended market was people who like or have even heard of SF classics like the Foundation series. The intended audience is pretty clearly everyone who watches stuff. It’s one of many shows trying to spend their way into cultural ubiquity after the immense success of Game of Thrones. Even if previous Asimov fans were disappointed it would have been totally fine if the show took off (this was the case for many George R. R. Martin fans and the Game of Thrones TV series).

If you don't like the Foundation show, that's fine, but this "oh, this is the hubris of Apple and I am glad they failed and everything they do is terrible and Tim Cook personally beat my cat to death" narrative isn't just tired, it's utterly irrelevant. What you don't like is David S. Goyer's take on Foundation. If you really don't like that take, then you wouldn't like it if it were running on Netflix or Amazon Prime or HBO Max, either, and it would have been just the same on one of those services -- albeit probably with a smaller special effects budget.

And the thing is, a "faithful translation" of the first books would be deathly boring. It's full of great ideas, but also full of flat characters, stilted dialogue, droning monologues, and very little in the way of actual plot. It's a story that hinges on the fall of a giant galactic empire yet lets that fall happen entirely off camera. One reviewer in 1982 described it this way:

> I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, nearly a quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and conversation. No action. No physical suspense.

That "reviewer" was Isaac Asimov, when he re-read his own work before commencing the fourth book. Foundation started as a series of short stories patched together, then became a novel series full of retcons: it was all predicted by math! Wait, it was really the Second Foundation and Mentalics! Something something The Mule(tm)! Hold on, it was the robot from this other series entirely what the hell, Isaac!

Goyer has the disadvantage of trying to take what starts out as basically a future history sourcebook and turning it into a story, but the advantage of not having to retcon anything. There are already references to Foundation and Earth in the show.

Do I love the show? No, but I like the show. Is it turning a cerebral almost action-free book series into an action epic? Yes, but so far it's been a smart action epic, and I'm okay with that. Is it arguably Foundation fanfic? Maybe, but fanfic is usually "what if we shipped these two characters"; Foundation is fanfic of its source material in the sense of asking "what if Asimov created characters anyone would ever consider shipping in the first place."

That seems...faithful.

That seems like a problem with you, not the story.

You need to re-read the books. While the overall ideas and plot is good, the details and dialogue are terrible.

I have to skip some scenes because they become too boring: flirting, romance, sex? skip. Emotional scene that adds nothing to the plot? skip. Maybe I lost some important bit among that, but seeing the sluggish pace, I doubt it.

I don't care about the books and stopped watching mid season. The production impressed me for the first episode and then it was very bland and boring. There is no drama, nothing that caught my attention. It feels like watching a boring documentary.

Nah, consisting mostly of dialogue doesn't make something unfilmable. That description applies to tons of good movies. "Unfilmable" becomes a possibility when there's little way to show anything, other than having characters speak infodumps at the audience. Even dialog-heavy movies need to show you things, even if it's just the physical movement and reactions of characters during the dialogue, or items about the room.

I'm still surprised about how slow they can make an hour-long episode. Between fistfights, face closeups and gratuitous sex scenes and drama, barely anything advances. It's following the Star Trek Discovery formula but in slow motion.

No, the show simply isn’t good. It suffers from the Netflix Disease. High production quality, painfully mediocre writing.

It wasn't quite just like ancient Rome, but...

> Change of technologies and productivity and economy will not lead to change of political systems?

It did, which is why their political system wasn't one of the ones popular at the time it was written. The system echoed with past ones because the combined effect of the economic and tech changes (particularly notably the relationship between travel and communications speed) echoed the past.

And while not identical, Smith's Lensmen and Lucas' Jedi Knights have a great deal in common.

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.

As per a sibling comment: the original authors were involved. But:

It depends on style of the show material and the style of the new medium. If the original is cerebral and low-action, can you make a commercially successful adaptation with the same qualities?

As Krugman himself writes, "[Foundation] mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year."

It is hard to film faithfully while attracting and preserving a large audience.

It wasn't about Foundation, then why call it "Foundation"?

It's like that Will Smith movie called I, Robot: why did they bother calling it that?

You can create a new sci-fi show or movie without the 'false marketing' of referencing previous source material: that's what the original Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars did in the 1970s. Or you can try to faithfully use the source material as much as possible as The Expanse show has done, and what Villeneuve has generally done with his Dune.

There are plenty of both sci-fi and fantasy works available for adaptation into shows and movies. And if (general) audiences expect action-y stuff in their sci-fi/fantasy, then pick one in which the source material is more action-y.

Don't try adapting Waiting for Godot into the next Die Hard.

I don’t think it is unreasonable for someone watching an adaptation of a book to expect that the central themes of that book to be central to the adaptation, or at least not have the main themes of the adaptation be a direct contradiction to the source material.

This translates to an assessment of too emotionally invested?

Name calling and gas lighting seem to be the natural way of some people's narrative approach of discredit the person without offering counter point to the statement (or rather, not able to).

I don't think so. If it wasn't called Foundation, or if I, Robot wasn't referencing Asimov's stories, or if Brave New World was called something different, they would all be lost in the quagmire of new 'blockbuster' TV shows that all the streaming networks are pushing hard. Because they're all very formulaic, optimized things where they took inspiration from endless A/B testing online, doing everything by the book, as in, there's probably a book / guide out there on how to make a TV show.

Without the name, they are bland and anonymous shows.

Meanwhile there are plenty of shows that stand on their own - this year there was Queen's Gambit, the book on which it was based on never showed up on my radar so (anecdotally) it's not carried by having a Name / Reputation. That one has been nearly 20 years in the making, too.

It was never intended for film or TV. It was almost intentionally unfilmable.

“I had worked in Hollywood myself for about 10 years, from the late ’80s to the ’90s. I’d been on the staff of The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. All of my first drafts tended to be too big or too expensive. I always hated the process of having to cut.” When he took up novel-writing afterward, he recalls: “I said, ‘I’m sick of this, I’m going to write something that’s as big as I want it to be, and it’s going to have a cast of characters that go into the thousands, and I’m going to have huge castles, and battles, and dragons.”

https://ew.com/article/2011/04/04/game-of-thrones-hbo-george...

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.

Almost all space scifi has FTL, wormholes, warp drive or jump drive out of necessity, otherwise you're rather limited in travel. Even the Expanse allows for it at some point, after allowing for the super high efficiency fusion drive just to make travel around the Solar System reasonably fast enough. It's a necessary plot device, unless you're doing a generational ship or staying close to home.

There is a definite sliding scale. Make your Sci-Fi too hard and you just have science and no fiction. But its not that hard to stick to the "One Big Lie" rule. If the expanse and the Martian can do it then so can everyone else.

Whatever the reason, we're surely becoming culturally poorer.

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.

F**...

The show-runner helped make Batman vs Superman and I see LOTS of that awful movie in Foundation.

I'm not sure they're so wrong with that. In the books, Hari Seldon understands his math and so does Gaal, but nobody else can. Same in the show.

His line in the colony ship in the show, something about "following me on what's little more than a prayer", is spot on. I think the show has done a fairly good job of playing with the discomfort I felt reading Foundation: that so much has to be taken on faith by so many people. It doesn't really matter whether your prophet got his revelation through a dream, pulling some rocks from a bag, or a few nights of multidimensional calculus; it's all opaque to the followers who just have to believe.

The rest of the additions and changes seem to make sense given the medium. Clone emperors: super great, and helped by the best acting in the show. I'd bet Asimov had something similar in mind (he named them "Cleon" in the books too, surely a clue in that anagram.) Even the time-jump with the cryo pod helps to ameliorate one of the issues I had with the books, which was the brief time we got to hang out with some interesting characters before a few centuries passed. The plot with Dornick's boyfriend on the colony ship was a good addition too, albeit quite well telegraphed. Space 9/11 was totally necessary for a TV adaptation, you can't show a couple of potholes in the highway roads and expect anyone to get "society collapses" from it.

I'm with the consensus on Hardin though. Space marine chosen one was not where I thought that character would end up. The actor playing her mom would've been better as Salvor, with her daughter being a destabilizing influence for her to try and keep leashed up (and maybe ultimately use, reluctantly, as her "last resort.")

That doesn't seem all that inconsistent with the source material; Seldon _is_ effectively treated as a religious figure almost from the start (and of course the psychohistory _is_ on the face of it more magic than science).

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.

Foundation is more like David Lynch's Dune. It calls itself Foundation but it doesn't even give lip service to the material, it actively betrays a lot of the story. While overall TNG was good, there were a few terrible and mediocre episodes. I feel that the Foundation TV show is more akin to those mediocre episodes but with very good production value and a passing resemblance only in name to the book. It doesn't feel like the writers actually cared for the books at all.

While, as a fan of the novel, I'd have liked to see these elements given more explanation, I think on reflection that they did a commendable job deciding which elements needed exposition for audiences to follow the plot and which ones could be left as background details and texture for the world to avoid overwhelming the viewer and letting the film breathe more as a film.

I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.

Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.

Others are just as entitled to enjoy an adaptation as you are to not enjoy it.

Some people enjoy seeing how a writer, director, cinematographer, cast, set and costume designers, etc present a written work.

Lots of people watch an adaptation and find bits they enjoy and bits they don't.

If you go through life only demanding or expecting experiences you will enjoy, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

I ended up reading The Expanse series because I loved the pilot TV episode so much. I've never read Foundation and I think I likely will in the near future.

> With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"

Others are entitled to opinions other than your own...

Well, the last books of the original series of Dune take place over thousands of years when Leto II becomes the worm via symbiosis with the sandtrout. There is so much that happens in these millenia, sometimes told in flashback through the everlasting Duncan Idaho, or through the narrative of the religious texts.

The wars and the scheming and the plans and the plots... I mean just the sisterhood's rise and attempts to undermine leto could be its own series. Heck there are more subplots in Dune than fables in the Silmarillion. In fact, I think that the flaw with the Silmarillion is that everything becomes so much of the same after a while that I stopped caring about all of the one-off stories: it got repetitive and, frankly, boring.

Dune did suffer a Jon Galt moment with all of the exposition in God Emperor of Dune, but there was a lot of storytelling in those meetings between the Duncans and Leto.

And having re-read the originals (and not the translation) recently, with my new outlook and all the books i've read since, i'd say that even those are written better than the two first Foundation books (that i love). I'd say the "Cave of steel" was the best written of his books from the 50s, a bit better than "Naked Sun" and "Second Foundation", or at least better paced. But his best books are either "Foundation's edge" or "Robots and Empire", at least to me.

It’s ok to not want to watch a show that sucks originally. We don’t need to watch it to completion in order to pass judgement on something that just didn’t hit the mark.

Unfortunately the show's narrative is completely ridiculous. Nothing makes rationale sense. It seems that no character can even walk down a hallway without something going awfully wrong and things get resolved by never-before-mentioned magical plot elements falling in place.

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

I'd love to train it on the LotR movies and spit out a book-accurate rendition of the story with those graphics.

There isn't a lot of imagery described in his books (not that I would see it anyway) but that doesn't mean it couldn't be presented visually while keeping to the spirit, just that Asimov probably couldn't have done it. Good writers and directors could.

If given the Villeneuve or Kubrick treatment it might be very different.

https://archive.org/details/foundationtrilogythe--bbc1973rad...

It's one thing to acknowledge the flexibility required in converting a story from novel to film. It is another to change the entire message, character motives and morals while merely retaining the surface plotlines.

For what it's worth, having read ten chapters of Dune after watching the amazing 2021 film, I can say they did a fantastic job capturing the spirit and the core storyline of the book.

I believe there was a radio show adaptation done by the BBC.

If the portrayal of Kynes was "a forgetabble "generic strong woman"", didn't that apply to (at the very least) both Gurney and Duncan also?

It seems that you wanted to see a different film than the one Villeneuve wanted to make.

Kynes was perhaps a critical but yet very minor character in the novel and arguably was a forgettable character. The reason it may seem otherwise is that Kynes was first portrayed by that notorious show-stealer Max von Sydow.

Casting a Black female actor instead in the role of Kynes is merely license as opposed to and starkly contrasted with the sacrilege of Liv Tyler stealing all of Glorfindel's thunder.

I thought Sharon did a fantastic job as Kynes, one of the more naturalistic performances in the whole movie.

Probably because at the time Dune was written, people conflated those things in a way that caused a lot of harm to people not interested in harming children. Seems highly reasonable not to feed a trope like that.

Reread chapter 31. Jessica bested Stilgar in a physical fight the same as the movie.

Jessica was demoted in the movie. She was far stronger in the book. I didn't understand why until I read this review. https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/10/dune

Jessica should be a terrific fighter since she is a Bene Gesserit https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Bene_Gesserit#Powers_and_Abilit....

I don't agree with this take that it was modified to satisfy PC morality. There were a lot of criticism that Dune is white mesiah for arabs in space. Imagine a change where black Paula together with her partner Chani and Fremen overthrow the male dominated Landsraad.

The movie is basically in line with the books in terms of story: it's not about a hero saving the world; Paul is not an-Aragorn like figure, he is manipulating and taking advantage of prophecies put in place in the collective mind by the Bene Gesserit, in order to further his own goals.

That's probably for the best, because that term would have quite different baggage for the average viewer in the 2020s than it would have for the average reader in the 1960s.

It’s under the heading “Film”.

Yeah, like they did for The Hobbit.

Wheel of Time will tell.

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...

I’m pretty sure Seldon being wrong about the smaller things is going to be a recurring thing in the series. People just _think_ he can predict them. He seems to too, despite knowing rationally that he cannot (he’s stated that numerous times).

The theme of the Seldon plot seems to be: is Seldon predicting things, or causing them? Are his actions choices that are driving events, is he being forced into his role by fate (or math), or is everything he does irrelevant? Is the very fact that he, and we, are confused about this proof that the questions don’t even make sense? Can some of all these contradicting things be true at the same time?

Might it be true that he is _both_ predicting events and driving them? Wouldn’t that mean that one of these ideas is false?

It's not just "starting in the middle of a series", it's starting almost at the end...after the best part of the story is well in the rear-view mirror.

IIRC, Foundation and Earth not only benefits from reading all of the Foundation books that came prior, but also all of Asimov's Robot books.

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 :)

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.