Hopefully the team that brought us “Foundation” has nothing to do with it. Their adaptation is unrecognizable.
I will say though, Foundation is more filmable than some of Asimov's other books. The Gods Themselves is truly, utterly, unfilmable.
But I loved the visuals and concept of the show. The Mary Sue thing wasn't even that much of a deal breaker like some modern scifi/fantasy TV. Just the story and characters in general lacked depth.
LotR and the MCU have shown that when you respect the source material, you get incredible movies which are popular and long lasting. For some reason, Hollywood still thinks they can hire directors and writers who want to put their own spin on things and disrespect both the material and the audience and make adaptions like iRobot and Foundation (among many others) which are simply horrible. Even Steve Jackson fell down this hole with (to me) nearly unwatchable Hobbit trilogy.
It's not about the adaption per se - you always need to make drastic changes to transform one medium into another - it's about understanding what makes the source material great. Instead you have directors who pride themselves on having never read or seen the original. It boggles my brain.
Sometimes it works - think BladeRunner or Children of Men - but for more popular stuff, the first thing producers should do is hire a group of fanboys/fangirls to educate them on what makes a particularly loved story great and what changes would not only be unwelcome, but insulting.
> you have directors who pride themselves on having never read or seen the original.
That is indeed mind-boggling. I’m curious which directors have taken this approach. Also, if they haven’t read the actual source, what do they use as their source instead? The Wikipedia article, an outline written for them by someone else?
> Filmmaker: How did you become interested in adapting and then making Children of Men?
> Alfonso Cuarón: It was when I realized that the premise of the book, the premise of infertility and humanity, could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope that I feel humanity has [today]. It was an amazing opportunity.
> Filmmaker: I also read that 9/11 was a motivating factor to wanting to do this.
> Cuarón: Definitely. I was trying to cope with the reality we’re living. Even before September 11th things were changing. The big phenomenon of globalization that started becoming so obvious in the ‘90s was really having a lot of repercussions. That was pretty much what I was trying to explore.
> Filmmaker: Your adaptation of the novel is quite loose. How did you approach your source material?
> Cuarón: Once we decided to do this exploration on the state of things – and you don’t have to go very far to realize that the environment and immigration are pretty much on the top of the list – then we had to craft a story. I had the story I wanted to tell so clear in my head that I was very afraid of reading the book and getting completely confused. I read an abridged version of the book, and Timothy J. Sexton, my writing partner, read the [entire] book. But our whole idea was lets find out what elements are relevant to what we’re doing and lets disregard what we think is irrelevant.
I don’t think I’d call that bragging. It seems more like Cuarón had a set of ideas he wanted to explore and the book was a suitable hook on which to hang them.
¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20081009182846/https://www.filmm...
Rereading it though, there are bits of brilliance in a sea of cigar smoke and 50’s atomic futurism. The suck fairy hit it pretty hard.
I wonder if the Mule vaguely corresponds to the rise of Muhammad and the Muslim conquests?