Amph Jonathan Nolan & HBO developing Asimov's Foundation series

Harlan Ellison?

Yeah, I'll definitely check that out.

 

Ellison structures the film like Citizen Kane. It was a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Robot-Illustr...098087&sr=8-1&keywords=harlan+ellison+i+robot

 

That might be a buy. Much cheaper than buying Kubriks Napoleon Script.

I've read a good many of the Sy-Fy classics but I've never read the Foundation stories. Worth getting?

 

Absolutely. The Foundation & Robot novels

 

None of them??? The Robot novels were required reading back when I was in High School.

 

To add to the proof that Nolan can be the right person to handle this, the scene from this week's Person of Interest that featured the meeting between Root and Samaritan's avatar (and also marvel at the kid's fantastic performance too) is proof that they can do this. The right amount of tension, drama and moralistics all bound up into the one effort.

Hell, the whole episode serves to show what could be done. The biggest action piece of the entire episode involves a car chase (well, more like a high-speed trip) that serves as a backdrop to a phone conversation. While you can't do every episode, having the kind of money that they would have for a cable show and being able to punctuate episodes in the vein of this with action sequences would give the right mix for something based upon Foundation.

 

While it helps in drawing an audience, you don't need epic battles or a lot of sex scenes to have a quality cable or HBO drama. If the story is compelling, it will gain an audience or at the very least critical mass and a cult following. I wouldn't expect Game of Thrones numbers with it. But compelling stories like True Detective or Mad Men gain a following. So I think it can be done without turning Foundation into an epic action adventure with massive explosions and space battles.

 

I wasn't sure if there was a thread for this. But here we are.

Might have to change the thread title

 

They should go the whole hog all the way to Foundation And Earth.

 

No.

 

I can't wait for this to deviate almost immediately from the actual story in favor of dumb plot holes and "cool" extended sex scenes that have nothing to do with anything.

 

Like a certain Asimov story that was made into a movie?

 

That neither attempted nor claimed to be a retelling of a literal Asimov story. However, it did extensively lift his sensibilities. Several scenes are lifted from the short story anthology of the same name (eg trying to find the Three Laws Altered robot hiding inside a robot factory), besides the relationship the drives the entire film (Sonny & Will Smith paralleling Daneel Olivaw and his human partner) following the arc seen for the protagonists from the Caves of Steel novel series. Calvin was a character that very much had an Asimovian inflection, as did Lanning. On the former point, this film was remarkably progressive in demonstrating a stable, happy male/female relationship that did not devolve into some sort of cheap, stupid romance, or even hint of physical attraction.

You don't actually have anything to complain about with this film.

 

You know, other than it's terrible and Asimov would roll in his grave.

 

I don't think so. He didn't come up with the title, it was nicked from some other writer

 

David Goyer is not the guy I would pick, I can tell you that.

I need to read those books again though. Well, the second & third anyway. Those could absolutely be killer as movies or a television show, but, while Goyer has done some decent stuff in the past, I think he's an awful fit for this material.

 

Asimov was actually pretty mediocre as a storyteller. I'm not sure he would object to a lot of what showed up onscreen. His real strength was in an imagination that let him probe the implications and permutations of the developments he conjectured about. The "I, Robot" anthology is perhaps one of the best expressions of this impulse. He really stretches out how even small manipulations of the Three Laws have powerful implications in real world behavior, and how people would deal with them. That's the delight of his work, not that his characters are especially profound or that his literary talent is somehow on par with Dumas.

But yes, conceded. You are perfectly welcome to not like the film. But that's a different thing than saying it was or wasn't faithful to a lot of the spirit of what Asimov was doing. You run into the same issue with Zach Snyder films. They are often lifted frame-for-frame from the comic books they're derived from. They're also universally terrible. It's two separate lines of critique.

 

Zach Snyder's films are pretty terrible, because -- like the I, Robot adaptation -- they lift specific scenes / sequences whilst completely misunderstanding the fundamental purpose and meaning of the scenes. Batman v. Superman and Watchmen are two pretty clear examples of that.