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'Foundation' Is Fixing The Trickiest Thing About the Asimov Books
(www.inverse.com)
The show has nothing to do with Asimov's books. They are just using Asimov's name for marketing.
Yes. This video adaptation is disgusting.
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I’ve only really heard negative opinions about this show but the budget and special effects actually look beautiful. What’s the consensus here on the show? I actually have never actually read the books as reference.
Its like… actively bad.
The only parts I have actually found engaging enough to watch are the parts centered around the emperor. Unfortunately, everything to do with Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin so far is at best kinda inconsequential, and at worst so cringingly over-acted and poorly written that I genuinely cannot understand how it got past focus groups.
Not to mention, there is SO. MUCH. Expository narration… I guess the writers didn’t get the memo about “show, don’t tell”.
Not very good. It's a mess to follow.
It's a horrible show. Don't waste your money on it.
Read the books, actually just finished rereading them. Enjoy the show very much, but it's definitely a different story.
The consensus on here is that the show is horrible and should be obliterated with extreme prejudice. Especially amongst fans of the novels.
(Braces for pitchforks)
I read and finished the first Foundation novel and didn't really like it. I love classic science fiction novels in general. And I'm not saying it's a bad novel or series, just that Foundation certainly didn't grab me.
The show isn't perfect by any means. But as someone who didn't get into the novels, I think it's a pretty decent watch overall. It's a difficult story to tell, partly because of the big time jumps and abstract ideas, and partly because Asimov was light on character development compared to some other writers (especially more recent ones). But they've done a pretty good job adapting it IMO.
The big time jumps do make it a difficult story. The names of the people on the page are always changing and you don’t get true character development or drama.
The show doesn’t execute this well, it tries to avoid it. It bends over backward to invent multiple ways for the characters to defeat death. Cryo sleep. Digital consciousness. Synthetic bodies. Clones. Has there been any outright time travel yet? If not I’m sure there will be.
That's a good point. The continuation of key characters over death-defying time periods and then their inevitable interactions does feel pretty contrived.
I could not make it past the first season. It's all looks and no content. They drag out unnecessary bits, mess up the narrative of the original material to make it more "tv friendly".
I'd put it on the same shelf as Amazon's "The Expanse". If you like that, maybe foundation is also your cup of tea. Personally I'm not into either.
I love the Expanse, but I hate Foundation. Has nothing to do with the books. If they want to make something different, they should call it something different.
I liked The Expanse and still hate Foundarion.
I wanted to like it. I’m open to changes in adaptation because I honestly didn’t always enjoy reading the novels. And I am not one of those people to complain about “wokeness” in the slightest.
I just hated the show. Even on its own for what it is trying to be, it’s a mess. I guess there are some good special effects? There are also a lot of average and bad ones. It’s the lack of any self-propelling plot that kills it for me. Every step forward in the story is totally forced and uninteresting. No one should subscribe to Apple TV to get this show.
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I liked the books back when I read them. But sometimes it was tough work keeping on reading, because p.e. tech references would not translate well to nowadays, and from the social structure depicted they really showed their age. Which for me works with p.e. Heinlein, but not with Asimov and Foundation.
I try to see the series not as adaption of the books, but completely apart from them. And then I have to agree with the author and with OP, its modern, engaging and really well made.
Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.
Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.
Remember when everyone complained about Ender's Game which was so similar with blatant storytelling in character thought? Versus the reality of what's being show in universe to a 3rd party observer? I can name very few internal monologue driven movies, let alone tv series that did well. I can't name a single one off the top of my head. Maybe Sin City and that's stretching.
Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.
This is something that Dune handles really well precisely because it writes a lot of the tech out of the setting. "Thinking machines" are gone and banned, guns don't work against shields, lasers are banned because of their (nuclear) interaction with shields. Even communications are largely handled by couriers. The tech is deliberately written to be at a level where it doesn't take convenience or deux ex machina for certain situations to occur.
Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.
I thought Denix Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune handled this incredibly well when Paul and Jessica used sign language to communicate while they were tied up. In the book, that entire section is told through their internal monologues and their expectations of what the other would be thinking, so translating that to sign language for the screen was clever. I'm very curious to see how the internal-monologue-heavy second half of the book will fare, though.
The banned laser guns in Dune always struck me as a funny choice. If everyone uses shields and laser guns cause them to explode like nukes… those aren’t very good shields are they? And the Harkonnens are going to respect a ban? The Fremen could have used one laser to nuke the Harkonnens but they didn’t because of a ban?
I wish he just hadn’t mentioned lasers at all. Not sure why he felt he had to.
Ender's Game was bad because they changed the overall internal conflict from one of horror at making the 'necessary' decisions to a 'yay we beat the bugs' ending of generic sci fi. Yeah, internal dialogue is hard to adapt, but when the core part of the book is changed it should be an interesting contrast like in Starship Troopers.
Yes, correct. I think what made reading the books difficult for me, though - and that was many years ago, not sure if I remember correctly - was that strong "atomic" reference in everything tech related, overused. Yes, at the time of writing this was cutting edge, but for me when reading was extremely difficult to translate/take seriously. It killed the immersion.
Can't describe it better, but did not have that effect at all wit Asimov's contemporaries.
I never thought of Sin City being different in that way. But it is. Whole sections are just the current character talking to themselves.
Not having read the books, I'm enjoying the show very much and since The Expanse was shitcanned, this is my favorite SciFi being produced every year now. The production value is off the charts, it's excellent science fiction.
I miss when Hollywood had original ideas
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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