Emmerich Plans Foundation As a 3D Epic 283
spuke4000 writes "Roland Emmerich, the writer/director/producer behind Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 is planning to adapt Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The plans include using technology developed for Avatar including 3D and motion capture technology. When asked about using this technology Emmerich responded: 'It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.'"
3D format already available (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's that hard to comprehend how to wrangle this story onto a screen, perhaps it's best left as a book?
Hey, you forgot the best part! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hacking into an alien military computer system with an Apple laptop! How could you leave THAT out?
Funny, when I read the Foundation series, I never pictured it as a big budget action movie. I never thought it would need 3Dand whiz bang special effects. And, you know, it isn't one story, it's a whole bunch of separate stories. I'm thinking this movie will bear about as much resemblance to the books as I, Robot did to its books. That is to say, I predict they will share a similar title, and not much else.
Doesn't bode well (Score:5, Insightful)
"It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real."
Really? I'm having trouble thinking of anything in Foundation that couldn't have been filmed using the technology available back when the stories were originally written. It's a story about ideas, not an exercise in world-building or aesthetic splendor.
Re:3D format already available (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad writing? Hardly. Asimov is not to everyone's taste. His writing is for thoughtful people interested in character motivations and dialogue, not fans of space opera shoot-'em-up action. Which means his books don't generally make good movies unless you completely rewrite them.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I Robot is a pretty decent film
Please tell me you're joking. The movie I, Robot may have been okay if it were simply a standalone film, but as an "adaption" of Asimov's book it was a travesty. About the only thing the book had in common with the movie was the title.
While overly satirical and lacking in details, Maddox's review [thebestpag...iverse.net] isn't all that far from the mark.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Classic case of Doesn't Get It (Score:3, Insightful)
The Foundation trilogy is about the least SFnal SF from the standpoint of imagery. There's precious little spaceships, or future tech. It's all in the minds of the characters, and in the dialogue. This movie could have been made in 1975 and not suffered visually at all.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:4, Insightful)
About the only thing the book had in common with the movie was the title.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book); a mystery based on trying to predict how these laws will play out in unusual circumstances (the point of the other half of the stories in the book); a society shaped by dependence on robots, and the problems this might cause (the subject of a number of Asimov's later robot books). Sure, there's a lot more running around and shooting and Will Smith being a badass in the film than there is in the book, but there's some definite common threads, too.
I'm beginning to think that people who claim the book and film of I, Robot have nothing in common simply don't have a very strong grasp on what Asimov actually wrote.
Re:Intelligencia complaints already available (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the fact that we were all children when we first watched it explains the success of Star Wars.
I liked Dukes of Hazard and Benny Hill back then, if that gives you any idea of the aesthetic sensibilities of the average child-geek.
Help us Hari Seldon, You're Our Only Hope! (Score:5, Insightful)
If there really is a secret force out there influencing events to preserve civilization I'm counting on them to prevent this.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, was there any running around and shooting in the book? The themes may have been similar, but was the actual PLOT of the movie anything like the book? Was the TONE of the movie anything like the book? If you admit that the only thing the book and movie had in common was the three laws and ubiquitous robots, I think we can agree.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:4, Insightful)
What's even worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just wait until the moviegoing public decides that Trantor was just a rip-off of Star Wars' Coruscant. Or more likely, that the whole Empire is a rip-off of Star Wars.
Just something else Lucas will have to answer for.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:5, Insightful)
From the wiki:
The film that was ultimately made originally had no connections with Asimov, originating as a screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. That script was an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery that took place entirely at the scene of a crime, with one lone human character, FBI agent Del Spooner, investigating the killing of a reclusive scientist named Dr. Hogenmiller, and interrogating a cast of machine suspects that included Sonny the robot, HECTOR the supercomputer with a perpetual yellow smiley face, the dead Doctor Hogenmiller's hologram, plus several other examples of artificial intelligence... Jeff Vintar... incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics, and replaced the character of Flynn with Susan Calvin, when the studio decided to use the name "I, Robot"
I was genuinely angry after watching that film, mainly because the only copy of I, Robot I could get my hands on now had Will Smith on the cover.
No, wait, it was mainly because the plots of the two works shared not one single point of congruence. And the film mainly focused on badassery and leaping around, which is true to Asimov's style - his trademark was always providing very little substance and just having huge set-piece battles between the protagonist and every other being in the story.
No, wait. What really, really got to me was that the name I, Robot was used on some crappy spec script that had to be reimagined multiple times to make it sufficiently commercial and then had Asimov's ideas vaguely pinned on as a clear afterthought in order to give it some geek cred, instead of a tender reimagining of the lovingly crafted tales of understated strife that his works so deserve.
Re:Asimov himself said nothing happens in Foundati (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. Asimov had some awesome story lines and ideas, which is why I love the Foundation series. But a lot of the prose he uses to implement his ideas is just not very good. I had to wince almost every time Arkady had a line of dialogue. I think this is the primary curse of being a fan of science fiction literature: great ideas with poor writing. But I'll keep reading the stuff anyway.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)
>This is why I prefer never to have read a book before seeing a film adaptation.
Try reading books and ignoring the film. You'll find the pictures are better.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:5, Insightful)
They are just whiny geeks (Score:2, Insightful)
For some reason, with sci-fi in particular, you get people who seem to think that there is the One True Way(tm) that a story must be told. As such if you adapt it to a movie or something like that you have to maintain it precisely, 100% the way it was. If you change anything, you've "ruined" it. Also running along side that you get a sort of counter culture movement that says "If something is popular it can't be good." They can only like things that are out of the mainstream.
That's what was going on here. Proyas realized, as Asimov actually had, that the stories as told in the novel wouldn't translate to the screen. There just wasn't any way to try and modify it. So rather than do that and end up with something useless, he decided to take the spirit of the novel and make a movie about it. The original stories would serve as background material, a scene and subject, not as something to be turn in to a script.
Personally, I liked the result. It was an enjoyable movie that was accessible to non-hardcore sci-fi people. I also liked the take on the three laws, how the company had turned them in to a corporate mantra/marketing slogan which is precisely the sort of thing you see companies do.
It is the same shit as the people who hated on the Hitchhikers movie for being different than the book, while not realizing that the book was different from teh radio series which was the original.
Re:They are just whiny geeks (Score:3, Insightful)
Except you've vastly overstated the degree to which the I, Robot movie resembled the book. It wasn't even remotely the same story (unlike Hitchikers) and it certainly wasn't true to Asimov's vision.
If you want to know why sci-fi fans, particularly hard sci-fi fans are like this I'll tell you. It's because nobody ever makes a movie that appeals to them. The issues of morality and science that they find interesting are not elements of sci-fi on screen. The only thing they have is books. And when one of those books is to be adapted they get their hopes up.
Re:Intelligencia complaints already available (Score:3, Insightful)
I liked Dukes of Hazard and Benny Hill back then, if that gives you any idea of the aesthetic sensibilities of the average child-geek.
I am astounded that you would put that on a public forum. ;^)
That said, I agree with the GP. This is not going to make a good movie. An epic, 5 season TV series like Babylon V? Maybe. But "the Mule" is not going to play well in 2 1/2 hours. 3D won't cut it, movies will need to be telepathic before we can make this one.
--
Toro
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They are just whiny geeks (Score:3, Insightful)
Abso-fucking-lutely not in the spirit of the collection.
Asimov's robots could in almost all cases harm an individual human only at the cost of their own self-destruction, if even then; being in a position to save only one of two humans would destroy them. In the case where the "zeroth law" does make its way into the original stories, the cost of violating the First Law remains severe.
The movie did not respect Asimov's Three Laws, as originally imagined, beyond mere lip service.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:4, Insightful)
It is unfortunate that I don't have any mod points right now. I couldn't agree more.... I, Robot was an absolutely hideous movie compared to the book. It completely missed the point of the book and certainly didn't really explore the concepts of the laws of robotics in more than simply a superficial fashion.
Of the other movies in his resume, the other Roland Emmerich films also give me the shudders to think of how bad they could be. Heck, I think it would be an improvement for some of those films to have Jar Jar Binks come walking into the scene with some singing Wookies.... if you know what I mean from the George Lucas films.
I sort of enjoyed Independence Day.... provided I put my brain into neutral and was under a buzz from some adult beverages. More of that stuff helps, I should note. I don't even have a desire to watch 2012, and criticized the trailer to no end on Hulu when I saw that piece of tripe for the first time. Day After Tomorrow? Please, give me a break. That was even worse than the others.
I love the foundation books, and it disappoints me to no end that they've given such a treasure to a hack like Emmerich. It will more than likely be a horrible movie, sort of how the Starship Troopers ended up being filmed by a very much non-fan of the author or book. I presume it will include Hari Seldon and talk about Trantor to some extent. I sure hope that he at least looks at the feel of Coruscant from the later Star Wars trilogy (episodes I-III) to at least sort of present this massive planet as a city feel in the distant future which is a galactic capital. Asimov explained in one of the books that Trantor had at least a dozen planets tasked to it just for food production to feed the citizens on Trantor, with an incredible amount of interstellar commerce happening just to maintain the status quo of the planet.
Somehow I think all of that is going to be glossed over or even ignored. And that is just the initial setting of the book. The Psionic mental manipulations that happen in the books should be even more interesting to try and capture on film, and it would take a genius to pull that off. I don't think Emmerich is going to be the one to make that happen either.
All I can hope is that in the distant future (20-40 years from now) some other brave director actually reads these books and decides to "re-imagine" the books to do them justice. Sort of how Peter Jackson finally figured out how to do the Lord of the Rings in a way that worked. Emmerich isn't that person.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:5, Insightful)
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book)
The reason Asimov's robot stories are so famous is because he did not write 'robot as the monster' stories. His robots were machines, and broke down like machines. They did not go havok or turn on their creators. They had weird, unpredictable bugs that resulted in unexpected behavior, but did not violate their core concepts. His robots were safe: 'Made so.'
Once he had that fully established, he played with it a bit in no more than a couple of stories, because he was too good an author to not do so. But even then, there was never a robot 'menace', or robots running around murdering people.
Robots running haywire and trying to supplant the human race is exactly what Asimov was known for not doing. Making a movie where that's the plot and putting Asimov's name on it is like doing a movie about Lord of the Rings - and having Saruon as a misunderstood rebel, who's really all right underneath.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)
There's has to be a lot of Asimov in the movie. Or else why take the trouble of licensing the work?
My take on it is that the producer told the writer something like this:
"The bad news is that your script is clearly a horrible, misguided mimicry of Asimov. The good news is that Will Smith likes it, and we have the rights to I, Robot, so it doesn't actually matter."
Who am I kidding? No producer is that intelligent.
Re:Veto power (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm with you. Of all the classic SF/Fantasy series out there, The Foundation Trilogy is probably the one LEAST amenable to a screenplay.
I mean, consider these series, just off the top of my head, in no particular order:
- Chalker's Well of Souls series
- Varley's Gaea Trilogy
- Heinlein's Lazarus Long epics
- Niven's Ringworld trilogy
- Niven/Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand
- Flynn's Firestar series
- Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Gap Cycle
- Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
- Any of Piers Anthony's tripe starting with the Tarot novels
- Anything good by Piers Anthony up to and including the Cluster series
- McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series
- Morris' Silistra series
I could go on and on and on, Philip Jose Farmer, David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks...
Anyone attempting to translate any of these series to a Cinema or Television screenplay would FAIL, for various reasons... content, scope, depth, or combinations thereof.
But yet, I can't think of ONE that would be harder to translate to a screenplay than Asimov's Foundation series.
So, why is that one chosen? The only thing I can think of is that it's the only one that's the property of an estate looking to commercialize a dead author's bibliography.
And I'm not even going to honor the '3D' quotation with a comment. [shudder]
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Classic case of Doesn't Get It (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, Foundation could be remade as a theatre piece. Imagery is not important at all.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Daneel: "I can't harm humans."
Villain: "Gee, that's too bad, isn't it?"
Villain turns and starts walking away.
Daneel: "Ah, screw it."
Daneel runs up to the villain, rips out his arms and beats him to death with them.
Daneel (still perfectly calmly): "This is the Zeroeth Rule, bitch."
Seriously, the other movies were all action spectacles. Foundation is not, it's a political/psychological story that spans centuries, with some psychics thrown in for whatever reason. Turning it into a movie is not going to work; but I suppose they could simply make a war movie about, say, the Four Kingdoms trying to conquer Foundation.
Re:Veto power (Score:1, Insightful)
They're choosing *Foundation* because it has a name recognition that none of those books have (not even the Future History). *Stranger in a Strange Land* and *Childhood's End*, on the other hand, do have that kind of name recognition. Hollywood wants *guaranteed* audiences.
The fact that Foundation is IMPOSSIBLE to film won't stop anybody. I can just imagine something like this in the story meetings:
I suppose you could combine "Foundation," "Bridle and Saddle," and "The Wedge." Salvor Hardin would become the mayor and remain the mayor to the end of the film, and you might substitute Hober Mallow for Limmar Ponyets (to have some continuity with the second film, who cares about the chronology).
The second movie, *Foundation and Empire*, would combine "The Big and the Little" and "Dead Hand." You'd combine Devers and Hober Mallow, who eventually turns out to be Hardin's successor.
In the third movie, "The Mule" and "Now You See It-" would make up the bulk of the third film, with "-And Now You Don't" as the climax (the scene in which the Second Foundation defuse The Mule would be two-thirds of the way through the film). Toran and Bayta would be traveling with their _daughter_ Arkady, who would befriend Magnifico and would be the heroine of the piece. The name *Second Foundation* would be a problem, since Hollywood doesn't like to "confuse" it's audiences, and the title suggests that it is the _second_ story, not the _third_ (remember that "The Madness of King George III" lost it's main character's number because the studio was worried that people wouldn't go to see it because they hadn't seen "The Madness of King George" and "The Madness of King George II"), so it would probably have to be called *Foundation III: The Other Foundation* or some such thing.
I think I just threw up in my mouth.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)
are you yet another nerd raging at some book/comic not being adapted to film in a way that matches his wet dreams? *yawn*
I realize you're mostly trolling here, but a lot of people never stop to think about why fans are so upset when their favorite stories are misrepresented. I don't believe it's mostly a selfish reaction, but more the simple human desire to share positive experiences. When you hear a funny joke, you tell other people the joke so that they can enjoy it, too. If you hear someone else telling the joke in such a way as to render it unfunny, this is irksome because they are both wasting an opportunity to share a good joke and making the correct joke itself less effective since it's been ruined. I think a poorly adapted movie is engendering much the same hostility as someone who mangles a good joke, and for much the same reasons.
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! (Score:3, Insightful)