I watched the show. It is actually well produced. The scenes with Empire are definitely the best. Hari Seldom scenes are good too. Everything else is all make-believe and has NOTHING to do with the Asimov novels. Enoy the show for what it is but don’t expect a faithful adaptation. It’s not even an adaptation…
I just re-read Foundation. Wow, just nothing in similarity. I’ll read the next 2 books again soon
Or what they call, "adaptation in name only". In a way is it like I Robot, Starship Troopers or Dune (1984); only enjoyable if the person did not read the book first and were looking forward to seeing the book on screen.
shareI loved the Starship Troopers movie and did read the book.
I thought the movie was actually better, or just more able to connect with people.
I. Robot ... Will Smith ruined it for me, I hated it, and I hated Will Smith, and it seems I was right to ... the guy is a major scum.
Wasn't the movie sillier and patriotic? I heard the book was more visceral.
shareThe movie, I think, did not want to be just one thing, like most movies
today that try to appeal to all kinds of audiences and have multiple
threads and plot twists, but in the case of Starship Troopers, to me,
I think it worked.
Let me guess; they just took the outline and names of characters and wrote their own garbage?
shareThat would be a generous description. They put in more characters that were not in the books.
I have a list of some of the changes here; http://thatwasnotinthebook.com/diff/foundation-vs-foundation-season-1
That's a pretty cool site there showing the differences between book and adaptation.
shareWell, the first Foundation novel has NO female characters. None. Maybe a few background characters with no dialogue, but everyone is male.
The show, however, is filled with female characters in key roles.
The book is intellectual with basically NO action at all. Mostly just people talking.
The show has fight scenes, guns a-blazing, SFX everywhere.
There was one story I read in the Foundation series, but it was a short one that had a teenage girl who was a genius and an adventurer. Incidentally, Asimov wasn't very good at writing her, but she left an impression on me.
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I vaguely remember such a story too. It must be in one of the later books I havent reread yet.
I do dislike this trend of gender-swapping in Hollywood productions. For the most part, it adds nothing but just distracts or annoys the audience. That said, one of my absolute favorite films ever gender-swaps! It takes the male character of Hildy Johnson from The Front Page and makes the character female in the film His Girl Friday. What a classic film!
Arcady Darell. She was the pawn the 2nd Foundation used to stay hidden. Her mother was a better character although she did not emerge from the shadow of the males until near the end of her story arc when she foiled the Mule's plan with a murder of her own.
shareI did not mind the gender swaps. An on screen sausage fest that is not something like Predator gets boring after a while. The series needed something to fill in the "action in the background", but they went overboard.
shareHaving read a lot of Asimov's other books, I tried reading Asimov's Foundation a few times in life and never could get into it. The plot and writing style was very dense and I just never cared where it was going - it was too long. I quite like this series adaption of it. There are some interesting effects and ideas, and it is well down. Movies are rarely anything like the books.
shareWow, Season 2 is just amazingly bad nevermind completely made up out of whole cloth. The acting is beyond cringe-worthy. This is the apotheosis of what I call "wouldn't it be cool if..." writing. Just a disconnected series of what the writers must think are "cool" scenes with no rhyme, reason, back-story, rationale for being, logical sense, or character motivation.
shareI really wonder how many of the scriptwriters (who now fill an entire "writing room" in most studios) actually read the novels. The worst recurrent diversion regards the Second Foundation -- location shifted in Season 1 and again in Season 2. I'm not sure even Goyer understands what Asimov created it to be.
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