Foundation on Apple TV

With Seldon being a central character I kind of figured they'd be lifting stuff from Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation but even so... I recognize very little in this trailer. I heard one (approximate) line from the books, though: "Order will vanish... wars will be endless," which Seldon declares during his trial in the first part of book 1, and which I only remember because I once tried to write a Foundation movie script...

Still gonna watch, though.
 
It is true that in The Psychohistorians, the powers that be on Trantor were worried that Seldon was a cult leader. He had gathered together a hundred thousand people to work on a seeeecret project.
 
I've seen the trailers on YouTube, and I'm not going to get a subscription to Apple+ for it. I might watch it on NetFlix or HBO, but I'm not overly impressed with what I've seen.
 
It seems they've added a lot of action that Asmiov only mentioned in the stories as sort of background. I can understand that, needing to draw in people who know nothing about Foundation.

I'm not sure about the tagline 'Change Your Fate'. That makes it sound like the downfall can somehow be averted rather than the Foundation's goal of shortening the dark time. Maybe that's just my take on it.

I do hope this is good though.
 
Vince W said:
It seems they've added a lot of action that Asmiov only mentioned in the stories as sort of background. I can understand that needing to draw in people who know nothing about Foundation.
Click to expand...

A lot of people haven't read it or even touched it, even though I'd personally put it to need to read material in school. The thing is the end we know is going to be vicious and the end of a galactic empire isn't going to be a whistle or burp.

I think they are cleverly playing the overall story narrative and give the audience more visuals, rather than make this to be a costume drama. I do hope they devote enough of time in the Foundation to establish the narrative parts, while the empire crumbles.

Curiously I didn't see any aliens, even though there are aliens in the Foundation universe. Overall I think it is a good trailer as it gives enough for the audience to latch on.
 
That's the problem with trailers. I don't know how many times I've been burned by a great trailer then go to see the film only to be disappointed because the only good bits were already in the trailer. :rolleyes:

Still, there's a lot more material to this than a 90 minute film.
 
“Whenever I’m adapting something, I read it again or watch it again, and I try to write down what I think the core ideas are, the essential ingredients,” he told io9 over video chat. “In this case, because Asimov wasn’t alive, I was talking to his estate, to his daughter, and I said, I want to make sure that I’ve identified the core ingredients that make Foundation, Foundation. Fortunately, they said, yeah, we feel like you’ve zeroed in on the most important elements. And because we’re adapting it now, over 70 years after Asimov first wrote it—you know, it was a metaphorical story back in the post-World War II environment—some of the events, some of the things that we’re interrogating, we’re going to have to change because we’re speaking to an audience of today and not an audience post-World War II.”

The first big, important change: diversifying the characters. “Because there are virtually no female characters in the first book, I said to the Asimov estate, ‘How would you how would you feel if we gender-flipped a couple of the characters?’ And they said, ‘We love it. We think Asimov himself would have completely embraced that,’” Goyer said.
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gizmodo.com

Foundation's David S. Goyer on the Key Changes Made for the Adaptation

With the long-awaited Foundation series finally arriving next week, io9 spoke with showrunner, writer, and executive producer David S. Goyer about his Apple TV+ adaptation of Isaac Asimov's sci-fi classic.
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com

Overall, the characters became the anchor point for Foundation’s sprawling story. “It’s impossible to do a line-for-line, word-for-word adaptation of Foundation, especially 70 years later. So you try to make sure that you cleave to the core tenants—but, let’s be honest, people tune in for the characters. So you need to make sure that the characters have fully three-dimensional lives, that we care about their hopes and their dreams. The books are primarily books about ideas. A lot of big events happen off-screen and kind of in-between sentences. We knew that we were going to dramatize some of those events. But the thing that I really tried to dig down into is the characters—so I tried to figure out ways of creating characters that could inhabit the themes and ideas that Asimov was working with.”
Click to expand...
 
It’s often said sci-fi is never about the future but the present – and there’s some truth to that in Foundation. The references to climate change are pretty on-the-nose (rising sea levels flooding worlds, politicians ignoring inconvenient science, humans struggling to solve existential issues), but ultimately don’t feel forced. Overall, it makes a unrivalled basis for a world-class sci-fi series.

And yet, in the midst of this lush world-building, something is missing. It isn’t that the acting was bad (although the amazing Jared Harris, who was billed as the lead, appears infrequently) or that there aren’t good moments of writing either. It’s more that you find yourself wondering why anything that happens in the show particularly matters. It’s hard to mourn after terrorist bombings that leave hundreds of millions dead when you never really see a body, or a broken family (you barely even see damaged buildings). Or care about the supposed downfall of a galactic empire when that entire crisis largely happens off-screen. At times, it really does remind you of Game of Thrones-in-Space, insofar as it wastes time on a lot of pointless sex scenes and political intrigues that aren’t all that intriguing. Generally, the show is at its worst when it tries to be ‘human’. Much like the stilted empire that serves as the show’s centrepiece, there’s something wrong at the core of Foundation.

In the end, Asimov disavowed the idea of psychohistory. Unlike individual molecules, he said, human behaviour “is far too complicated” to map and human history is “so chaotic that it probably can never be predicted”. Drawing absolute lines between the individual and the society they form a part of doesn’t really work. But much like the theory itself, and frankly a lot of Asimov’s writing, Foundation finds itself dwelling on the abstract molecular mass of society, and ignoring the individual parts of it. And without that human core you increasingly find yourself struggling to locate Foundation’s soul.
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www.wired.co.uk

Foundation is Apple’s first (flawed) TV masterpiece

Foundation on Apple TV+ is a masterclass in world-building that forgets its inhabitants
www.wired.co.uk www.wired.co.uk

hhrrmmm, I guess we'll really have to see it to know if it's good or not. More so, this reminds me about the hype surrounding Raised by Wolves and that series ultimate flop to insanity. I don't know how they are going to crawl out from it.
 
ctg said:
www.wired.co.uk

Foundation is Apple’s first (flawed) TV masterpiece

Foundation on Apple TV+ is a masterclass in world-building that forgets its inhabitants
www.wired.co.uk www.wired.co.uk

hhrrmmm, I guess we'll really have to see it to know if it's good or not. More so, this reminds me about the hype surrounding Raised by Wolves and that series ultimate flop to insanity. I don't know how they are going to crawl out from it.
Click to expand...
I'll wait until I see it myself. I will sign up for my free trial later today and give it a look. If it isn't good I can cancel the trial and continue to ignore Apple TV.
 
Episode 1.

Just finished watching it and First up it's beautiful to look at. A concept artist's wet dream - beautiful production design, wonderful images of spaceships and classic sci-fi imagery. A little too much so, it all seems a little too style over substance. The cinematography is less impressive when there are humans in the frame and the CG-ness of it all brings a sheen of artificiality. Beautiful images alone don't make gripping TV, though.

There seems to be a weird rule for movies / TV. If the acting or dialogue is not good enough to carry the scene, plaster some incidental music underneath to plaster over the lack of emotion. There is certainly a bit of that going on with the younger actors here.

Jared Harris is, well, Jared Harris as Seldon. And charismatic as ever. The guy could act the phone book and still make it gripping. It's interesting that the lead's acting seems to up a notch in his presence.

There are some unconvincing American accents on display.

Overall - will continue watching. It does feel a bit Jupiter rising / Raised by Wolves, though.
 
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