When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’s Vision Gets Lost

Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by klodolph on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @12:25AM (#29077075)

I would reject faithfulness as a measure of success. I'd much rather have "That's not Foundation!"

I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.

Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.

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Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by Joeri on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @08:22AM (#29080164)

Starship troopers in particular has a very curious relationship between movie and book. Where the book manages to glorify the military the movie deliberately chooses an ironic treatment of the characters and plot elements to form the book’s antithesis. The movie is best enjoyed by not trying to fit it into the mold of the book, and vice versa.

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Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by jvanvleet on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @01:13PM (#29084214)

I agree. The majority of the reactions here to Foundation seem exactly the way I felt so many years ago to the Starship Troopers movie. I hated seeing it in the theater with a passion and it was because I was one of the people that read and enjoyed the book. Even today when the ST movie is talked about as a cult classic I bristle a little bit - but I can see now it is good as a movie unrelated to the book and a disappointment to a fan.

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Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by R0b0t1 on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @02:13AM (#29077681)

Some adaptation is appropriate, as a lot of the pulp fiction scifi from that area has characters doing ridiculous things like using tape drives. On the other hand, setting up a scene and doing a shoot are not the same skills used for telling a story. Many directors have absolutely terrible taste when it comes to story telling, as we can see from Game of Thrones and the other Dune adaptation.

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Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by mcphage on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @08:04AM (#29080010)

Annihilation did that rather well, I think—the source material is about imperfect clones, that had the same structure as the original but weren't the same inside. And then they released a movie that had the structure of the book, but wasn't the same inside. I thought that was quite clever.

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Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by Joeri on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @08:27AM (#29080207)

The three books of the southern reach trilogy were the most creepy read I’ve ever had. Because of the dense and meandering writing style I felt like I was slowly losing my sanity together with the main characters of the books, trying to hold onto details and losing the fight.

The movie was ok to watch if taken by itself, but indeed not the same thing.

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Re:When “Foundation” Gets the Blockbuster Treatment, Asimov’... by Apocryphon on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @12:43AM (#29077173)

Agreed, but we really need a faithful adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? set in San Francisco, as Dick envisioned it.

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