New Asimov Movies Coming 396
bowman9991 writes "Two big budget Isaac Asimov novel adaptations are on the way. New Line founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are developing Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation, the first in Asimov's classic space opera saga, which has the potential to be as epic as Lord of the Rings. At the same time, New Regency has recently announced they were adapting Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity. Despite having edited or written more than 500 books, it's surprising how little of Isaac Asimov's work has made it to the big screen. '"Isaac Asimov had writer's block once," fellow science fiction writer Harlan Ellison said, referring to Asimov's impressive output. "It was the worst ten minutes of his life."' Previous adaptations include the misguided Will Smith feature I, Robot, the lame Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, and two B-grade adaptations of Nightfall."
This reader also notes that a remake of The Day of the Triffids is coming.
Oh, the potential (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:foundation (Score:5, Insightful)
It definetly was! The epic scale of the book, a conflict spanning a whole galaxy was incredible. I don't know how a movie could capture that to be truthfull... Even Star Wars didn't feel as epic. Not to mention the timescale of the book, with time jumping forward by decades at a time.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be first in line for the foundation movies.
As long as it was movies. Not the whole thing crammed into a 90 minute movie
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
As science fiction readers we always seem to approach a movie release of our favourite stories with dread.
Why do film makers always do such a bad job with sci-fi classics? Is it just blatant commercialism? Is it that modernisation of a classic story is inappropriate? Or is it something more fundamental - do film makers simply not understand science fiction?
I have a feeling that when Hollywood hears the words 'science fiction' they immediately think special effects and action and how they can maximise those things for the viewing experience. Yet sci-fi books are about ideas. I, Robot is a classic example of the whole point of the book being sacrificed for extra action. Similarly I am Legend for those who have read the book is most thought provoking in its ending but Hollywood sacrificed that for a... well, Hollywood ending.
There have been some excellent sci-fi movies: 2001, The Andromeda Strain for instance, so it is possible. Why do film makers so often get it wrong?
foundation unfilmable? (Score:4, Insightful)
one would think watchmen was unfilmable, but apparently early previews say it is fantastic
one would have thought lord of the rings was unfilmable, and yet jackson made some of the best films ever made
as long as they do it right... for values of "doing it right" that are largely unquantifiable
This is good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I love Foundation more than anyone should love a work of fiction, and there are lots of people like me out there. That doesn't mean this is a good idea.
Foundation strikes me as one of the least "filmy" books - because it's really a bunch of short stories, each crisis a little puzzle. I fell in love with the books because they were essentially mystery stories wrapped around a gooey scifi center.
This is like trying to adapt three or four Sherlock Holmes short stories at once, all on top of Hollywood's hatred of smart science fiction. I predict PAIN.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose 2001, one of my favorite movies, would be a complete failure if it were to be shown to todays public.
Re:"The end of Eternity" exists since 1987 (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry about replying to my own post, but I found the movie - plays in Flash with reasonable quality. There is also download for some small cash, but I haven't tried that. The flash player has ads, but they are not too bad. There are no subtitles, though, and that's sad because I'm watching it now and the dialog (in the council chamber) is not meaningless.
Anyway, here is the working link [www.intv.ru].
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:2, Insightful)
What Jackson did with LOTR is just unexcuseable.
That's your opinion, and I'll gladly accept it if you can explain how you would have squeezed the entire story into 12 hours more effectively than PJ did.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Oh, the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a feeling that when Hollywood hears the words 'science fiction' they immediately think special effects and action and how they can maximise those things for the viewing experience.
Not just SF. This year's Jones and Bond outings were all chase and fight, utterly devoid of all the other stuff that makes for a good movie.
Hell, I can't even tell you what Solace was about.
Hollywood movies are degenerating into big budget laser light shows: "Gee that's cool, but...."
Oh, the Grand Vistas. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why do film makers always do such a bad job with sci-fi classics? Is it just blatant commercialism? Is it that modernisation of a classic story is inappropriate? Or is it something more fundamental - do film makers simply not understand science fiction?"
It could also be economics. Just how much money do you think it would take to do Ringworld on the same scale as it exists in most peoples heads when they read science fiction? Grand usually takes a "grand".
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
Fans of Tolkein on the whole don't have a problem with Jackson's *omissions*. It's his *additions* that were the issue.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I fell asleep after just ten minutes of reading the LOTR books. Okay not really, but I was bored out of my mind. That man rambled on more than my delusional grandmother. I never did get past the halfway point of book 1 because it was like listening to my English prof drone on-and-on-and-on.
As for Foundation, it's not really a novel. It's a series of short stories and I don't know how it can be adapted to a movie, since the cast of characters is constantly changing, and I can't imagine the movie makers constantly changing actors every twenty minutes. The result will probably be some bastardized mess that fails to properly span one hundred years of history. When you have a series of stories like Foundation, it makes more sense to handle it like Star Trek TOS - each episode is a standalone independent of the others. They should create an "Issac Asimov Presents" show with each episode covering a different short story, including his Foundation, Robot, and Empire short stories.
>>>misguided Will Smith feature I, Robot, the lame Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, and two B-grade adaptations of Nightfall.
I have to disagree with this statement. Yeah the B-grade movies were bad, but I thought Bicentennial Man was faithful to the original text, and I Robot was an original non-asimov story, but still stayed true to Asimov's original Four Robot Laws (1,2,3, and 0). I saw that movie three times and enjoyed it every time. I wish they'd go back and adapt a few more (but this time stick to the text).
I want some Elijah Bailey! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In Other News - Dune Remake (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad Hollywood writers think science fiction adaptations are 50% special effects and 50% stuff they think is cool but is cliche and shows they didn't grasp the book.
Dune is complex, deep, and half of it takes place internal to the characters. Sci-Fi managed to stuff it into a five episode mini-series and did it a fair amount of justice, but I hold out slim hope for a feature length movie. That goes times a million if Brian Herbert is involved in any way.
Re:This is good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the problem with him is that he can't be anybody else than himself. It's as much acting as Arnie did. The role in which Arnie excelled was basically himself: a muscular robot. That does not mean that the movies are not fun to watch, Will Smith can be amazingly funny. But he'll be Will Smith all of the time. Now take a look at an actor like Depp. Sure you can recognize him, but you could watch a whole movie without actually really noticing that he's in there.
So indeed, don't put him in there unless it really fits his personality. Maybe that's what they are doing though. Many SF novels are written around one or a few heroes that play out fantastic voyages.
Re:Hari Seldon and Psychohistory (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll be seeing that first run in theatres and buying the DVDs.
They predicted that, you know.
Idiot, everyone knows psychohistory can't predict individual actions, just those of a group.
Re: Oh, the potential (Score:4, Insightful)
I just saw it yesterday, without having seen Casino Royale. (The new one, that is. I've seen the David Niven/Woody Allen farce.) The action was very thick, but there was a plot in there, you just had to really be paying attention to ferret it out.
All in all, I liked it better than the later Roger Moore Bond films. By that time he seemed to be mugging and smirking his way through the films, laughing all the way to the bank. This film was very dark, any hint of humor would have gotten shot, thrown out of the vehicle, and blown up immediately, but I still rather liked it.
I thought "Quantum of Solace" referred to the tiniest amount of relief from his grief after the last movie. But I would have sworn I heard a few references to "Quantum" as an organization, and saw a few flashes of "Q" logo. I don't know if it was a hint, something I needed to see Casino to understand, or a changed direction that wasn't completely removed.
Speaking of which, (incompletely removed change of direction) don't forget that they're making, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" into a movie, as well as Ridley Scott doing "The Forever War." I've heard that in the latter, he wants to emphasize the lost feeling or returning home to a changed world, after losing time to relativistic travel.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one, could live with the additions, and can sorta understand the thinking behind changing the POV from the halfling's to the human's. I can live with the substitution of Aragorn's chef's roll of weaponry for the whole Bombadil/Barrow Wight episode. But omission of "The Scouring of the Shire", THE BEST PART of the whole fucking story, was just asinine.
No, he was a great author, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
...he didn't pay much attention to standard values of novels; things like, say, human emotions, fast action, sex, or even much real suspense - the plot is usually "logical" and the real thrill of the reader is being taught the fine details that connect Point A to Point B. A lecturer-style, if you wish. In other literary aspects, like narrative structure and command of the English language, Asimov seems quite strong (I'm a non-native English speaker, having read most of his works translated, but as an adult [and professional bilingual writer] I've read a few originals - e.g. Gold - and liked it truly.) Many readers actually love that style in the genre of hard-SF. No literary decorations, no convoluted characters... just the fundamentals: GREAT ideas envolving future technology and its iteraction with society, and a competent and serious development of these ideas. Salvo exceptions like the Lucky Starr space-cowboy series; and even those books were much above the level of "entertainment sci-fi" like Flash Gordon.
Re:The Will Smith movie wasn't based on Asimov's b (Score:3, Insightful)
The Will Smith movies was a disgrace to Asimov's legacy with, as one of the worse cinema whoring of all times, them actually making Dr. Calving fuckeable.
She was anything but cute in the books.
Now this is an epic workload (Score:3, Insightful)
How will the be able to portray R. Daneel Oliwav and R. Giskard Reventlov and their brain wave mind bending of humans without it looking corny on screen BUT as amazing as it is written?
How will they portray the mule without it looking like a bad version of Alien?
How are they going to be able to flesh out the vast amount of social undertones that are perfused in all the books? Recently I have though "This is becoming like Trantor" when I see infrastructure "collapsing" around me in this real world we live in.
Heck 99% of the conflicts as I recall them are on the mental plane... from the start to mycogen and beyond.
They better be some spectacular screen writer adaptors to even scratch the surface.
Re:This is good... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now take a look at an actor like Depp. Sure you can recognize him, but you could watch a whole movie without actually really noticing that he's in there.
No, no. That's Gary Oldman. Depp is still too flashy to blend seamlessly into his roles. The closest he came was ironically his flashiest role: Cap'n Jack Sparrow...and he was aided by copious accouterments and make-up to pull it off.
"Foundation" would be a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
"Foundation" would be a joke today. "We can predict the future. With math. In detail. By hand!" People are less impressed with mathematical prediction now; enough of it has been done to make it clear what's possible and what isn't.
Wall Street has had sizable efforts in that direction. You can at best do a little bit better than noise, some of the time. Which was enough to create hedge fund billionaires.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:4, Insightful)
Bicentennial man screwed up two things about Asimov's text. The first was really bad: In Asimov's version, after the robot has himself surgically altered so he dies, he tells the human congress that he did it because he had concluded that they would never accept a human who could live forever. In the movie adaptation, the congress flat-out tells him "Sorry, you're immortal. Men aren't immortal."
It ruins the poignancy of it, because man intentionally drives the robot to death, whereas in Asimov's end, it's unspoken bigotry that drives him to death.
That, and they made his desire to become human all about sex. Honestly, if that's your thing, cool, but don't turn Asimov into stories about robots that want to have sex.
As for I, Robot, I think misguided is an excellent word. They should've done an Asimov work. The result wasn't atrocious, but it wasn't Asimov. When Asimov's robots took over the world, humans though they were in control, and so were quite fine with it (because the robots were, after all, only there to serve humankind.)
The U.S. of the Galaxy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:2001 (Score:4, Insightful)
2001 came out shortly after the time of Marshall McLuhan's mantra "the medium is the message" [wikipedia.org], which argued that the medium of communication is a fundamental influence on the way we process information or content. 2001 is a communication via visual content rather than dialogue. I still find 2001 an amazing and deep movie, but none of the message is contained in the dialog. Consider an obvious scene: the reading of the lips of Bowman and Poole while they are discussing the possibility of shutting down HAL, the dialog is irrelevant. Or the scene on the moon where the team is looking at the monolith in Tycho, the way they touch it ... reminiscent of the way the apes did, but now with opposable thumbs.
Or a more subtle one: when Bowman recovers Poole's body and brings it back to the Discovery HAL refuses him entry, there is then an extended quiet period where the discovery and the pod are shown facing each other. The pod seems to be offering up the body of Poole as a sacrifice. But in this moment we (again) see the three stages of evolution: Man, machine enhanced man (Bowman in the Pod) and Machine Intelligence. Man is dead, now is the time of the machine enhanced human, and the future humanity becoming or supplanted by machine intelligence.
Of course this is only scratching the surface.
Re:"Foundation" would be a joke (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not an enormous fan of Asimov. I am just not that attracted to his writing style. However, I did like Foundation. And his argument I thought was and is still reasonable. That when you are dealing with hundreds of billions of people, not just billions, then human populations become predictable like the physics of gases, except for powerful individuals like the Mule. A reasonable enough premise to carry a movie.
They blinded me with science! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the thing that pleases me most is the fact that the Foundation books were largely about the idea that while religion and irrationality tend to mess up a society, science always kinda works. If they manage to convey this idea in the movies, it could be a great message for our culture at this time.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:4, Insightful)
Fourth Film (Score:3, Insightful)
...Or the extended DVD of the third film, but they sort of blew it when Grima didn't go flying after the palintir, (and then HE kills Saruman? WTF). The book was not written from the human point of view. Without the original POV, very little plot is left to develop, hence the fluff that everyone else seems offended by. I haven't had to condense any novels into screenplays myself, but somehow the main plot point needs support. Three times was kind of the rule of thumb that comes to mind. I have done some film work, BTW. The essential plot point of LOTR was the protagonists having to reach deeper within themselves to find resources and strength that they didn't know they had, in order to succeed. Boromir fails, kid brother Faramir comes through. Saruman fails, junior wizard Gandalf defies the laws of physics and triumphs. Isildur fails, Aragorn gets to stage a big comeback. The Hobbits were the most humble and peace-loving of all, there is no warrior pride or arrogance, but they stood up when the time came, even Smeagol has his moments. The final section, where the Brandybuck and the Took answer their heritage and raise up the folks at home, WAS the whole point being developed. If you want to see superior might steamroll over groveling malefactors, look for Chuck Norris. It has been said that LOTR was an allegory for a "Nation of Gardeners and Shopkeepers" rising up to stand against Hitler. (By Godwin!)
Pretty interesting action scenes (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of Foundation action scenes are mind control fights. It would be really interesting to see how they manage to translate that to the screen.
Re:Oh, the potential (Score:2, Insightful)