FOUNDATION to become a movie

Director Roland Emmerich was recently announced to be developing a movie based upon the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov, in particular the original trilogy of Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953). Originally it appeared the project was doomed to development hell, but Emmerich recently announced the film will be his next project after his current film, the William Shakespeare movie Anonymous, wraps up (his previous movie, 2012, hits cinemas in a few weeks).


The news is of concern: Roland Emmerich is the director of Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, movies noted for having tons of special effects and having things explode, sink or be cataclysmically destroyed (usually New York) with thousands of people killed. He doesn't do 'quiet', although Anonymous appears to be a brave attempt to tell a character-driven movie, although I'm not ruling out Emmerich somehow causing Elizabethan Richmond to explode in slow-motion with a dog successfully outrunning the blast by turning down a corridor at right-angles to the blast and thus surviving due to the director's ignorance of ballistic reality. But you never know.

Emmerich seems to get off on the right foot by agreeing that the recent film version of Asimov's I, Robot was rubbish, had nothing to do with the book and his approach would be a faithful adaptation of the Foundation Trilogy (the continued popularity of this term suggests the existence of the latter four books seems to have been forgotten by a lot of people at this point). So how was he going to faithfully adapt a series of episodic stories featuring radical shifts in cast and geopolitical situation across some 400 years of future history? Well, he's going to merge all the events into a shorter period of time and all the separate protagonists will become one character.

Right.

You don't have to be Hari Seldon to accurately predict that this will not end well. And I'd put money on Trantor being destroyed in a slow-motion, skyscraper-tumbling firestorm at some point as well.