FOUNDATION movie becomes a TV series

Roland Emmerich's Foundation project has moved from the big screen to television, with the director confirming that his next film will instead be the unasked-for Independence Day sequel.

According to Emmerich:

"We're trying to do it as a big mini-series, but even there you would have to change the story itself and set it in a time when the galaxy has fallen apart - and then you're pretty much making a TV show with all these characters and playing all the scenes out. You can [do that] and we'll see what happens. We tried so hard [to make it into a movie], honestly, because it's one of my most favourite books. I just love it."

Here's a thought. If you love the book so much, why not just do an adaptation rather than arse around with it? If anything, the episodic structure of the books (the first three 'novels' in the series are actually linked collections of short stories and novellas) would map onto a TV series very well.

This is still early in development, with no writer or studio yet attached.

Roland Emmerich to film FOUNDATION trilogy

Originally published as a series of eight short stories in Astounding Magazine in the late 1940s, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series became best-known as a trilogy of fixup novels, published between 1951 and 1953 by Gnome Press in the USA. Asimov had developed the concept along with infamous SF uber-editor John W. Campbell and was inspired by Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The initial stories chronicled the fall of the ancient Galactic Empire and the galaxy's descent into chaos, with the twin 'Foundations' established by psycho-historian Hari Seldon to guide humanity to the rise of a new empire a thousand years later. The trilogy only covered four centuries of this period before Asimov ran out of inspiration for future stories and decided to turn his attentions elsewhere.


The trilogy went on to become one of SF's most popular and well-known sagas, arguably outstripped only by Frank Herbert's Dune series, and won the one and only 'Best Series' Hugo Award in 1966 (an award that Asimov believed had purely been invented to retroactively honour The Lord of the Rings and was flabbergasted when he won instead). Asimov eventually returned to the series in the 1980s, penning the fourth and fifth books, Foundation's Edge in 1981 and Foundation and Earth in 1986, before writing two sequels, Prelude to Foundation (1989) and Forward the Foundation, the latter finished just before his death in 1992. Asimov also, perhaps ill-advisedly given the resulting continuity issues, combined the Foundation universe with his Robots books to create one enormous future history spanning some 20,000 years.

The Foundation books are noted for being heavy on sociological musings, stern-faced characters discussing matters of import, historical ponderings, awkward romances and occasional, long-distance space battles. Obviously this makes them the ideal source material to be turned into a trilogy of CGI-drenched 3D space opera extravaganzas featuring slow-motion explosions and (probably) cute dogs by the understated and subtle film-maker Roland Emmerich, the director of such arty flicks as Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and the recent 2012.

Okay, it could be worse. It could have been Uwe Boll. In every other respect, this is the most inappropriate matching-up of director and source material I have ever come across. This is a disaster in the making, and it only remains to be seen just how bad the end result is. Maybe Emmerich will surprise us with a film that is halfway-watchable, but I seriously doubt it. What next? Tony Scott's Book of the New Sun? Michael Bay's The Stars My Destination?

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.