I don’t see why Foundation needs to have lots and lots of CGI and what not. The stories were political intrigue, on a galactic scale. But I guess if you’re going to film sci-fi instead of science fiction (to get a bigger audience) you need CGI.
Why they changed the names from Cleon 1 to Brother Whatever is beyond me. It sounds religious and IIRC there was very little religion in the stories (except for the fake “religion of science” in the third story).
Does it seem like trailer quality has less correlation to movie quality than it ever has?
Used to be when a trailer was good, the movie was good, generally. There were exceptions, of course but now, you see a great trailer and think, I hope the movie lives up to it, not “that is solid evidence that the movie will be good”.
I think they’ve learned a lot more about trailer-making in recent decades than they have about movie making. Digital technology makes trailer-making a breeze, so it’s easier to make something look cool whether the source material is good or not.
I’d like to take a moment to plug one of much better books that’s kinda set in similar Galactic Empire universe.
“Child of Fortune” by Normand Spinrad.
Now, there’s a book that’s well worthy of a big budget mini-series.
It also features one of the better young adult female characters ever in SF.
The reviews are in many ways misleading. I, Robot is basically what you’d get if Asimov had written an action movie; the whole core of the story revolves around the Three Laws and their corner cases and loop holes. It’s much better than most geeks seem to believe.
That’s the opportunity in adapting it as a series—Asimov tended to write thought experiments populated with bare-minimum characters. This show has a chance to flesh that out and explore various themes with the device of psychohistory. They could create a multi-episode arc of getting permission to establish Foundation, exploring the motivations of Seldon and his team, the opposition they face, and the conditions which will lead to the imperial collapse. I was pleased to learn Saladin Ahmed was in the writers’ room—he’s entertaining and has a fresh voice. Hopefully the writers did more than just put Asimov’s words on screen.
The main thing I remember from the I, Robot movie was cars with spherical wheels which allows them to rotate independently of their direction of travel.
Hugely impractical, but I thought it was pretty cool.
