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Emmerich Plans Foundation As a 3D Epic
spuke4000 writes "Roland Emmerich, the writer/director/producer behind Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 is planning to adapt Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The plans include using technology developed for Avatar including 3D and motion capture technology. When asked about using this technology Emmerich responded: 'It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.'"
If it's that hard to comprehend how to wrangle this story onto a screen, perhaps it's best left as a book?
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Hacking into an alien military computer system with an Apple laptop! How could you leave THAT out?
Funny, when I read the Foundation series, I never pictured it as a big budget action movie. I never thought it would need 3Dand whiz bang special effects. And, you know, it isn't one story, it's a whole bunch of separate stories. I'm thinking this movie will bear about as much resemblance to the books as I, Robot did to its books. That is to say, I predict they will share a similar title, and not much else.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real."
Really? I'm having trouble thinking of anything in Foundation that couldn't have been filmed using the technology available back when the stories were originally written. It's a story about ideas, not an exercise in world-building or aesthetic splendor.
I Robot is a pretty decent film
Please tell me you're joking. The movie I, Robot may have been okay if it were simply a standalone film, but as an "adaption" of Asimov's book it was a travesty. About the only thing the book had in common with the movie was the title.
While overly satirical and lacking in details, Maddox's review isn't all that far from the mark.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Perhaps you are purposefully disregarding the fact that Roland's target audience is simply.. not you? (You know.. the intelligent type.) Most people really enjoyed ID4. Most people will probably enjoy Foundation in 3D, but only because Roland will dumb it down to their levels.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
About the only thing the book had in common with the movie was the title.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book); a mystery based on trying to predict how these laws will play out in unusual circumstances (the point of the other half of the stories in the book); a society shaped by dependence on robots, and the problems this might cause (the subject of a number of Asimov's later robot books). Sure, there's a lot more running around and shooting and Will Smith being a badass in the film than there is in the book, but there's some definite common threads, too.
I'm beginning to think that people who claim the book and film of I, Robot have nothing in common simply don't have a very strong grasp on what Asimov actually wrote.
If there really is a secret force out there influencing events to preserve civilization I'm counting on them to prevent this.
Uh, was there any running around and shooting in the book? The themes may have been similar, but was the actual PLOT of the movie anything like the book? Was the TONE of the movie anything like the book? If you admit that the only thing the book and movie had in common was the three laws and ubiquitous robots, I think we can agree.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
How would you propose one could possibly experience the awesome exhibition of the unique ability of The Mule without 3D?! Luddite!!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Just wait until the moviegoing public decides that Trantor was just a rip-off of Star Wars' Coruscant. Or more likely, that the whole Empire is a rip-off of Star Wars.
Just something else Lucas will have to answer for.
-- Alastair
From the wiki:
The film that was ultimately made originally had no connections with Asimov, originating as a screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. That script was an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery that took place entirely at the scene of a crime, with one lone human character, FBI agent Del Spooner, investigating the killing of a reclusive scientist named Dr. Hogenmiller, and interrogating a cast of machine suspects that included Sonny the robot, HECTOR the supercomputer with a perpetual yellow smiley face, the dead Doctor Hogenmiller's hologram, plus several other examples of artificial intelligence... Jeff Vintar... incorporated the Three Laws of Robotics, and replaced the character of Flynn with Susan Calvin, when the studio decided to use the name "I, Robot"
I was genuinely angry after watching that film, mainly because the only copy of I, Robot I could get my hands on now had Will Smith on the cover.
No, wait, it was mainly because the plots of the two works shared not one single point of congruence. And the film mainly focused on badassery and leaping around, which is true to Asimov's style - his trademark was always providing very little substance and just having huge set-piece battles between the protagonist and every other being in the story.
No, wait. What really, really got to me was that the name I, Robot was used on some crappy spec script that had to be reimagined multiple times to make it sufficiently commercial and then had Asimov's ideas vaguely pinned on as a clear afterthought in order to give it some geek cred, instead of a tender reimagining of the lovingly crafted tales of understated strife that his works so deserve.
Be smart, help people!
You can get some great movies with dialog alone. I had to watch one old movie for a class in high school, and I forget its title, but it was basically a jury talking about whether a man is innocent or not. It was black and white, with no effects that people of my generation have come to expect in movies. It had no action of any sort, just talking and the tension that comes from their arguments. It was, however, an awesome film. Better than most movies nowadays.
SSC
Then why not make an entertaining movie that looks exactly the same but with a different title? Why take an intelligent book and dumb it down instead of just starting dumb and meeting expectations?
Except you've vastly overstated the degree to which the I, Robot movie resembled the book. It wasn't even remotely the same story (unlike Hitchikers) and it certainly wasn't true to Asimov's vision.
If you want to know why sci-fi fans, particularly hard sci-fi fans are like this I'll tell you. It's because nobody ever makes a movie that appeals to them. The issues of morality and science that they find interesting are not elements of sci-fi on screen. The only thing they have is books. And when one of those books is to be adapted they get their hopes up.
The laws in the movie were interpreted drastically differently than in the book. I would have to say that they do not have the laws in common.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
It is unfortunate that I don't have any mod points right now. I couldn't agree more.... I, Robot was an absolutely hideous movie compared to the book. It completely missed the point of the book and certainly didn't really explore the concepts of the laws of robotics in more than simply a superficial fashion.
Of the other movies in his resume, the other Roland Emmerich films also give me the shudders to think of how bad they could be. Heck, I think it would be an improvement for some of those films to have Jar Jar Binks come walking into the scene with some singing Wookies.... if you know what I mean from the George Lucas films.
I sort of enjoyed Independence Day.... provided I put my brain into neutral and was under a buzz from some adult beverages. More of that stuff helps, I should note. I don't even have a desire to watch 2012, and criticized the trailer to no end on Hulu when I saw that piece of tripe for the first time. Day After Tomorrow? Please, give me a break. That was even worse than the others.
I love the foundation books, and it disappoints me to no end that they've given such a treasure to a hack like Emmerich. It will more than likely be a horrible movie, sort of how the Starship Troopers ended up being filmed by a very much non-fan of the author or book. I presume it will include Hari Seldon and talk about Trantor to some extent. I sure hope that he at least looks at the feel of Coruscant from the later Star Wars trilogy (episodes I-III) to at least sort of present this massive planet as a city feel in the distant future which is a galactic capital. Asimov explained in one of the books that Trantor had at least a dozen planets tasked to it just for food production to feed the citizens on Trantor, with an incredible amount of interstellar commerce happening just to maintain the status quo of the planet.
Somehow I think all of that is going to be glossed over or even ignored. And that is just the initial setting of the book. The Psionic mental manipulations that happen in the books should be even more interesting to try and capture on film, and it would take a genius to pull that off. I don't think Emmerich is going to be the one to make that happen either.
All I can hope is that in the distant future (20-40 years from now) some other brave director actually reads these books and decides to "re-imagine" the books to do them justice. Sort of how Peter Jackson finally figured out how to do the Lord of the Rings in a way that worked. Emmerich isn't that person.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book)
The reason Asimov's robot stories are so famous is because he did not write 'robot as the monster' stories. His robots were machines, and broke down like machines. They did not go havok or turn on their creators. They had weird, unpredictable bugs that resulted in unexpected behavior, but did not violate their core concepts. His robots were safe: 'Made so.'
Once he had that fully established, he played with it a bit in no more than a couple of stories, because he was too good an author to not do so. But even then, there was never a robot 'menace', or robots running around murdering people.
Robots running haywire and trying to supplant the human race is exactly what Asimov was known for not doing. Making a movie where that's the plot and putting Asimov's name on it is like doing a movie about Lord of the Rings - and having Saruon as a misunderstood rebel, who's really all right underneath.
'Sensible' is a curse word.