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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.'"

5 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. 3D format already available by tivoKlr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it's that hard to comprehend how to wrangle this story onto a screen, perhaps it's best left as a book?

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    Ocean is land, covered with water.
  2. Doesn't bode well by Homburg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  3. Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! by nmb3000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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  4. Help us Hari Seldon, You're Our Only Hope! by McNally · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If there really is a secret force out there influencing events to preserve civilization I'm counting on them to prevent this.

  5. Re:Oh My God, THE Roland Emmerich?! by Daniel_Staal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    'Sensible' is a curse word.