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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.'"
The same Roland Emmerich that wrote the script for Independence Day? The movie where Will Smith flies a spaceship out of an alien base and yells "Oh! Elvis has left the building!" ? Where Will Smith pauses after beating up an alien and says "Welcome to Earth!" ? Where Randy Quaid says, "Payback's a bitch, ain't it?" ? Where Randy Quaid is about to fly his ship up into an Alien fortress to blow it up and says "All right, you alien assholes! In the words of my generation: Up Yours!" followed by "Ha-ha-ha! Hello, boys! I'm back! " ? Where Jeff Goldblum says, "Must go faster!" ?
That's the writing we have to look forward to? And the guy who wrote that is directing?
*curls up into fetal position*
Well, after seeing I, Robot I must say that at least they waited until Asimov was dead before hacking his works up into utter drivel in order to milk those cash cows. Gee, maybe if we're lucky we'll get to see the psychohistorian Hari Seldon played by Tom Cruise scream, "And that's my thousand year plan, bitch!" while snapping his fingers back and forth?
So what are we looking at here? A movie full of catch phrases shot in a new technology that just broke records for box office revenues? Sounds like these executive producers are betting on a winning horse that I'd rather take a bullet to the head than see.
My work here is dung.
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.
When I was 13 I came down with a pretty bad case of strep throat. I was stuck at home and feeling pretty miserable. My mother did something a bit unusual, she stopped into a local used book store that I frequented quite a bit and picked up a Foundation Trilogy boxed set from the '60s. (This was the early '80s) I still bought a lot of books based on the cover back then and I don't know that I would have picked these up at the time. But she brought them home (along with a copy of Watership Down I think) and I dove into them. One of the best gifts my mother ever gave me. I fell in love with them, still have them and re-read them every so often.
I never could get into the newer books quite as much as those first three. They hold a very special place in my library. Hopefully down the road my kids will enjoy them as much as I did.
As for film adaptaptions, like most avid readers I think I will see it but wont expect much. I never expect film or tv to be as 'good' as a book because I like books more. I don't usually get too upset unless someone murders a book I love, which fortunately doesn't happen too often. But it does happen. Of course the, "It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real." quote doesn't inspire confidence. Anyone who says that about Foundation hasn't read it.
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.
When I often consider whom I would choose to make a movie about thinking leaders who manage to diffuse conflicts through subtle social and economic pressures, Roland Emerich never fails to make my short list. Of course I would have thought Michael Bay or Uwe Boll to have been more ideal choices.
I know how to film it. You take some ACTORS and you have them ACT and you point a camera at them, and then you have a movie. Asimov was a writer, not a zero-attention-span adrenaline junkie. Just about every scene in the first three Foundation books is people talking, and that's all it is, and more to the point, that's precisely why it's amazingly good. You could have the spaceships made out of cardboard cutouts being held by cute Asian girls and it would only marginally impact the flow of Asimov's story. GAH.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The Foundation trilogy is about the least SFnal SF from the standpoint of imagery. There's precious little spaceships, or future tech. It's all in the minds of the characters, and in the dialogue. This movie could have been made in 1975 and not suffered visually at all.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
No, the fact that we were all children when we first watched it explains the success of Star Wars.
I liked Dukes of Hazard and Benny Hill back then, if that gives you any idea of the aesthetic sensibilities of the average child-geek.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If there really is a secret force out there influencing events to preserve civilization I'm counting on them to prevent this.
It's going to be like a train wreck...something that one can't bear to watch, and yet one can't tear one's eyes away from.
For example, qoting from http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=59905#:
"On the other end, the "Foundation" is a similar problem in that you have all these short stories and then they were combined into a book and so in a way there is not one character and I spoke with the Rob and he said we have to consolidate the characters..."
So here you have this epic story that deliberately spans the generations to show how Seldon's grand plan is being played out (ignoring all the 'other' fuondations books that sort of watered things down) and Emmerich is going to "consoldiate the characters." WTF? Lazarus Long will be taking the starring role perhaps ;-)
Thisgs to look forward to, perhaps:
Maybe we'll see Salvor Hardin kicking Prince Regent Wienis' teeth out in a thrilling fight scene (can't see Emmerich taking the maxim "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" on board!).
Maybe we'll see Bel Riose blowing everything up as he closes in on Trantor. Lots of opportunity for a car chase (sorry...space battle...) scene here...
We can watch the Mule torture Captain Han Pritcher (in close up) into submission. Imagine the fun of seeing blood trickle down from Pritcher's nose and then realise (with a shock) that a burst blood vessel in his nose actually signifies how his will has been broken.
Maybe we'll see a bit of girl-on-girl action between Arkady Darrel and Lady Callia? In 3D!
No. No and thrice NO, I say!
Let's start up a "NO Foundation Film" petition!
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
These are absolutely some of my very favorite books. But as I recall, Asimov's own foreword to the original trilogy makes the idea of a movie series seem pretty stupid. He started Foundation as a series of short stories. Years later, when a publisher was trying to persuade him to make a longer Foundation work, Asimov had to go back and re-read the material. He reports that, as he sat there reading, he kept waiting for something to happen in the story. He was right (of course): Foundation is mostly people have discussions. What kind of movie can you make out of that?
The Foundation Trilogy was one of the first major SF books I read, back in the late 70's. I had the trilogy with the Chris Foss covers. Those covers evoked in me a deep feeling of time and distance and that was what put me onto SF as a genre. The very first Star Wars, with the minimalist desert scenes filmed in Tunisia, also had some of that. While I enjoyed ID4 and Stargate as mindless feel good SF action films, almost everything Emmerich does is exactly the same thing, huge disasters with a strange lack of coherence between the characters shallow, happy smiling faces and the tragedy of what is happening around them.
I am devastated that Roland Emmerich will be murdering one of my childhood icons with his facile plots. It makes me truly sad.
I would like to see Neil Blomkamp produce and direct the trilogy. he's one of the few directors who hasn't been corrupted by the Hollywood feel-good virus and will let his hero be a loser. I would really like to be amazed again.
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
Were the members of the jury men? Were they angry? Were there twelve of them?
-- $SIGNATURE
The movie I, Robot may have been okay if it were simply a standalone film
Sorry... can't agree on this.
It was on TV just last night and it is BAD.
This isn't the first time I've seen it mind you.
First time was truly a torture - particularly cause I've just reread the Robots couple of months prior.
Last night though, I've tried to analyze it to see if it could be made into a watchable movie with some creative editing.
I came to conclusion that it would have to be cut down to about 1/3 of the current length.
- Drop most action sequences. Like Will Smith running after a robot - to point out what? That he is a clueless moron?
- Drop nearly EVERYTHING Will Smith utters during the movie (nearly all his lines are completely pointless one-liners).
- Cut out Shia LaBeouf completely (Why the fuck is he in this movie at all? Who is his agent? Satan?), despite the urge to have him killed in a very graphic way early on in the movie.
There is a scene where he runs through traffic.
Just have a bus run him over.
Make his blood and guts explode across the screen... in slow motion... pretty...
Umm... sorry about that. Got carried away for a moment.
- Re-dub some of the dialog so it makes sense.
- Remove that idiotic red light all bad robots have in their chests just so we would know that they are bad now.
- Also, drop those scenes where they are made to act like spiders or look suspicious and shifty-eyed.
- Remove the pointless product placements.
- Change the name of the movie. It has nearly nothing to do with the book or the stories in it - it shouldn't be called "I, Robot".
Not exactly Maddox's 3 minute cut, more like 30-minute one.
It wouldn't really be a good movie, or a TV episode of some SF show, like Twilight Zone or Outer Limits.
But it would be watchable.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
I liked Dukes of Hazard and Benny Hill back then, if that gives you any idea of the aesthetic sensibilities of the average child-geek.
I am astounded that you would put that on a public forum. ;^)
That said, I agree with the GP. This is not going to make a good movie. An epic, 5 season TV series like Babylon V? Maybe. But "the Mule" is not going to play well in 2 1/2 hours. 3D won't cut it, movies will need to be telepathic before we can make this one.
--
Toro
The entire story takes place over a few years. The Mule is played by a devious British actor. The protagonist, probably a middle aged guy with a dysfunctional family or a young guy after a girl, builds Terminus, defeats The Empire, defeats The Mule. The Second Foundation is a shadowy organisation who at the start appears like an enemy but helps the protagonist over the course of the movie. There will be at least three massive space battles. Hari will be played by Morgan Freeman. The scale will be reduced, as Galaxies are too big for the average person to comprehend. There will be aliens and robots, perhaps alien robots.
i'd do this Sky Captain style. Real actors, CG environment, 50's looking gadgets. i'd do it as a TV series so you could give it the time it needs.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Abso-fucking-lutely not in the spirit of the collection.
Asimov's robots could in almost all cases harm an individual human only at the cost of their own self-destruction, if even then; being in a position to save only one of two humans would destroy them. In the case where the "zeroth law" does make its way into the original stories, the cost of violating the First Law remains severe.
The movie did not respect Asimov's Three Laws, as originally imagined, beyond mere lip service.
I'm with you. Of all the classic SF/Fantasy series out there, The Foundation Trilogy is probably the one LEAST amenable to a screenplay.
I mean, consider these series, just off the top of my head, in no particular order:
- Chalker's Well of Souls series
- Varley's Gaea Trilogy
- Heinlein's Lazarus Long epics
- Niven's Ringworld trilogy
- Niven/Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand
- Flynn's Firestar series
- Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Gap Cycle
- Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
- Any of Piers Anthony's tripe starting with the Tarot novels
- Anything good by Piers Anthony up to and including the Cluster series
- McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series
- Morris' Silistra series
I could go on and on and on, Philip Jose Farmer, David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks...
Anyone attempting to translate any of these series to a Cinema or Television screenplay would FAIL, for various reasons... content, scope, depth, or combinations thereof.
But yet, I can't think of ONE that would be harder to translate to a screenplay than Asimov's Foundation series.
So, why is that one chosen? The only thing I can think of is that it's the only one that's the property of an estate looking to commercialize a dead author's bibliography.
And I'm not even going to honor the '3D' quotation with a comment. [shudder]
I can see the fnords!
Already being done: http://gizmodo.com/5139211/3d-porn-is-coming-three-guesses-as-to-what-will-be-sticking-straight-off-the-screen http://www.switched.com/2009/01/21/porn-star-belladonna-picks-top-sex-tech-3d-adult-films/ I'm personally waiting for smellovision to make a comeback.
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
Surely I can't be the only one who got REALLY worried when I read this part of the interview: "It's not only the effect of 3-D, ['Avatar' has] just shown that if you do a movie in 3-D, you can ask for more money and that's the trick."
It really seems to me that this is proof that Emmerich has missed the point here. 3D is a wonderful tool for telling stories, but the story has to be there first. I've been a fan of movies all my life, and many of the most impressive movies I've seen were done on a very low budget - what made them impressive was that they told really good stories, or they told their story really well.
To take an example of the first: Moon. If you haven't seen it, see it. It's an amazing movie, a mind-blowing story, and it was done with a budget of all of $5 million. Another example: Cube. That's a very effective and extremely imaginative SF horror movie, with a budget of a grand total of around $365,000.
But, what about a larger story? One with lots of pyrotechnics, battles, etc. Well, besides the fact that each Lord of the Rings movie came in at $90 million only - making them now cheaper than most other event movies - I present for your consideration Underworld. It doesn't have a mind-blowing story - it's a pretty basic one, although it is well-told - but it does have a centuries-old war between vampires and werewolves, and it was incredibly stylish with very good effects, and an emphasis on story. Its budget? Around $22 million.
Emmerich's comment about how 3D will be very good at shaking loose more money worries me a great deal. I'm afraid that we're going to see lots of big event movies that are all computer FX, and lacking in craft or storytelling. Sure, you'll see the money on the screen, but part of creativity in moviemaking is coming up with new ways to tell stories, and limited budgets are often a good thing - they force the filmmaker to concentrate on the important parts of the movie, rather than getting distracted by the FX sequences. Now we're looking at 3D for the sake of 3D - or even worse, for the sake of getting money to do 3D - rather than 3D because that's the best way to tell the story.
(Aside from which, am I the only one who thinks that a few too many people are talking about FX allowing them to do things they couldn't do before, particularly when their examples ARE things that have been done before, and done well? Sure, there are stories that are probably unfilmable, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, but that's mainly because it's more travelogue than story - all the visual effects could have been done for that by Ray Harryhausen forty years ago. Seriously, if King Kong could do it in 1933, it wasn't impossible before computers.)
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive