A Seldon Crisis of epic proportions in the making

[YankeyMCC]

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I see nothing but ‘train wreck’ written all over this. Emmerich is a competent filmmaker, churning out big-budget genre spectacles of debatable quality like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. But both of these movies are nothing more than shallow, star-and/or-effects-driven affairs, and The Foundation Trilogy is anything but. The only slightly intellectually engaging movie of Ememrich’s that comes to mind is Stargate, but even then Emmerich struggled to convey the intricacies of that movie’s relatively complex plot.
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my comment: This is exactly my fear. I should not and usually do not overly fret about Hollywood trying to make movies where perhaps they shouldn't or at least where they don't really approach it correctly. Often I even still have fun with the result as with I, Robot (compared to the series of stories by Asimov the movie was horrible, and even measuring it for 'intelligent science fiction' it was lacking almost totally but it was fun). But Foundation is so dear to me this is going to make me cringe very very hard.

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I’m loathe to pronounce anything as “unfilmable”. That kind of blanket assertion seems to me to smack of a kind of close-minded intransigence towards creative exploration that I generally don’t abide (Watchmen haters, I’m looking at you). However, I can’t see how a two-and-a-half hour feature (or a trilogy of them, even), produced by a major Hollywood studio, helmed by an action-movie director, and probably starring a young Hollywood leading man, could ever hope to do justice to Asimov’s classic chronicle of the Galactic Empire's fall, resurgence, and the interregnum in between.
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my comments: I may be naive but I'm ore opptomistic that a movie interpetation could be done. I mean a good, entertaining series of movies that comes fairly close to the core themes and spirit of the original stories, although there would certainly be some significant departures, additions, different emphasis/angle, to be sure. But as noted above I don't think they've picked the correct team.

The rest of the blog entry: http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=11726#more