Jump to content

Apple's TV show based on Asimov's FOUNDATION, starring Jared Harris


Werthead
 Share

Recommended Posts

7 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

The weirdest thing about that scene was that everyone just stood there as if they had come to a lecture , and listened to "Hari" talk and talk and even asked questions about what he was saying re: history  of Anachreon and Thespis... for some 10 minutes at least before someone (one of the kids!) finally asked "How are you here?"

Yeah. Awful writing. Poor Jared Harris -- but I suppose Apple likely paid him as much or more than he ever saw in his career to do this role.

7 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

It's really odd how drastically different the two parts of the show are - everything with Cleons and Demerzel has been really interesting, well written and acted, while the Terminus stuff has, by comparison, has felt generic at its best, and static and dull a lot of the time. It's like watching two completely different shows.

Basically, all the Terminus stuff has been the attempt to actually adapt Foundation. The Invictus story is very loosely based on the novel. The Hari appearing on Terminus and making peace with Anacreon (and Thespin) is loosely adapted from the book as well. But Goyer is proving that Foundation, as written, is not adaptable (at least by him, though I think maybe by anyone) -- its characters are thin and much of it is just people talking, talking, talking.

So it's no surprise that the only part of the show that works well is the one that is basically invented whole-cloth and, after the first episode, is essentially completely disconnected from the Foundation material.

 

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

I think Hari was really cemented as by far the most likely culprit for the bombing of the Star Bridge now.

I think you're right. Demerzel made sense when it seemed like she was basically R. Daneel Olivaw doing the Zeroth Law thing, but it does start to feel like they've found a different role for her when they came up with the genetic dynasty.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It also seems to me that they barely adapted half of the first novel.  Doesn’t [u]Foundation[/u] end with a member of the Foundation discovering how far behind the Foundation the remnants of the Empire have fallen.

Edited by Ser Scot A Ellison
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The first three novels aren't novels, they're nine short stories and novellas rather - hamfistedly - combined into fixup books. If Asimov had planned them better, he'd have included the stuff with the Imperial Navy into the first novel and then had all the Mule stuff in the second book as a cohesive story (instead of being split between Books 2 and 3) and expanded the material in the final novella into a full novel, or just left it being really short.

But yeah, they've very loosely adapted "The Psychohistorians," "The Encyclopedists" and "The Mayors," all from Foundation. According to Goyer, Season 2 will adapt at least "The Merchant Princes" (the final Foundation story) and "The General," the first half of Foundation and Empire (maybe "The Traders" from the first book as well, but that's really an irrelevant side-story). They're looking to cast Hober Mallow and Bel Riose for Season 2.

My review.

A weird experience watching a show that's around 50% great or promising compared to 50% tedious, often veering into WTFery.

Edited by Werthead
Link to comment
Share on other sites

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/foundation-tv-series-books-empire/620750/

Quote

Foundation is a grand sci-fi adventure, sure, but it’s better understood as a work of political theory—a young American’s dialogue with the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon about the promise and peril of empire. To its credit, Apple’s new series embraces the philosophical ambition of Asimov’s masterpiece. But in updating Foundation for the 21st century, Goyer has produced a near-comprehensive repudiation of his source material. This is a show not about space or science, but rather the limits of liberal politics.

...

Gibbon was writing from a moment of disillusion with the British project. The first volume of his magnum opus was published in 1776, and the American Revolution had made clear to Gibbon that his nation was just as capable of decadent violence as ancient Rome had been. Throughout his four-volume masterpiece, Gibbon interrogates the roles of what we would now call structural forces in Roman society—religion, class, trade, technology, military and administrative capacity, ideology—each of which Asimov gives its own treatment as the dominant theme of a separate Foundation story.

...

This break with Gibbon’s history—which was fundamentally an examination of the follies of empire—turned out to be a stroke of commercial genius. Asimov’s themes were perfectly attuned to the technocratic American exceptionalism of the postwar years, when Americans enjoyed the fruits of a new empire while denying that their government’s political hegemony could be considered an empire at all. Asimov’s heroes looked and acted more like sci-fi’s readership than the square-jawed space cowboys of Thrilling Wonder Stories did. Asimov’s heroes were nerds, and reading his stories would eventually become a rite of passage for generations of freaks and geeks.

...

The Galactic Empire that crumbles and disappears in Asimov’s first story is an ever-present menace throughout Goyer’s first season—bad guys hanging around to do bad things and demonstrate how bad imperialism is. Goyer’s story is thus more thematically relevant to empire in the 21st century than Asimov’s, but it also isn’t as good. Almost every major political event in Goyer’s universe is either an act of violence or an act compelled by the threat of violence. His characters are motivated not by bursts of rational insight, but raw ethnic and identitarian resentment. This gets tedious after a few hours.

 

Edited by SpaceChampion
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting piece that does a good job of explaining Foundation's importance to the genre and its impact in the particular political moment when it came. I can understand why he dreams of a good adaptation of the actual themes of the books, but it's funny that it makes him uninterested in the genetic dynasty part of the story.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Ran said:

Interesting piece that does a good job of explaining Foundation's importance to the genre and its impact in the particular political moment when it came. I can understand why he dreams of a good adaptation of the actual themes of the books, but it's funny that it makes him uninterested in the genetic dynasty part of the story.

Wasn't he saying Asimov got Gibbon's themes backwards, and in turn Goyer got Asimov's themes backwards (somewhat restoring Gibbon I think) but not that he longed for Asimov's version? 

Asimov's themes of liberal nerd rationalist imperialism was very American but not particularly pro-democracy.  The outcome Goyer's Seldon is going for seems to be another unimaginative autocracy.  He's not saying Asimov's vision was particular good either though.

Edited by SpaceChampion
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, SpaceChampion said:

Wasn't he saying Asimov got Gibbon's themes backwards, and in turn Goyer got Asimov's themes backwards (somewhat restoring Gibbon I think) but not that he longed for Asimov's version? 

I mean...

Quote

Although Asimov presented an accommodating attitude toward empire, he was neither naive nor jingoistic. 

...

And with each successive story, the unbridled optimism of Asimov’s early entries is complicated by darker developments. The Foundation becomes a police state, and at times embodies the worst elements of what it once battled against.

While Goyer has indeed updated it to the "post-9/11 world", the actual way he has gone about it is something the critic finds "tedious", and so he finishes by saying:

Quote

The dramatic key for subsequent seasons is to ditch the first’s plodding focus on the Galactic Emperor Bad Guy and emphasize the internal contradictions of the Foundation itself. As the Foundation’s influence grows across Asimov’s opus, it loses its underdog status and becomes a more politically complex entity, with interests and responsibilities well outside its original mission.

Which just loops back to the fact that Asimov, while still remaining positive towards the Foundation and its empire of raeason, had recognized that the Foundation was going to become more complicated in a moral way as it grew more powerful, which is reflected in his narrative. Not to the degree that someone cynical about American imperialism might, but still. He wants Goyer to mine the books and engage with its themes more, and get away from the things he sees as tedium,

Personally, I don't think Goyer is the guy to deliver that. We should be happy he came up with the genetic dynasty, cast some great performers, and let that run -- it's the best stuff going dramatically speaking, even if it is about a flailing autocracy. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Asimov’s Galactic Empire, despite its flaws, is the greatest incubator of art and knowledge the universe has ever known. Goyer’s is just a brutal autocracy. Who cares if it is destroyed? Why would anyone want to make another one?

Indeed, it's quite telling that Asimov's end game is another Empire, not a galactic Republic.

Though the inconvenient truth is that empires, even autocratic and at times brutal ones, like the old Roman Empire, like other empires in China, Persia and other places, wasn't just a bad and evil thing but was also at times a key to a level of peace and prosperity for its inhabitants. At some levels, there are a few advantages to such empires compared to the alternatives at the time - moreso obvious when you consider what happened after they went down. The real issue isn't that they're wholly bad; the issue is: which other better political regime could be put into place that would keep or improve pre-existing advantages and possibly bring progress in other parts of life.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Finally brought myself to finish this show.

Man, this was bad. The Cleons' storylines were all right, with interesting twists and turns, but the Gaale and Hardin ones were tedious and empty. There are many moments that are visually stunning, but they really don't seem to be able to weave together a rivetting plot, so the moments lack any kind of depth or potency.
Nine episodes in, partner and I realized we still didn't have a clue what this was about. The characters just didn't seem very endearing, while the plot didn't offer any substance to compensate. "Loosely based" is as generous as I can get. Even the finale gives us very little. We somehow land more or less at what is an actual point of Asimov's story, but with the iconic moment (Seldon's hologram explaining the crises) turned ridiculous, because for some reason, the hologram is now self-aware and affects events directly.
To be fair, I've seen many shows worse than this, but none of them pretended to adapt one of the most celebrated works of science-fiction. It's as if the showrunner(s) had no idea what Asimov was writing, so they decided to try doing their own thing instead, only following the original story in a very broad sort of way. You get bits and pieces of the books, but the plot is in shambles. "Psychohistory" may have been kind of a deus ex machina in the books, but the entire point was that it worked, and that its predictions did allow things to be set in motion for the future. It wasn't so much about a a hologram telling people what to do, but rather about the hologram having predicted what they would do. There was no "special" individual that could single-handedly change everything by kicking the right ass. Some remarkable individuals perhaps, but using their brains, while the ability to break free from determinism would only appear after generations ; one has to wonder how two psychics ended up being front and center for the entire first season.
This inability to escape focusing on either a few super-important badass heroes or self-reflecting tyrants, is precisely what clashes with the themes and stories of the source material. Instead of a group of intelligent humans having to deal with the complexities of building a new society looking to the future, the show relies on a handful of hastily depicted conflicts centering on a very small numbers of special or important individuals. By avoiding any political meaning for the Foundation except it being opposed to the "bad" Empire (though it's not that clear what makes it inherently evil), the show doesn't allow us to actually root for it. It seems we're supposed to care for the Foundation because the main characters do (Hardin at least), rather than us rooting for the characters because the Foundation means something. Yes, the books had many flaws, but an empire of reason of science was always something nice to muse about. The show's Foundation otoh seems to rely on violence to sorts things out at the right moment, from Hardin's personal rifle (or bow) to the eventual capture of the super-ship Invictus. When a great quote from the books actually pops up, it ends underlining how the show seems to be doing its best to prove it wrong.
I disagree that Foundation is "impossible" to adapt. The point however, is kinda moot, because I don't think they tried. Instead of working with the books to figure out how to make them compeling on a screen, they wrote their own stories within the Foundation series - as a vague framework. And one way or the other, ended up in direct opposition to the source material. In the show, the Empire is bad because it can't care about individuals, and is led by a tyrant ; the Foundation is good because it has special individuals. No serious thought seems to be given to what makes one society better than the other. Supposedly some of the Empire's citizens can't see the stars, and are upset about it. Supposedly its peace is built on treacheries, lies, and terror, its wealth an illusion. And yet, one fails to see what the Foundation, which is just a bunch of scientists in prefabs on a barren world (starting to build super-weapons), has to offer exactly. No culture or vision of the future is to be seen. All its leaders fail as role models because of how self-centered they seem to be. It's so void of any substance that the Cleons' search for individuality or spirituality is more entertaining than what's supposed to become an alternative to their Empire.
The main problem of the show, imho, is that it seems unable to imagine a society that is neither a tyranny nor based on special individuals. It refuses to explore socio-economic structures, or at least their consequences, only touching on religion, with much precaution. To be fair, the books didn't explore anything in-depth either, but the themes are least were clear. The decadence of the Empire had deep roots, and the Foundation would use reason and science to avoid it.
An adaptation was always going to be difficult, not so much because of any technical challenge (at this point in time, you can represent anything), but because it would have to take a political stance. Should the Foundation promote environmentalism, democracy, transhumanism? What kind of balance would itr strike between individual liberty and collective cooperation? Asimov never made it clear (though I do like to think the very end of the series offers a pretty big clue), so an adaptation was free to choose. The showrunner(s) chose to to choose. So we're left with a story that tells no story, a plot with no meaning. It's not that it's boring, exactly. Simply that it doesn't say anything.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...
23 hours ago, Ran said:

BAFTA nominations out, and Foundation has one. Costume design? No. VFX? You'd think, but nope.

Instead, it's Best Supporting . . . Actress, for Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin.

:dunno:

That's very random. If you're going to go with an acting nod, then Lee Pace would be a better nod (he did chew up the scenery in some eps, but his walk through the desert was pretty good). I also thought Lou Llobell did a good job of elevating the poor material she was given, whilst Leah Harvey did not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/30/2022 at 11:22 PM, Ran said:

BAFTA nominations out, and Foundation has one. Costume design? No. VFX? You'd think, but nope.

Instead, it's Best Supporting . . . Actress, for Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin.

:dunno:

Really? Of all the cast members, this is who they nominate? Not Lee Pace, not Laura Birn, Terrance Mann . 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/31/2022 at 10:37 PM, Werthead said:

That's very random. If you're going to go with an acting nod, then Lee Pace would be a better nod (he did chew up the scenery in some eps, but his walk through the desert was pretty good). I also thought Lou Llobell did a good job of elevating the poor material she was given, whilst Leah Harvey did not.

How do you not chew scenery when you're playing Cleon(s)?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 months later...

Foundation has two Emmy nominations: Main Title Design and (deservedly, IMO) Special Visual Effects in a Season or Movie. The BAFTA snub has been righted, at least, the show's spectacular, visually-speaking. I do wish the production design had gotten a nod.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...
  • 4 months later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...