I’ve seen a few reports on the interwebs about a new film that’s been proposed. It’s a long overdue film, but that’s hardly the point. Like anything, if you want it to be successful, you need just the right ingredients. Could you imagine Jurassic Park directed by David Cronenberg? It’d be damned good, but not quite the family-friendly super-smash it is. Or could you imagine Batman Begins / The Dark Knight with Adam Sandler as Batman and Russell Brand as the Joker and directed by David Lynch? Ugh. Horrible.
The film that’s been announced is based on the book Foundation. Isaac Asimov began his series of books in the ’50s with the first three novels (Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), Second Foundation (1953)), then in the early ’80s wrote the first sequel (Foundation’s Edge (1982)) followed a few years later by a second and final part (Foundation and Earth (1986)). He then wrote two prequels (Prelude to Foundation (1988), Forward the Foundation (Posthumously in 1993)) to the original series making seven books in total. In addition there are also stories by other famous science fiction authors and have been authorised by Asimov’s estate after his death.
The whole saga is fairly intense and there’s way too much for me to summarise here, so I’ll stick to just the first book. Foundation takes place in far future of humanity which, according to Hari Seldon – an amazing mathematition – has stagnated for too long and is on the edge of collapse and about to enter another dark age. Lucky for us, Seldon is the founder of psychohistory – a kind of science for predicting the actions of the human race far in the future, and so long as a few rules can be kept the predictions are incredibly accurate. Of course, anybody with knowledge of any prediction has the chance to sufficiently change the outcome, so one of the rules of psychohistory is that nobody can know what the predictions are until it’s too late to change it.
According to Seldon, the best course of action is to make a ‘backup of sorts’ of all the civilisations history, art, technology, etc and wait out the following barbarism. These ‘foundations’ will reduce the time the barbarism lasts and we’ll be back up and running in no time. Well, no time being a good few thousand years earlier than otherwise! Thus the Seldon Plan was born.
Of course there are going to be a few hiccups along the way which Seldon had accounted for, these Seldon Crises are what make up a lot of the following books as humanity try to work through each one. Of course there’s a catch: anyone with knowledge of a Seldon Crisis before it’s upon them would/could do something drastic, changing the predicted cause of humaity, negating the rules of psychohistory rendering the Seldon Plan null and void in the process.
Seldon, obviously isn’t going to be around in thousands of years to come, and so he records himself giving instructions on each step of the Seldon Plan for future generations to watch when the time is right. It’s eerie how bang-on his predictions are – so much so that he convinces these future generations (who think it’s nothing more than a magic trick or ghost story) that he knows what he’s talking about.
What happens, however, when something comes along that is so unforseen that even Hari couldn’t predict? Well I’ll let you read it to find out. Damn good stuff mind.
Which brings me back to having the right man for the job. A story like this (and remember, this was just the first book I’ve described) with so many fans behind it, requires someone to treat it right. It’s not exactly an ‘action-packed, summer blockbuster’ although there’s action in it (it has been a while since I’ve read them, but I believe the stories following the first had more action in, but even then, not upto Rambo standards!).
Oh what’s that? It’s a ‘directing vehicle’ for Roland Emmerich? Gimme a break.
No disrespect to Mr. Emmerich, I’ve enjoyed his films but like Michael Bay, he’s forever tied to making big, explosive summer blockbusters. Independece Day, 10,000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow, yeah, they’re all successful films, they all fit the gap they were intended to fill. These wonderful books were never meant to fill a gap like that.
There are only a few Hollywood directors I’d like to see attempt these stories; Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Peter Jackson, Robert Zemeckis, Oliver Stone, even Steven Spielberg. Kubrick would have done a fantastic job, but that ain’t gonna happen! Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and I hope I have, but to me, Emmerich has a lot to prove on this film!
The botched job they made out of the last Asimov adaptation (I, Robot (dear Lord, what were you doing, Alex Proyas? Your films are normally so good!)), makes me hesitant. It’s obvious they’re looking for another hyper-successful series of films along the lines of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, as this article points out and yes, they have fantastic material.
They’re just lacking that other vital ingredient.
Dag's Paradigm 