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Cracked Foundation
Jun. 13th, 2023 08:19 amWe watched four episodes of Foundation and I am done. (Dun dun dun!) I don't care about gender/race swapping - I actually thought it worked better with Gaal Dornick to emphasize her naivety and not fitting in. But it's clear that this adaptation has some names in common with the books and nothing else.
The books were a product of their time, as well as the author's viewpoint, in their emphasizing rationality and science over faith and superstition. They also had very little action, usually two or three people talking about what happened. So sure, changes and updates needed. But instead the series deliberately subverts the original - the TV Salvador Hardin says "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" - a core tenet of the character in the books - is "an old man's philosophy." The series goes totally woo-woo with visions, mind-links to dead characters, and seems to have ripped off large parts of Dune. It turns the Foundation settlers into a religious cult. (I think the conceit of the book would have worked better: that the Foundation thinks it is there solely to safeguard learning by producing an Encyclopedia Galactica. Up until the first Seldon Crisis when he disabuses them of that notion and they have to flail upon losing their core purpose.)
Also, a robot kills people. Who invented the Three Laws of Robotics? Oh, right, Isaac Asimov.
I don't get it. If you dislike the original material so much that you want to discard and disavow all of it, why adapt it in the first place?
The books were a product of their time, as well as the author's viewpoint, in their emphasizing rationality and science over faith and superstition. They also had very little action, usually two or three people talking about what happened. So sure, changes and updates needed. But instead the series deliberately subverts the original - the TV Salvador Hardin says "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" - a core tenet of the character in the books - is "an old man's philosophy." The series goes totally woo-woo with visions, mind-links to dead characters, and seems to have ripped off large parts of Dune. It turns the Foundation settlers into a religious cult. (I think the conceit of the book would have worked better: that the Foundation thinks it is there solely to safeguard learning by producing an Encyclopedia Galactica. Up until the first Seldon Crisis when he disabuses them of that notion and they have to flail upon losing their core purpose.)
Also, a robot kills people. Who invented the Three Laws of Robotics? Oh, right, Isaac Asimov.
I don't get it. If you dislike the original material so much that you want to discard and disavow all of it, why adapt it in the first place?
