Anyone with a yen for science fiction has passed through the doors of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy. Rich with intrigue, massive in scope, rife with socio-political ideas. It is one of those trilogies, like the more sophisticated Dune series, that gets a young sci-fi reader’s mind racing.
One of the beauties of Foundation is that, while a huge spacefaring adventure, it relies on a form of suspense that occurs in generational time rather than in days, weeks, or months. Despite the fact that there are innumerable spaceships and space skirmishes, these episodes are secondary to the psycho-historical intrigue. Asimov wrote an adventure tale for anthropology and sociology geeks, not for the Star Wars crowd.
Well, we all knew it was only a matter of time before Hollywood would piss on another sci-fi classic. Little did we know that one of Hollywood’s heaviest-hitting clods would be responsible for directing it.
Roland Emmerich. You know the name. You love him or you hate him. I fall somewhere in between. I love his eye for grossly over-the-top cinematic destruction. Nobody destroys a city like he does. However, the man has no skills for subtlety or character and is perennially disdainful of plot.
It’s like a great big joke. Hey, let’s find the director who is least suited for the Foundation films, someone with no patience for good dialogue, an anti-intellectual, the sort of person Asimov would have scorned, or dismissed as an unimportant hack.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Emmerich when he plays in his well-defined sandbox — like Michael Bay, he is capable of doing just one or two things very well. Those two things do not include epic science fiction.
What’s worse is that Emmerich, a fan and friend of Jim Cameron, plans to use Avatar‘s 3D technology to tell a story that doesn’t really require the heavy visual onslaught Avatar proudly embodies.
But, hey, retarded 13-year-old consumers will love it.