Today is Apple’s big World Wide Developer’s Conference, and the company took the opportunity to provide a first look at its upcoming adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic novel Foundation, teasing an epic space opera with some incredible-looking visuals.
The trailer gives us an idea of what the highly-anticipated series will look like. David Goyer provides a brief preamble to the teaser, in which he explains that Foundation was a huge influence on Star Wars, and that people have been working for ages to try and adapted.
The series stars Lee Pace (Halt and Catch Fire) as Brother Day, the emperor of the Galaxy and Jared Harris (Chernobyl) as Hari Seldon, a mathematician who has predicted the downfall of the galactic empire, and moves to create a compendium of all knowledge called the Encyclopedia Galactica as a way to shorten the impending dark ages.
In the teaser, Seldon tells his companion, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), a fellow mathematician, that he’s about to be arrested for his mathematical theory psychohistory, noting that people believe that he can predict the future with it. There are some stunning visuals here as well: spaceships flying through outer space, space elevators, and some beautiful planetary scenery. The series also stars Leah Harvey, Laura Birn, Terrence Mann, and Casian Bilton.
There have been many attempts over the years to adapt Foundation in some form: the BBC produced a radio drama of the series in the 1970s, but a film adaptation has been more elusive. Stargate director Roland Emmerich was tapped to direct a film in 2009, while HBO brought on Jonathan Nolan (who wrote Interstellar and co-created Westworld) to produce a TV series in 2014.
The project then jumped over to Apple in 2018 when the company announced that it was getting into the streaming video market, with Goyer and Josh Friedman set to develop the project. In August, it gave the project a direct-to-series order, and it’s since been in production.
That original content is designed to entice new users into signing up for the service, or to buy new Apple devices (in which case, it comes free for a year). Foundation is the latest high-profile project from the company to join the service.
The show joins a growing lineup of other projects from the tech company, which launched Apple TV + last winter with a small slate of original programming, including an alternate history space series called For All Mankind from Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, post-apocalyptic series See, and others. It’s slowly been rolling out other projects, like a reboot of the anthology series Amazing Stories, Defending Jacob and Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.
Apple didn’t provide an exact release date for when the series would debut on the service, only that it’ll arrive sometime in 2021.
Well. Didn’t recognize most of the scenes, but I suppose this is an adaptation, after all! I’m intrigued to see where they go with this. Wondering how much it will capture the tone/feel of Asimov (right now, doesn’t seem to but…again – adaptation). This seems to be a mix of Forward the Foundation and possibly Foundation itself…and then a lot of new material, I’m presuming.
I am curious and nervous.
Looks ambitious as it should be. Please don’t screw it up!
What’s theie budget tor these shows. See was movie quality like a big big big movie. If apple keeps it up it will do better than HBO and amazon.
What the HELL is this GARBAGE??
There was more action in that trailer than the entire Foundation saga.
Each of the first three Foundation books is about 200 pages long and made up of short stories, so a faithful adaptation of the books would be extremely short and have a very small cast (and virtually no female characters at all), so yes, there’s going to be a lot of invention here.
The cast looks great – Lee Pace and Jared Harris can do no wrong at the moment but I suspect the gender-flipping of R. Daneel is going to annoy some purists (given Daneel’s nature, I don’t see it as a major problem) – and it looks like they are dramatically expanding the scope of the story.
One interesting problem is that this is going to be coming out very soon after Dune, and Dune is very much a remix of Foundation with almost the same plot (someone comes up with a plan to save humanity, whose utter annihilation they have foreseen, but faces resistance from the less-enlightened) but dramatically better execution.
I was excited when I first heard that Apple had taken on this project. This teaser hasn’t done anything to abate my excitement. The Apple TV+ content I’ve seen so far has been quite compelling. I don’t know if they have a process to ensure consistency, but I’m definitely hopeful…
@7: I’d love it if someone here did a For All Mankind rewatch series. (No, I am not volunteering.)
@6/Werthead: thanks for mentioning that the Daneel storyline will be part of the show: I was wondering but it’s been over two decades since I read the prequels so I would not have recognized Daneel’s pseudonym in the IMDb character list without the prompt.
As to the trailer: looks very pretty (expensive) but the imagery is also rather generic, no? The thematics (Hari Seldon is Greta Thunberg?) are potentially intriguing but a trailer won’t tell you anything about whether the theme will be gracefully handled in the show itself. @7/Daveed’s formulation is probably right: if you’re already eager this trailer won’t knock you off that course, but I’d be surprised to see it do much to sell those who are dubious.
…Though I suppose the real test is how it does with generating curiosity among folks who haven’t read any of the books.
The Hell it was.
The idea that Foundation is in anyway still worthy of being considered the greatest sci-fi anything is laughable. There’ve been better written and more thought provoking books since and the fact none of them are getting adapted instead of a boring story written by a serial harasser is the dumbest thing ever.
Well it looks cool so far, and I find it very appropriate that the visual (and thruster-sound) aesthetic seems much like a cleaned-up version of Star Wars. And a couple nods towards Dune, too.
As for being an adaptation, I certainly hope it tries to keep the major storylines without trying to be slavish to the details, as when I re-read the books recently I found that they have not aged particularly well. The casting of who I presume to be Gaal Dornick seems like a good start towards evening out the, er, imbalances in the original text.
I’ve never been able to get into the Foundation series myself. I remember The Mule and finding Daneel on Gaia but that’s about all.
I loved that Elijah has become this mythic founder character that nobody really believes is historical, and that Daneel still remembered him fondly.
@5: …and then some!
Werthead @@@@@ 6:
Dune is very much a remix of Foundation with almost the same plot (someone comes up with a plan to save humanity, whose utter annihilation they have foreseen, but faces resistance from the less-enlightened)
OK, I’m going to have to say no, Dune is not “the same plot” at all. They share the idea of a “galactic empire” (although the empire in Foundation encompasses the entire galaxy, while the empire in Dune seems rather smaller) headed by an “Emperor”, but that’s about it. (If you want to talk “plots”, then Foundation is “Fall of the Roman Empire” and Dune is “Arab Islamic conquest of the Persian Empire”. Very, very loosely.)
@10: Well Coruscant is Trantor, but other than that, not much (the Kessel spice run makes Star Wars “Dune”, right?).
I will not pile on on how Dune and Star Wars are NOT based or evolved from Foundation (I gave a talk once on the topic of what a radical change Foundation was in the history of science fiction in that the heroes figured out that you didn’t beat the enemy by having bigger spaceships or more powerful lasers but by being smarter than them!). I will also not comment on whether it’s Hugo as Best Science Fiction Series of All Time should be revoked based on better books being published more recently as that is very much a matter of personal taste.
Full disclosure: I started reading Foundation in the 60’s long before Asimov’s retcon that put R. Daneel Oliver into the plotline (aside: Asimov’s late attempts to tie together the previously unconnected universes was far more successful than Heinlein’s) and leaving him out of the story would have been fine by me.
Question: who in the name of Klonos is “Brother Day” and how did he get into the Imperial Dynasty?
PS I know he cannot be cast for a number of reasons but when I was younger I always pictured the Mule as Woody Allen…
Lot of action. I remember the Foundation books as being very talky which lends itself to boring visuals. Tried rereading Foundation a few years back. Dates poorly. And full of a lot of clunky dialogue. Dialogue not being Asimov’s strong suit. I have much more hope for Dune.
Uh, Neither of the characters later revealed to be Daneel are in this trailer. May be in the background of one scene. Neither of them are Gaal Dornick. I may have missed them and I will watch it again. Gaal has been gender flipped and that is fine, but that isn’t Daneel.
I checked IMDB and looks like I am wrong. Still fine.
@19 Bill,
I noticed that too. Gaal is a gal. (Asimov was a sucker for puns, he would likely have approved)
I’m more concerned that Salvor Hardin appears to be with Seldon on Trantor, when the whole point of the character was figuring out how to respond to the first Seldon crises without direct knowledge of the Plan.
@22
Don’t tell the writers and producers about this in person. As Salvor Hardin would say “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”
I find the idea of gender-flipping Daneel interesting, since Daneel is about as gendered as a toaster. ;-)
@23: One of the things I liked best about Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis (a reimagined sequel to the Foundation stories, with the serial numbers filed off and the ink just dried on fake ownership papers) is that he changed that to ‘Violence is the last refuge of the competent‘ – because they’ve tried everything else first.
@17 I suspect Day, Dawn and Dusk are inspired from Seldon’s stay in Mycogen in Prelude to Foundation.
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I first read the Foundation trilogy with a few friends in college nearly 20 years ago and we were immediately hooked by the story that employed the idea of hero and his sidekicks on a quest in such a unique way. The Greater Foundation remains one of the best extended universe works of fiction that I have read so far.
It will be interesting to see what interpretation Goyer has on this seminal story, especially with veterans like Harris and Pace added to the mix.
PS: On a related note, while I encourage people to read Asimov’s novels and especially his short stories it is also important to note that Asimov has a disturbing legacy when it comes to women
@16 Even Coruscant didn’t show up until a Timothy Zahn book in 1991.
@27: D’oh!
@wiredog
Olivaw’s gender is a plot point in “The Robots of Dawn” (well, that of his predecessor/body-double, anyway).
Looks interesting enough, even if not really all that faithful to the source material. That bit about how awesome Apple is was really, really cringey and unnecessary. I get it, a lot of people LOVE their iPhones and their Macs, but man, it’s a company with an awful corporate culture and questionable business practices all over the world, and only interested in making money, why even try to make them seem like some sort of selfless organization working for the betterment of mankind? It legit made me chuckle.