I also evaluate film and TV adaptations as separate works. I do get really annoyed when it seems like a film tried to faithfully adapt a book and failed, or made artless changes due to studio notes et al. If the filmmaker is consciously and deliberately making an independent work or setting the book contra the film, then I’m okay. I’m really happy when a filmmaker makes the plot quite different in order to achieve the same aims of the book in a different medium because that takes so much skill and the results can be electrifying for fans of the book. Glazer’s Under the Skin is a recent example of this.
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I figured I’d enjoy Apple TV+’s Foundation just because it’s a big sci-fi production. What’s surprising is that my wife likes it, too. She’s not a sci-fi fan by any stretch, so I think the show’s worldbuilding and immersive sets have paid off.
I’m reading Foundation and Empire at the moment, having read _Foundation_a few years ago. I liked the first, but I am hating the second. It is all over the place. I doubt I will continue after I finish this book. By then, the final Expanse book will be out anyway!
(As others have hinted at—if you haven’t read the Expanse books, you really should. Every single novel is rich with detail without being tiresome. The plots are propulsive and you fall in love with the characters. I enjoyed the first season of the show and hope to go back and watch the rest at some point, if only to enjoy the characters and universe for a little longer!)
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Paul Verhoeven read Starship Troopers, hated it and thought of it as fascist propaganda.
Based on that he made the movie to make fun of the novel and turned it into a satire on fascism.
I loved it!
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Well that’s good to know! I could have used you 35 years ago!!! 
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We’re the same!!! It’s so hard to get her into sci-fi series. She enjoyed the political nature and the world-building aspect. Sci-fi bores her.
Planning to get into the book as well. I heard they’re only doing until Season 7 of the series.
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Re: the Expanse, I think that’s right. Still, if you love the books as much as I have, any more is a bonus!
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Looks like I’m in luck! There’s a hardbound 10th anniversary edition for the first book that was just released this month. Not a fan of paperback and small text.
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Really liked the 84’ film despite of it’s obvious flaws. Guess you can call it nostalgia.
The new one is pretty boring and has one of these awful Hans Zimmer soundtracks, that go VvRooooMMM DRRRrrrrrrr all the time.
It looks fantastic though!!! Worth the watch just for the spectacle alone especially in a nice cinema (that’s how I watched it).
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We’re veering off into politics, but let me just say that anyone who hates a book should never make a movie from it. By definition if you don’t like the book you wil miss the things that people love about it.
I also most vehemently disagree that Starship Troopers is fascist but that’s an argument for a different type of forum.
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Agreed 
Most people just don’t know the background of the film.
This has been a fun thread to read. And while the original post is nominally about the new Foundation series, it has turned into an analysis of adapting non-theatrical material into motion pictures, especially books. As an entertainment lawyer with 22 years in the movie business, I see the thorny issues involving reactions to adaptations arise quite regularly.
I have read books that I thought were ruined by the movies. I’ve watched moves that I thought were better than the book they were adapted from. I’ve read books that were wonderful, and then watched a motion picture adaptation that departed substantially from the book, but that I loved just as much as the book.
For anyone interested in learning more about the challenges of adapting novels to screenplays, you should read The Art of Adaptation. It was written in 1992, so the examples are dated but the process remains the same.
From the introduction, Seager points out something we’ve all observed just in this thread:
With that out of the way, my thoughts—and by thoughts, I mean completely unsolicited opinions—on the subjects covered thus far.
I loved the motion picture adaptation of Starship Troopers. I thought it was a well-crafted, popcorn, adventure/action flick. Yes, it departed greatly from the book.
Original Dune, I finally watched a few weeks ago because all things Dune keep showing up in my Youtube and other feeds. Probably because of the remake and maybe because Herbert drew some of the concepts for Dune from Asimov’s Foundation series, e.g., the galactic empire.)
I never read Dune, so I cannot comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation. Without any knowledge of the book to “poison the well,” I saw Dune on its own. While I am generally a David Lynch fan, I thought Dune was terrible, virtually unwatchable—but I powered through it. I understood why I never bothered watching it as a kid. Now, however, I really want to read the book to see if is actually good.
Foundation, the series, so far, I think it’s great. The opening credits are awesome, the visuals are stunning, and I’m enjoying the story as it unfolds.
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Probably, Verhoeven (not understanding the book) conflated militarism with nazzi fascism. Taking the film as a reflection of themes from the book, that was a substantial misunderstanding on his part or a very lazy way to depict militarism in a visual way. On the other hand, it may have just been an action movie looking to simplify a complex issue for its audience… or it may have been an intentional political commentary. (Which, you are right, can be discussed in a different type of forum.)
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I don’t think that the problem is making a movie from a book. A filmmaker could literally produce a frame-by-frame analog of the story. That doesn’t make for good filmmaking, of course.
In a sense, the power of a book, especially a book that one cherishes or can’t put out mind, is the reaction of one’s imaginative powers to the words on paper – creating internal images of characters and events that become an entirely personal memory. When we later see a movie that seems to somehow “violate” that memory created from reading the book, then it’s understandable that a negative reaction to the movie can result.
I recently read Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, which for me was hard to put down and hard to forget. Klara, the central character, is an AI, and much of the narrative concerns Klara’s growing understanding of the world around them. You have to imagine being Klara to imagine Klara understanding humans. The film rights have been sold (3000 Pictures). The film could tell the story literally, perhaps out of sequence to help with the dislocations in time and place in the book, adding some obvious effects – but it cannot enter Klara’s “mind” in the way the book causes the reader to understand the story.
On the other hand, Shipstead’s Great Circle is obviously written to be the source for the TV series that will be made based on it. Great Circle is light reading, and requires no mental leaps to grasp. It should translate well to a streaming series.
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Those books look great. You should just announce your reading list to MPU somehow so that I don’t have to think about what book I’m going to read next ever again!
For others’ convenience…
https://www.amazon.com/Klara-Sun-Kazuo-Ishiguro-ebook/dp/B08B7SKRWX/
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Circle-novel-Maggie-Shipstead-ebook/dp/B08H17FP36
tldr: I think we are in agreement.
Yes! My main point relates to what you wrote. We interact differently with books than we do with movies. Books communicate differently than movies (and other forms of media do). So, you are right, when the book’s interpreter (the screenwriters or director) capture details differently from how we perceived them when we read the book, we may have strong feelings.
My comment was not about the fact of this discrepancy but, rather, why it happens begin with. Adapting a something changes what is being communicated by and through the original something. So, it’s hard to avoid losing important thoughts, concepts, and details in the translation. And so, an adaptor always risks being on the wrong side of our strong feelings. Even the adaptor who cherishes the original work and devotes considerable attention to getting it right may still fall short. We, the readers, watching an adaptation are now observing another reader’s visual interpretation of what we both read and imagined. It’s especially difficult in film because film has a hard time dealing with various literary points of view. Narrative and omniscient, POVs, for example are tough. All those inner feelings and sentiments that the book author could describe for us have to manifest without words through an actor’s facial expressions, and body language. First person narratives are also difficult because heavy narration in a film is generally considered a failing—the medium should convey the message through visuals and dialogue, not offscreen narration.
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I leave that up to reading everything on the long list of the Booker Prize committee, and the New York Review’s excellent in-depth reviews.
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There’s an official Apple podcast about the Foundation series. I’m about halfway through the first episode and so far it’s pretty interesting.
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Yep. The podcast is pretty good.
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There’s also themes that are easy to explore in books but are a taboo in movies & television (including streaming).
When they adapted Let the Right One in by John Ajvide Lindqvist in Sweden and in Hollywood, they have to remove any storyline and theme on pedophilia as it would be difficult to translate to film. They also have to raise the ratings barring additional viewers from accessing the film.
Asimov liked to explore taboos and other psychological fears in his writing (for example, agoraphobia, fear of darkness, baldness in both genders, mustaches). But for the record, I’ve never run across pedophilia.
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