Yes, that’s EXACTLY who I’d pick to direct…

Some books are just unfilmable – Atlas Shrugged comes instantly to mind. The original Foundation trilogy, Asimov’s masterpiece and indeed one of the masterpieces of “old school” science fiction, is another one. These are novels of pure ideas – the characters are interchangable and all of the action takes place offstage. Even Asimov himself could never really do the triology justice again; the sequels and prequels he wrote are all lousy and make the grievous error of conflating the Foundation with Asimov’s much lesser robot books. In principle a movie – or better yet, a television miniseries comprising all three books – could be cool, especially if the director made the artistic decision to go for a “retro 1950’s futuristic” look for the ships, clothes, and ray guns. In fact, though, it would just be a hollow shell like the beautiful-looking miniseries adaptation of Dune (another unfilmable book). I certainly hope the deal falls through and the studio lets the option lapse. It’s bad enough a movie of Watchmen was made without besmirching Asimov’s masterpiece as well.

I’m kind of looking forward to seeing Hari Seldon tool around in a powered exoskeleton.

Will Smith as Hari Seldon.

Seriously, they’ll just do what they did with “I Robot”–take the name and give Asimov the “Suggested by a book title by” credit. (Disclosure: haven’t seen “I Robot.”)

Sadly, Michael Bay couldn’t direct this since he is already busy adapting “War and Peace” to the screen.