I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
It seemed like fairly standard tv stuff to me. Personally, if I’m watching a show that is grounded in the mundane eg the first season of true detective or breaking bad, i expect the dialogue to be very good and for the plot to be subtle and engaging in a complex way, but if I’m watching a SF show like a grandiose space opera then I have very different expectations. I am okay with some goofy dialogue, a lot of monologuing, more simple plot structure (since the setting is often complex in SF shows so it’s often more of showing a familiar dynamic in a wildly unfamiliar context like star trek is all about), etc. All this ranting to say that since it’s a galactic scale space opera i want crazy visuals, cool SF concepts, and an imagining of human mores and taboos set in a far flung future, I am willing to tolerate a lot more floppy plot and character interaction. My problem with this show in particular is just that it is a teeeeeeerrrible “adaptation” of someone else’s work, but if they had just taken inspiration from Asimov and not used all the nouns and settings like they’re trying to cajole the plot into show form, I would have been pretty happy with it. There’s not a lot of original SF on TV and they clearly had enough ideas where they could have just walked their own path.
Do you like watching galactic empires progress/fall over time with timeskips and solid cgi? The show picks up as it goes because the characters don’t know anything yet. The theme changes as empire falls and the clones get further from the original. The 2nd foundation is a pretty nice aditition too. Demerezel being the last ancient robot forced to serve emprie but also kill them and replace them if they don’t act like empire is pretty fun. A lot of stiff isn’t revealed early on tho.
And the cgi is so solid, could never be less than a 6/10 for me because of that.
It has all the good things for a space opera show, it’s really refreshing outside of the Asimov context. I will quibble about the adaptation aspect but I definitely recommend the show to anyone looking for a good watch