Oh, Roland Emmerich.
It seems the guy who thinks that a movie is merely the sum of it's bad CG'd destruction of major metropolitan areas and that characters need only be cardboard cutouts wants to return to an old success and then ruin a beloved science fiction classic.
Emmerich says he's keen on putting together an Independence Day sequel, that partner Dean Devlin is on board as well as Will Smith. I'll admit that when the movie first came out I was among the millions wowed by the site of massive alien spaceships making pulp out of every metropolis in America. But that was about it. There really is no rewatch value, none of the characters are memorable beyond a few pithy one liners and the dialogue was nothing
but a mishmash of cliched patriotic speeches and poorly written set-up for events to happen in another act down the road.
Besides, H.G. Wells didn't write a sequel to War of the Worlds. What will Emmerich and Devlin crib from this time?
But, alas, financing his the big hold-up, so until then, Emmerich intends to bide his time shitting on Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series. Yep, the grand-daddy of all science fiction epics (with apologies to Dune) that told the story of a small community of scientist and philosophers trying to maintain some semblance of civilization as everything goes to hell around them over the course of one thousand years will now surely be turned into a third rate space flick with all kinds of explosions and action and other things that weren't really hallmarks of the source material.
Here, Emmerich explains some intended changes...
"There's not one character going through, so Bob Rodat came to me and said, 'I'm like a fanatic reader of ... Foundation,' and I ... talked with him. ... He said, 'We have to consolidate the characters.' And that's what we did, and that's what's worked really, really well in the context. And I think that if Asimov ... would have ... conceived this as a science fiction trilogy or series from the very beginning, he would have done that, too. But he didn't. ... I think in spirit [the movie is] totally Foundation, but it has consolidated characters which go through the three movies."
It's good to see that a guy who seems to have no understanding of how to put a movie together that doesn't involve absurdly unrealistic shit happening at all times, all "explained" with a poor understanding of how science actually works, can actually muster the balls to second guess a writer who's work, though science fiction, was none the less grounded in actual science.
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