Please kill me now.

My first foray into science fiction was at age 12, reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. In those days, it was still a trilogy.

I've always though that there were at least two SF classics that could never be made into a movie. One was Dune (and David Lynch and Dino De Laurentis proved me right), the other was Foundation. And now, Roland Emmerich is going to prove me right again.

For those who don't know Roland Emmerich, his name translates from the original German into Michael Bay. Every couple of years, he releases a turd in the punch bowl action flick with too damn much CGI, and with the stupidest plots and characters imaginable.

After directing such works of genius as Moon 44, and Universal Soldier (with Jean Claude Van Damme, who couldn't act his way out of a paperbag), and succeeding in turning Stargate into a dull work of sci-fi (and compared to the later TV series, it is dull), his first big success was with Independence Day. A film so bad that it had poor Jeff Goldblum taking down an enemy starship with a freaking Macbook, with Bill Pullman as a wholly unbelievable President, and Randy Quaid as the hero you really wanted to die from the moment he appeared on screen the first time.

It only got worse from there. The Patriot. A really god-awful Godzilla remake. producer of Eight Legged Freaks, The Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. One brain dead film after another, each stupider than the next.

And that next movie is apparently, you guessed it, Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

I'm not sure if Mr. Emmerich has ever read Foundation, but it's basically the anti-Independence Day. The only person we see actually die on screen happens in the first 75 pages of the novel. And that's a suicide. The novel, which is actually a collection of short stories written by Asimov in serial form, are all about plot, and story, and intrigue, and high-level science fiction with a political edge. In other words, it contains every element a Roland Emmerich film NEVER has, and the very things that Mr. Emmerich has never shown any inclination to take seriously in a film.

I'll say it right now. I'd have rather left Foundation as one of those novels that just never could be made into a movie, instead of leaving it to Roland Emmerich to prove it couldn't be made into a good movie.

(h/t Atrios).

What If? Star Wars Style...

As you can see from some of the links to the left, I'm a gamer. Unabashedly so.

I've run role-playing games for 30 years now, starting with the old 3 Little Black Book boxed version of Traveller and the original boxed sets of D&D & First Edition AD&D.

At this point, I run two RPG systems. Star Wars Saga Edition and d20 Modern and many of its variant flavors.

I'll talk about d20 Modern another time, but now's the time to geek out over my reimagining of the Star Wars saga. The setting is the same, the background cast of characters are the same, but everything is just slightly off. It begins one hot summer day on Tatooine, in the dusty town of Mos Espa. The Old Republic still exists. Palpatine is still just a Senator from Naboo, and Qui-Gon Jinn, along with Padme Amidala are gambling their future, indeed their lives, on a 9 year old blond slave boy who has the ability to race pods.

The race unfolds through the first lap and a half much as it does in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. On the second lap, in the film, you may recall, Anakin takes a near miss from a slugthrower rifle fired by a Tusken Raider.

In this campaign, however, the Tusken Raider doesn't miss. His bullet easily pierces Anakin's skull, disabling him, and causing the podracer to spin out of control in a disastrous crash. The combination of the bullet wound and the blunt force trauma from the crash kills Anakin Skywalker instantly.

And suddenly, the main protagonists of the six films are gone. No Luke, no Leia, no Anakin, no Darth Vader.

Superficially, the galaxy is the same. There is still a crisis on Naboo. Darth Maul is on Tatooine, hunting down the Naboo fugitives. Darth Sidious/Senator Palpatine is engaged in political maneuvering behind the scenes to arrange the fall of the Chancellor, Finis Valorum. Two Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn, the Naboo Queen (Padme Amidala), her retinue, R2D2, and a certain bumbling Gungan, having lost their bet, and their disabled ship, are now stuck on Tatooine...

And so begins the story of our heroes.

I'll post more of this as the story unfolds. Don't want to spoil it for my players, after all.