Shocker! Roland Emmerich Will Film Asimov's Foundation Trilogy As 3D Mo-Cap Epic

This is a story with details so obvious and so easily expected that there is barely any reason to report them. Really, I'm just doing this to bum out the hardcore Isaac Asimov purists who are already despondent at the idea of Roland Emmerich getting his hands on the Foundation Trilogy. It's all in the headline, really: Emmerich's adaptation of Asimov's story won't just be predictably big and explode-y; it will be 3D and made with motion-capture goodness.

Speaking to MTV, Emmerich says:

Probably now all big movies have to be 3-D. It's not only the effect of 3-D, [Avatar has] just shown that if you do a movie in 3-D, you can ask for more money and that's the trick. I think now everybody who does bigger movies has to shoot them in 3-D. I think there's no way around it. I was on the set of 'Avatar' and I saw how it worked and I really thought, 'That's the ultimate way of making movies.'

None of which really tells us anything about what Emmerich actually plans to do. I'll say this: since I still consider 3D little more than a gimmick, Emmerich, who only seems to make gimmick pictures, could be just the guy to make a wildly entertaining, over the top 3D film. And he's already done so much with digital effects that he could also use mocap in an entertaining way. I just want him to do it with a property other than Foundation, capice?

The director says he gets the script for the first film (in a projected trilogy) tomorrow, so maybe we'll have more details soon. Or perhaps the script will somehow be sucked into a trans-dimensional wormhole just as it is being emailed by the writer, Robert Rodat, and we'll never see how this potential disasterpiece turns out.

(Rodat has done some good work and I'm actually curious to know how he tackles this. It's Emmerich in whom I have no faith. Or, more properly, in whom I have faith that he'll take the wrong approach.)

To refresh on Foundation in general, Asimov's Hugo-winning series is about "a mathematician named Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian who is able to predict large-scale events using scientific principles. When Seldon foresees the downfall of the Galactic Empire, which will precipitate a dark age lasting 30,000 years, he establishes two human oases ("Foundations") in an effort to preserve human knowledge."