Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
What is the best Asimov adaptation, movie or TV?
Off the top of my head, I think it is Bicentennial Man. I know critical opinion runs from 'meh' to negative. But I enjoyed the movie and it felt like Asimov. |
IMO it's better than other Asimov books adapted to movies, but not as good as the rather crazy infeasible "Fantastic Voyage", which is often wrongly ascribed to Asimov, though he did write the novelization of the movie based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. The Bicentennial Man film is very like the 2nd period Asimov SF (after the detective and text books when the publisher persuaded him to do more SF again and he explicitly combined Calvin & Foundation series). The 'Caves of Steel' is Robots and a hint of Foundation universe (1953, near end of 1st SF period), but 'Robots of Dawn' is firmly 2nd period SF as it's 1983.
I found the story 'Bicentennial Man' a bit weak compared to older Asimov works (I don't know which version I read). I thought the film was more Asimov than the poor "I Robot" film, but also weak. I've not read the novel expanded from Bicentennial Man, 'The Positronic Man', co-written with Robert Silverberg.
But OTOH, I'm only a fan of older Asimov. I don't much like any of the stuff he did when he took up writing SF again in the 1970s.
'Bicentennial Man' is echoed a bit by one of the ST-TNG stories about Data.*
Edit:
IMO, Fantastic Voyage is "magic by another name".
*Neither of those is really like Pinocchio as that is a sort of parable. If you pay attention, the fairy that makes Pinocchio into a 'real' boy is the one that enchanted the wood in the first place. Data and the Positronic robot are both made by humans. Pinocchio was carved by a human, but was really created by a transcendental magical creature, even before the carving started.