While
Denis Villeneuve's
Dune
is acclaimed in theaters, two platforms are attacking two other science fiction sagas deemed untransposable to the screen.
Y, the last man
, launched this Wednesday on Disney +, is inspired by the famous series of graphic novels by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra.
Foundation
, launched this Friday on Apple TV +, stages the monumental cycle of Isaac Asimov.
It took fifty years for an adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel,
Dune
, a colossal literary success born in 1965, to finally find favor in the eyes of fans of the sand planet. Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempt never saw the light of day, David Lynch's was denied by the filmmaker, John Harrison's TV films were deemed faithful, but not spectacular enough. While Denis Villeneuve's Dune is acclaimed in theaters, two platforms attack two other science fiction sagas a priori impossible to transpose to the screen.
Y, the last man
, revealed Wednesday on Disney + is inspired by the famous series of graphic novels by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra, while
Foundation
, launched this Friday on Apple TV +, stages the monumental cycle of Isaac Asimov .
So, how do you adapt two works deemed unsuitable, without alienating the fans while managing to seduce a new audience?
Many aficionados believed that the adaptation of
Y, The Last Man
would never see the light of day.
The film project, in 2007, produced by David S. Goyer, never came to fruition.
As a pilot in 2015 for FX, development of the series dragged on for many years due to artistic disputes until showrunner Eliza Clark took the reins.
How did “Y, the last man” modernize?
The comic book series - 60 issues published from 2003 to 2008, hailed by Stephen King as "the best graphic novel I have ever read" - depicts a post-apocalyptic world, in which a mysterious evil has decimated all mammals carrying a Y chromosome, with the exception of a cisgender, i.e. non-transgender, male named Yorick Brown, and his tame monkey, Ampersand.
In a post-9/11 world, the idea of a comic book about a radical end to patriarchy was avant-garde.
“So much has changed in the conversation we have about the genre over the past twenty years,” says Eliza Clark in an interview with
Thrillist
.
Where
Y the Last Man
shines in terms of adaptation is that the series isn't afraid to deviate and modernize the original story.
"One of the things that interested me the most was taking all the things I liked about this comic and updating them," confirms the showrunner in the columns of Den of Geek.
The series therefore endeavors not to have "an essentialist vision of the genre" and tries to show that "Yorick is not the last man", explains Eliza Clark in
The Verge
.
The series is more inclusive than the comics, which very briefly addressed the issue of transidentity. In one of the sequences, Dr. Allison Mann explains to Yorick “that his only interest is not to bring back the cisgender men. It is about bringing back all the diversity in the world. This includes transgender women, non-binary people and intersex people, ”Diana Bang, who plays this Harvard geneticist, tells
Den of Geek
.
The series also introduces new characters, like Sam Jordan (Elliot Fletcher), a transgender man, friend of Hero (Olivia Thirlby), sister of Yorick. “Yorick can walk around without a mask because we assume he's trans, whereas before the virus, we assume people are cisgender,” says Elliot Fletcher. An interesting reversal of the reality of trans people that "asks the question, 'What makes a man? What makes a woman?' Says Eliza Clark.
Alongside Yorick, who tries to understand the origin of the disappearance of men, many female characters discover power: his mother, Jennyfer (Diane Lane), senator who became president of the United States after the deaths of the entire chain of estate, an underground secret agent, 355, (Ashley Romans), Kimberly Campbell Cunningham (Amber Tamblyn), a conservative author, daughter of the late President of the United States.
“What was exciting about the book was the idea that a world that was mostly filled with women isn't necessarily heaven.
Women support oppressive systems like patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism, ”says Eliza Clark.
Y, the last man
, despite some weaknesses in the rhythm, becomes in a way an updated version of graphic novels, fully justifying its existence.
How to humanize and simplify the “Foundation” monument?
If David S. Goyer, to whom we owe the
Blade
trilogy
,
The Dark Knight
,
Man of Steel
or
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
, did not ultimately produce the film adaptation of
Y, the last man
, he tackled as a producer and creator at another monument of science fiction, the
Foundation
cycle
of Isaac Asimov.
Before him, New Line and Warner Bros had tried it with Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, in charge of special effects for The
Lord of the Rings,
or Sony with the director of
Independence Day
, Roland Emmerich.
Same berezina for HBO, in 2016, with Jonathan Nolan (among others co-writer of
Interstellar
) who abandoned the project in favor of
Westworld
.
Foundation
is a series of short stories published between 1942 and 1944 in the journal
Astounding Science-Fiction
, which became a trilogy in the 1950s, to which Isaac Asimov added two prequels and two sequels in the 1980s and 1993.
Inspired
by Edward Gibbon's
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, as well as Arnold Toynbee's theories of the cycles of history, this legendary and fascinating seven-volume cycle has as well had ascendancy over the prescient of
Dune
, the
Star Wars
Empire
than over Osama Bin Laden, since the title translates into Arabic as Al-Qaida. The fact that source material with such an aura has never been adapted in seventy years proves how difficult the task was.
Foundation
begins in the year 12067 of the Galactic Age.
While the Empire has never been so powerful or so extensive across the galaxy, using a new science, "psychohistory," mathematician Hari Seldon predicts its collapse within five centuries, followed by a thirty thousand years of darkness.
His solution to reduce this period of barbarism to 1,000 years?
Create the Foundation, depository of all the knowledge of the galaxy in an Encyclopedia on the planet Terminus, which will serve as the cradle from which the new Empire will be born.
A company with many powerful detractors.
A daring and risky bet that David S. Goyer managed to pitch in one sentence in order to convince Apple to produce the project: “It's a 1,000-year-old chess game between Hari Seldon and the Empire, and all the characters in between are pawns, but some of the pawns during this saga end up becoming kings and queens, ”he tells
The Hollywood Reporter
.
David S. Goyer identified three major problems in bringing Asimov's Bible to the screen. First of all, “the story is supposed to span 1,000 years with considerable time jumps,” he lists. Imagine a sort of
Game of Thrones
in space with a galactic empire rich in about 25 million planets on a gargantuan timeline! Then, “the books are a kind of anthology. "
While what viewers expect from a series are recurring and endearing characters,
Foundation
is a series of interconnected stories with a multitude of characters appearing, and disappearing as they came.
Finally, the books “are not particularly moving;
they are books on ideas, on concepts, ”says the creator of the
Foundation
series
.
Foundation
is the pinnacle of hard science fiction.
“Without saying too much, I found a way to extend the lifespan of some characters.
About six protagonists live from season to season, from century to century.
In this way, the series becomes half-anthological, half-continuous story ”, continues the showrunner.
Another big important change: the diversification of the characters, as in
Y, the last man
.
"There are hardly any female characters in the first book," recalls David S. Goyer.
Gaal Dornick, young mathematician prodigy in the book, crucial for the development of the rescue plan of Hari Seldon (Jared Harris of
Chernobyl
), becomes a female character, camped by the Métis actress Lou Llobell, just like Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of the Foundation, played by black British actress Leah Harvey.
Like
Damon Lindelof's
Watchmen
series
,
Foundation
doesn't really stick to the letter of the books, and that's a very good thing!
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