It took fifty years for an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, a colossal literary success born in 1965, finally finds favor in the eyes of fans of the planet of sand. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt never saw the light of day, David Lynch’s was
disowned by the filmmaker, John Harrison’s TV dramas 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 +, features 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 that I have never read ”- depicts a post-apocalyptic world, in which a mysterious evil has wiped out all mammals carrying a Y chromosome, except for a cisgender, ie non-transgender man, 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 gender over the past twenty years,” observes Eliza Clark in an interview with Thrillist.
There where Y, the last man shines in terms of adaptation is that the series is not afraid to deviate and modernize the original story. “One of the things that interested me the most was to take all the things that I liked in this comic and to update them”, confirms the showrunneuse 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, ”says Diana Bang, who plays this Harvard geneticist, at 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?’ “, highlighted 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 trilogy Blade, The dark knight, Man of steel or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, did not ultimately produce the cinema adaptation of Y, the last man, he tackled as a producer and creator another monument of science fiction, the cycle Foundation of Isaac Asimov.
Before him, had tried it New Line and Warner Bros with Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, Head of Special Effects for Lord of the Rings, or Sony with the director ofIndependence Day, Roland Emmerich. Same berezina for HBO, in 2016, with Jonathan Nolan (among others co-writer ofInterstellar) who abandoned the project in favor of Westworld.
Foundation, it is a series of short stories published between 1942 and 1944 in the review 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 The story of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, as well as Arnold Toynbee’s theories of the cycles of history, this legendary and fascinating seven-volume cycle has also had ascendancy over the prescient Dune, the Empire of Star warsthat on
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 some kind of Game Of Thrones in space with a rich galactic empire of 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; these are books on ideas, on concepts, ”says the creator of the series. Foundation. Foundation, this 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 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, played by Métis actress Lou Llobell, just like Salvor Hardin, the Foundation’s first mayor, played by black British actress Leah Harvey. Like the series Watchmen by Damon Lindelof, Foundation doesn’t really stick to the letter of the books, and that’s a very good thing!