It's world-building without the world having already been built in countless other movies, TV series and comic novels. Watch and you have the feeling that you are at the outset of a momentous journey. ... Spectacular.

Yes, it can be self-indulgent, meandering and more complicated than need be. But that feels somewhat inevitable, given the scope of the task at hand. That “Foundation” is otherwise nimble and engaging, even for those unfamiliar with the work that first inspired it, is down to its willingness to buck the Cleons’ line of wisdom and change with the times.

For the uninitiated, early episodes of Foundation can be a chore to get through, let alone understand. (Be prepared to replay scenes in order to catch snatches of rushed, whispery or conceptually opaque dialogue.) Which is a particular shame considering how beautiful every single frame looks. ... The storytelling improves markedly beginning in the fourth episode. ... We shouldn’t have to sit through hours of TV that makes our heads spin to get to stuff like this, that entertains and challenges us. But in this case, the patience does pay off.

The results stride with a sense of purpose, pomp, and grandeur; individual scenes are small enough to cut through the excess, but the excess is nearly stupefying.

Despite a deep bench of acting talent (including Lee Pace, who heads up the trio of clone brother emperors) the writing itself lets them down time and again. Not one line of dialogue grabbed my ear as clever or memorable. Very few distinct personalities pop out.

The individual parts of this Foundation equation add up to something that’s very pretty and slightly dull. Asimov’s books have long been considered impossible to adapt. This version is a noble effort that can’t quite solve the problem.

That nagging sense that the whole thing isn’t quite working builds to a more overarching complaint: it may be unfair to judge Foundation on its first couple of hours but at the moment it lacks a throughline.

This series is a must-have for anyone claiming to be a science fiction fan. Isac Asimov is one of the fathers of sci-fi. Apple went all out in everything. Don't mind the negative reviews, it's haters. It is one of the most extraordinary and difficult adaptations ever made. It is a long story, centuries old, with several characters, without focus on any one of them. The series covers several interesting points, such as artificial intelligence, future of humanity, forecasting the future, possibilities, revolutions, evolution and problem solving, and geopolitics.

So close to good but fails with some people acting completely out of character from one scene to the next. Did the writers proof read ? The parts with the emperor's are generally well done. The sets and effects are good.

You really have to want to watch this series, as it's really quite boring, and the majority of the acting is very poor. The visuals are nice, and the storyline is quite good - although it would have been better as three episodes at most! Some of the a actors are so poor that I kept stopping and watching something else. I only came back to it as I liked the books when I read them as a teenager. I'd definitely not bother watching it again!

I'm personally finding that there seems to be some miscommunication or something off going on behind the scenes.Story plots are being opened left, right and center without ever really FULLY being closed. The editing feels really off as well which could potentially be due to direction. For example there is a scene where a piece of rubble falls on one of the actors and she yelps in pain as one of the ruling class walks off screen, that scene is immediately followed up by shots of the exterior with no further emphasis of why that was important until much later. This is a common issue with the series so far... it tries to, at length, spend all this time building up these characters by showing you a lot of the things they will be doing but they don't do any actual character building for any of those characters until you're 5 episodes/hours in and have just accepted that the show has decided to skip over and not finish the background for a character that it initially started. This is also a problem with all of the twists and turns of the plot, it doesn't go anywhere quickly and once it arrives at the conclusion it was trying to make it's usually incomplete and non-conclusive until many episodes/hours later to the extent that you've pretty much given up on any answers since the ones you do get... aren't worth waiting for and then you have to wait even longer for the full answer. It's frustrating to watch and now you have to wait EVEN LONGER because they decide to leave things on a cliffhanger at the end of the episodes and it doesn't pick up where it started. Set design, art direction, costume design, vfx, makeup(sfx), etc. are all great but between the direction, editing, and everything else... it's a big let down. Also, without subtitles, added voice effects, multiple accents that add sounds to words that don't actually exist and the plethera of fictional words and places... it's almost impossible to understand what the actors are saying most of the time and it's clear the director did not ask them to enunciate. Despite all of that, I keep watching hoping there will be satisfactory answers to the various plots they have seemed to of abandoned; hopefully Season 2 is put together nicer because I feel like this should be an anthology instead of jumping back and forth between times, places, characters, plots, etc.

The Politically Correct Empire is dominating the galaxy. They couldn't even keep the main characters close to the source material. Luckily we are one light click away from watching something else.