Foundation wouldn't be the first work that was considered "pulp", or penny's literature at their time and later be re-evaluated as a classic. The same happened with Tolkien. Even Shakespeare was considered the equivalent of "pop culture" at his time.
I never really liked the idea of psycho history as it seemed to techno-bablish and anti-free will.
I took it more as an investigation of how people react to the idea that there exist such a thing as an inescapable destiny (in this case, the Seldon plan). People like Pirenne believed that The Plan attended to destiny all by itself. People like Hardin, by contrast, believed that individual action was required. People like Riose failed because the Foundation believed it was invincible due to The Plan. People like the Mule succeeded because the Foundation thought they were no longer protected by The Plan. I see it as a quite powerful allegory what the belief, or lack thereof, in an inevitable destiny can mean for peoples actions.
The most remarkable thing about The Plan is that everyone believed in it, but no-one ever knew how it worked or even saw it. I never saw any evidence in the story that psycho-history actually worked without people believing that it worked. On the contrary, Seldon own accomplishment contradicts the principles of psycho-history: According to these principles, one individual shouldn't be capable of shortening the dark ages from thirty thousand to one thousand years. Seldon also shouldn't be capable of predicting the actions of individual people - and yet, in the case of Chen, he did just that. And the success of the The Plan shouldn't depend on actions by people like Hardin or Mallow - and yet, it did. As I see it, it's not about The Plan being an inevitable destiny, but about how people react to the idea.
As for the topic, I can't help having a bad feeling about this endeavor of bringing Foundation to the screen. It doesn't help that people responsible for "I Robot" are involved in ti.
