On Apr 5, 4:27 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Andre Lieven wrote:
NASA no emotion crew images.

Further, it told an SF story in a visual medium where the humans do
not succeed in interacting or understanding the aliens and their
civilisation and motives. Its far too conventional a trope of much visual
SF that the humans and aliens will be able to interact, communicate,
and deal with each other on comparable planes.

Remember how well humanity interacted with the Martians in Pal's "War Of
The Worlds"?

Yep. g

We held up a white flag; they burned us down to ash with a heat ray.
Then they started taking out everything with their meson charge nullifier.
They had no more concern about us understanding them, or them
understanding us, than a person trying to figure out what the ants in
their yard were thinking when the insecticide hit.

I have to disagree, because we understood the power of their
technology,
and, when we finally saw them dying at the end of the movie, we also
understood their situation and what was doing them in.

The aliens in 2001, we got nothing. I wonder if that non depiction in
2001 inspired Carl Sagan, both in his Cosmos sensawunda and in
not showing the aliens in Contact - we only saw one human form
manifestation of them.

Even in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" our relationship with a alien
race consisted of: "Take our advice, or this solar system is going to
have a asteroid belt between Venus and Mars as well as one between Mars
and Jupiter. We can do that; it'd cost a lot to do, but believe me, we
can do that. We did it before regarding the planet that used to be
outboard of us; we can do it again regarding the one inboard of us."
They should have put that in the movie, that would have really shaken
people up. :-D

How many movie watchers back then do you suppose knew that our
system had an asteroid belt ? g

If for nothing else, 2001 is a valuable addition to the visual SF
patheon for that very reason. The rest is all gravy, albeit very nice
gravy.

Boring.

Majestic.

"Silent Running" had a better story, better visual effects, and came in
at around 1/10th the cost.

Once again, the story in SR was fairly pedestrian, being about only
the
humans. It was a good story, but, it wasn't hitting the Big Question:
If theres anyone out there, what are they like ? Can we understand
them ?

"Forbidden Planet" beat either of those movies for outright imagination,
and a intriguing storyline.

Oh, I grant that, though they did rip off Baco... Shakespeare...

"2001's" ending was very cryptic in its meaning (at best).

Indeed: That was the point.

"Forbidden Planet" was a examination of Lord Acton's concept of "power
corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely" driven forward as not
only as a challenge to Prof. Morbius...but to all humanity, by realizing
what had happened to the Krell's civilization.

Sure. When I speak positively about 2001, don't take that to mean that
I'm dissing any other films; Its just that the other films didn't take
on
the key theme of 2001.

That's a pretty deep concept when you come right down to it.
Is the end of technology to be gods of gold with feet of clay?
"Silent Running" had the profound concept of "don't give a tree-hugging
loon access to nuclear detonators, or all hell is going to break loose".
Rush Limbaugh has been warning us about this for over a decade.

Well, a side lesson there would be, don't give your prophets
unlimited
prescription drugs...

Both concepts sure beat the hell out of split-screen filming technology
with reversed colors over Alaskan ice fields, a old fart dropping his
wine glass, and a fetus hanging around in HEO.

Oh, I grant that I would love a remastered SPFX sequence there. But,
given what audiences had seen up to 1968, it was kewl.

Good News - there are other forms of life than us in the universe, far
more advanced than we are, that wish to bring us their knowledge.
Bad news - that knowledge consists of the concept: "Acid is groovy man!

Or, much of what you will see will simply not be understandable in any
form to us 2001 era humans. We often saw the flip side of that point
in TOS, when aliens would take human form to interact with us puny
humans. But, thats because they saw us as being worth talking with,
that 2001's point is that thats not a given.

Dig this endsville star-trip we are laying on your heads. Fetus _FLYING
AROUND_ your planet! Can you dig it, man? Can you REALLY dig it? It's a
pure Zen super-mellow brain-change."
Babylon 5 addressed the problem far better in regards to the Vorlons and
humanity.

Well, we also never saw the Vorlon homeworld.

The Vorlons are trying to tell us something, and their way of thinking
and communicating and our way of thinking and communicating are so
completely different that both sides are very confused about what one
is trying to tell the other.

But, once again, they're an enigmatic alien race that sees humans as
being
worth talking with. The point in 2001 is that those aliens *don't*
share that
viewpoint.

To us, their statements seem cryptic and evasive; to them, our
statements probably sound about as comprehensible as gibbering baboons.
Imagine if we could actually crack the complete dolphin language, and
ended up with a whole pile of info on water depths, size of squid
schools, and how thermal layers in the water affect your nose
sonar...with philosophical insights based on those inputs?
It might be very profound to the dolphins and their world view, but we'd
be very hard-pressed to interact with them in any form that wouldn't
completely confuse them as to what we were trying to talk about.
Christ, it would be like William F. Buckley sitting down to have a
insightful heart-to-heart conversation with ex-president George W. Bush.
(I leave the extraordinary possibilities of that surreal event to the
reader's imagination; Buckley wisely died at the right time, which is
more than can say about Dubya... that time, in his case, being during
his infancy. Where's SIDS when you really need it? The little tike
might have rolled over in his crib, gurgled out something about wanting
a cup of "aw-aw", emitted a snide snicker, and turned blue.)

bg I dare say that that event would have saved a lot of lives...

Now, let's run into a alien race. Sure, we could agree that 2+2 = 4, and
maybe that pi is pretty difficult thing to put a end on...but beyond
anything concrete like that, we are going to be a real morass regarding
anything subjective in regards to our world views because we are
different species with brains wired to work in different ways.
It might be like this:
"You have the ability to destroy stars, aren't you concerned that
some of those stars might evolve species that could be friends to you at
some future point from the planets around them?"
And we are expecting a answer like this:
"We are very conservative... we consider any species that might evolve
in the universe to be a potential future threat to us and destroy those
stars as a means to protect ourselves against that possible future threat."
But instead we get back: "Total energy to destroy a selected star is
lower than the energy our Bussard ramscoops derive from traversing the
hydrogen bubble created by the star's destruction. Are you saying that
you intend to pose a threat to us at some future point? The energy
required to destroy your star, "Sol", is more than the hydrogen bubble
created by its destruction would generate. We do not understand why you
would suggest you are a threat to us that would lead us to destroy your
star, as the math is not in our favor. You are a very confusing species,
and we don't understand what you are trying to tell us."

So, when are you writing the novel that comes from that premise ? :-)

One of the top-ten most over-rated films ever done in American cinema -
by Stanley Kubrick in particular; all of his other movies were
masterpieces that are worth watching time and time again ....or at least
worth watching once (I imagine I've seen "Dr. Strangleove" around 50
times, and immediately go to it or "Jaws" by the flip of a coin every
time I see it running on TV because those are two of _The Great
Movies_ ever done by great American director's in the past century.
Any of Kubrick's other films makes "2001" looking pretty mediocre by
comparison, when viewed with the space-fan blinders off.

I would somewhat disagree with that conclusion, but I do come to 2001
with the SF fan " sensawonda " view. I'm quite pleased to own the 2
DVD copy.

I want to see the monkeys getting violent, then wake me up when HAL goes
crazy. I'll happily sleep through all the rest.

Thats OK, I'll be doing enough grokking for the both of us... g

( When 2001 first came out, I was around 10. I got my dad, who was a
very
good and supportive dad, to take me to it twice in the first week or
so that
it was out. He was very SF friendly for me. )

Andre