Return of the Moon Bus

On 5/25/2010 10:08 AM, GordonD wrote:

The monkey wasn't enraged; he was upset because his wife was cheating on
him. He puts on that facial expression when he's thinking, and he points
to try to start a conversation, and he trembles because he has a copper
deficiency.

Yeah, and he's got that tapir femur because he's studying to be a
veterinary surgeon.

Pat

On 5/25/2010 10:09 AM, GordonD wrote:
HAL wasn't using his brains. When Bowman started heading toward the
emergency airlock in the Space Pod, Hal should have fired up the main
engines for a few moments and left him far astern in their radioactive
exhaust.

I'd have thought the engines would be mothballed at that phase of the
mission, and would take too long to start up.

Considering that they show at least one small asteroid* just missing the
ship at around the same point in the movie, they had better keep both
their radar and engines ready to go 24/7.

*Or do they show two in rapid succession? The odds of encountering even
one of any size by random chance in the passage through the belt are so
small that the scene doesn't make much sense.

Pat

On 5/25/2010 10:11 AM, GordonD wrote:
"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...

I'll say one thing for 2001 - it wasn't shooting low in regards to the
level of insight it expected from its prospective audience.


Clarke said at the time: "If you understand 2001 on your first viewing,
we'll have failed."

Well, that's one approach to upping profits from ticket sales.
And those were premium-priced tickets if you saw it in Cinerama also.
Maybe they could have gone the Lucas "Star Wars" route, and keep
re-issuing it in slightly modified versions.
The original script has a narrator and a lot more dialog, and although
it reads like a piece of lead, it would be interesting to see someone
re-edit the movie and put that material back in to see how that would
have worked: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/2001.html
I get a sneaking suspicion that the idea to put all the music in and
call the movie "profound" came about around a day after Kubrick and
Clarke saw just how well the original idea _would_ work during some
scene screenings and realized that the MGM bigwigs were going to string
them up for spending all that money of what they had made when they saw it.
The soaking 20th Century Fox took on "Cleopatra" production costs was
still fairly fresh in the memory at the time 2001 came out.

Pat

"GordonD" wrote in message
...

I'd have thought the engines would be mothballed at that phase of the
mission, and would take too long to start up.
--
Gordon Davie
Edinburgh, Scotland

"Slipped the surly bonds of Earth...to touch the face of God."

Hal's main objective was the mission. Hal was not programmed to kill the
crew, but suffered sometype of 'computer psychosis" because of programming
added by some government agency that directly conflicted with his main
purpose which was to relay information to the crew accurately and without
omissions. Because of this conflict he decided on his own the best way to
resolve this conflict was to eliminate the crew. I assume that he did not
fire the engines because it would have thrown the ship off course at that
point, or it takes a large amount of time to 'prep' the engines. Remember
HAL's main objective is to fulfill the mission (to the best of his
abilities).

I will admit that it has been several years since I have read these books
(2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001), and I may be forgetting details.