For the fans of 2001, the mystery is the point, and for those more devoted to secular causes, the concept of aliens as divine beings is the point.
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The A-list actor has become a thing of the past. Hollywood decided to focus on adapting franchises rather than promoting their actors, and because of this, most of the few A-list actors who remain have been grandfathered in. They are survivors of an old era.
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For one thing, I disagree with the philosophy behind it. I don’t think evolution is true, and I certainly don’t think that death is a necessary part of life.
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The movie ends with the baby staring at the earth, leaving the audience to either wonder what’s going on or what’s going to happen next.
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Clarke seems to be going for something more religious: technology gives mankind the means to become God, and our alien overlords will be there to help once mankind is worthy.
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A critical question for assessing the future of AI is, why did the space agency give HAL almost total control of the ship.
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We don’t really get to see enough of HAL 9000 when he is actually a help to the space travelers, which reduces the impact of his turn.
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One thing is for certain. In the iconic Dawn of Man sequence, the Monolith is conveying information. The question is how.
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Letting the question of who sent the monolith remain a mystery was probably a wise dramatic choice on the part of the writers.
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The greatest measure of a film’s success is the test of time. Something about this film works even though it breaks conventions.
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Escalation is where the Terminator franchise went wrong. The writers kept enlarging their world until it became contradictory.
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To keep the story under control, the time machine itself should be a hard system even if the concept of time is soft and pliable.
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Time travel into the future is not as tricky as travel into the past because altering the future does not create so many complex story problems.
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Shrouding the story rules in mystery only works with soft magic systems where the story focus is on something other than the system.
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Terminator 3 crossed into hard magic territory when it added the concept of fate to time travel, which means that specific rules began to matter.
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Soft magic is vague and incidental; hard magic imposes rules on the story. Too often in science fiction, these rules get broken.
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The writers of Time Travel 2002 merely use Wells’s story’s name and reputation to tell a less satisfying tale of their own making.
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The answer to the traveler’s dilemma is provided by an Uber-Morlock, unique to this version of the story and perhaps the most interesting character in the film.
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The time traveler, good-natured gentleman that he is, ignores the hologram’s snootiness and continues asking urgent questions.
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Good and bad writing are on a spectrum. Underlying this spectrum is the suspension of disbelief. That is, viewers should forget where they are while watching.
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