Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Gail Shaw wrote:
> > The monolith on earth, sparking tool usage in proto-humans and kick-starting
> > the whole human race.
>
> Oh, is that what that's supposed to be. (What is this monolith thing,
> and why is it there?)

why are we here?  where do we go?  why things are the way they are?

You seem the kind of fellow who goes watching a movie and asking every little
now and then for little details that got past your head.  I hope not to sit
next to you at the theater... :P

> > You mean the space trip to IO to investigate the monolith?
>
> Oh, is *that* why they went there? (And that's where "there" was...)

I think that's pretty obvious, no?  All that space ballet until they get to the
moon and Dr. Floyd is told of the discovery... then, it cuts to a manned
mission to Jupiter where the tripulants are actually unaware of the real
mission, confided to HAL alone:  to search for the giant monolith near the
giant planet.  Eventually, the crew's mission conflict with HAL's main mission
and the AI becomes "paranoid", so to speak.  The shit hits the fans and it's up
to Dave to turn off HAL to save his life.  In the process he discovers the real
purpose and gets to the monolith to know the truth.  The bad acid trip could be
seen as the monolith opening a worm whole and getting Dave closer for inspection
by the creators...

the old man seeing the baby in the monolith is an alegory for the life cycle...

Think of the monolith as generators of intelligent life and as beacons for when
such intelligent life are ready for contact...

> > The whole theme of the movie/book is evolution of mankind. Natural or
> > forced.
>
> Right. This wasn't evident from the film at all.

Learn to read in-between lines... if you watched more than you asked you'd get
it...

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