I'm pretty sure I agree, Brian. To be honest, I've lost track of who brought up "Lord of the Rings" or in what context.

Comparing things for superficial reasons is always tricky. Me? I have a totally irrational tendency to like stories set in outer space. I have no idea why; I guess I just decided as I kid that space was cool. I'll watch pretty much anything if it's set in outer space.

"Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have that in common … and to be honest, that's probably what motivated me to watch both of them when I was a little kid. I watched "2001" for the same reason, and we all know how that turned out.

On the other side of the coin, I tend to be prejudiced against magic and sorcery and wizards and stuff. I don't have a grudge against it; it just tends not to work for me, for whatever reason. I like broccoli but not cauliflower, and I put soy milk in my coffee even though I don't like to drink it; people have preferences they can't always explain. I enjoyed "Lord of the Rings" despite that prejudice … though that might be a bad example, because there's precious little actual sorcery in the thing. Oh, "Harry Potter" is a better example. I devoured those books despite the fact that I should have been prejudiced against them.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say "This is superficially like that, so if you liked this you might enjoy that." But have you guys ever heard of the "Napoleon Dynamite" problem? I read an article in the New York Times or something a couple years ago about how Netflix was really working hard to improve their recommendation algorithm. It turns out they hit a brick wall when it came to "Napoleon Dynamite." The average rating seemed to be a three out of five, because everybody either rated it 1 or 5 stars. And there seemed to be no logical way to predict, based on your movie likes and dislikes, whether you'd like that film. Which makes sense to me: I really liked it and I don't know why!

Which I guess is even farther off topic than we already were, but hey, whatever.

Sure, that makes sense. I guess I just get tripped up specifically by the "that never happened" language. Every time I hear that, without fail, I want to stop and say, "Wait. You understand that this is fiction we're talking about, right? You understand that all of this was made up, that none of it ever actually occurred?"

I really do think of myself as being a fairly laid-back guy. But on that one point, I just reflexively rush to the nearest phone booth and emerge in my Captain Literal Nofunsypants costume and rush off to save the day.

I kind of annoy myself sometimes.

If you're talking to me, then yes, you can call it a rant. It's more along the lines of the ravings of that creepy homeless guy who stands outside the Starbucks and smells like mushy peas for some reason, but "rant" is just fine.

If you mean that "Star Wars" the 1977 movie is greater than "Star Trek" the 2009 movie, then heck yeah, I definitely agree. Both are fun films, but "Star Wars" was better paced (to my liking, anyway) and had a more cohesive story.

If we're comparing the whole Star Wars and Star Trek, like, oeurvres, then it's tough to say. They're trying to do such different things, you know? Star Wars is intended to be one long story with mythological inspirations, in the same way that "The Lord of the Rings" was so intended. Star Trek seems to have been meant to be a framework in which socially conscious allegorical stories (as well as just-for-fun stories) could be told.

I think when Star Trek is at its very best, it tells better, more moving, more personal stories than those found in Star Wars — at least in my experience with Star Wars; I haven't read all the, like, novels and whatever. The trouble with generalizing that, though, is that (again in my experience) Star Trek spends so little of its time living up to that standard of the-very-best. It's often entertaining, but only rarely transcendent.

Obviously there's "The Wrath of Khan," which I've already gushed about. I mentioned elsewhere that I grew up watching "The Next Generation," as a teenager and into my early 20s. It was my regular Thursday night (or whatever it was) show, but I didn't go nuts over it or anything. I can think of three episodes of that series — I even remember their names — that really typified the at-its-very-best thing I'm talking about.

First, as I mentioned before, there was "Family," the episode where Picard goes back to the family vineyard. I think it had a B-plot, but all I remember of it is the A-plot, of Picard's reflectiveness and the conflict-and-resolution with his brother. It was a hell of a character piece.

Similarly, there was one called "The Inner Light." Picard gets zapped off the Enterprise during the teaser, and doesn't return until the last act, if I remember correctly. During that time, he lives for decades as an inhabitant on an alien planet, eventually coming to believe that his memories of his other life were just a fever dream brought on by serious illness. In the end, it turns out he never left the ship, but merely had a lifetime's worth of memories downloaded into his head by an alien memorial. Amusing enough premise, but it's told as a character piece, and after Picard "returns" to the Enterprise, he grieves deeply for the "family" he thought he'd had and lost.

Finally, there's "Darmok," which is just a truly classic science-fiction story. Picard and an alien can't communicate because the alien's language is entirely steeped in cultural allusion, and they have to find a way to get along in a survival situation. It's more than a little reminiscent of "Enemy Mine," but really it's just a sublime story about breaking through barriers of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

For every one of those, you've got like a hundred "Spock's Brain" episodes.

Star Wars is a really long book with a couple great chapters, a couple pretty good ones and a couple truly lousy ones. Star Trek is more like a vast collection of short stories, some of which truly stink and nearly all of which are just okay at best, but it's worth slogging through them to get to the real gems buried deep inside.

So: Different. Hard to say which is better, since pretty much the only thing they have in common is spaceships, and even then only sometimes.

Oh merciful GOD, Teague. I've only made it through part one (of freakin' seven!) of that Red Letter Media bit so far, and you're right. It's amazing. When he put up the four-way split-screen of the hero getting the girl at the end of the movie, and the bottom-right was Charlie hugging Willy Wonka, I near abouts fell out of my chair.

This is awesome.

Thanks for the link, Teague. I'm for bed at the moment, but I'll watch it tomorrow for sure.

I think I'm one of the few people who's pretty meh on Star Trek overall. "The Wrath of Khan" is one of my all-time favorite films, but I have indifferent or low opinions of the other movies — most recent one excepted, obviously. I grew up watching "The Next Generation" as a teenager, and yes, Teague, while a lot of it is either boring or really crappy, there were a few high points.

My personal threshold for silly is very low, though, and getting lower as I stare middle age uneasily in the face. So much of Star Trek is just plain silly, and I have a hard time with that. Of course, silly plus time equals camp, so it's sometimes hard to know just where to draw the line.

I guess one of the reasons I enjoyed "Star Trek" is 'cause it seemed to actively want to minimize the silly. The villain wasn't a megalomaniac; he wanted revenge for the death of his wife. And it wasn't even an unjust death, just an unfair one. She was killed in a natural disaster, one nobody could have prevented, but he went crazy and blamed a person in power for not doing more to stop it. (A lesser man would point out the obvious parallel to a certain recent president and a certain recent hurricane, but I don't wanna get political here.) For all of the film's implausbilities — yes, that's a word now, shut up — it was deeply grounded in real people with real motivations. And I liked that.

It was breakfast cereal for grown-ups, in a way. It indulged without insulting. Michael Bay wishes he could make a movie that's half as much fun.

It's damn peculiar, is what it is! It's a mass of contradictions and paradoxes. The movie is profoundly stupid, yet clever. It's fantasy, but grounded. It's lightweight popcorn, but it's got the highest on-screen death count of all time and deals with themes of predestination and free will. About the only aspect of the film that's not in some way self-contradictory is the fact that there were just too goddamn many lens flares. I think we can all agree on that.

(Someday I'm going to learn how to write a short post here, I promise. I'm really sorry I'm so wordy. I guess I just don't bother posting at all unless I feel like I have a lot to say.)

Hmmmmmm. Very interesting indeed. I think it revolves around how you choose to define "human." The Turing Test defined it in a walks-like-a-duck-quacks-like-a-duck way, and that's valid, and by that definition HAL was of course human. But if we draw some smaller circle around those aspects of humanity that we consider to be moral and civilized, then HAL might or might not qualify.

If you're going to set out to build a HAL, I think it's wise to decide up front whether you want to simulate a raw human being, with all the pros and cons of that, or whether you want to simulate the best of us. The trouble with that, of course, is that we're not even particularly good at fostering the best of us in us.

It's easy to imagine that an artificial intelligence will be "better" than us, because it won't have a limbic system. It won't get grumpy or jealous, won't have bad dreams or lose its temper. It'll be this pure reasoning thing, and obviously that's at the heart of what makes us special.

But such a being also could never feel compassion, at least not on an emotional level. Sure, maybe we could program it with some sort of "Asimov's Three Laws: The Long Form" to convince it to be good, but much of what we consider good and virtuous in people is decidedly irrational. So is what we consider to be evil and barbaric. How do we cultivate one to the exclusion of the other?

Which brings us right back around to "What does it mean to be human?" which is one of the great dilemmas of art and, especially, of science fiction.

Well, Maul, you asked for it. This will be much longer than my already-too-long ramblings on the "2001" thread. I apologize in advance.

I'm in the really weird position here of agreeing wholeheartedly with both Hansen AND Brian on this one. I think "Star Trek" is a flashy, superficial work that's possibly one of the all-time great examples of what TV Tropes calls "Fridge Logic" — the experience of stopping to think about it afterward when you're getting something out of the fridge, only to realize "Wait a minute, that makes no sense" — while simultaneously paying off everything it sets up. It's a terrible movie that happens to be perfect. And I loved it.

I'm with more or less everything Emfayder said, though to different degrees. The whole supernova/black hole/red matter thing? That's a magic bean. I give that a pass. Star Trek has always walked the line between science fiction and science fantasy, and last year's movie installment comes down firmly on the fantasy side, and that's okay.

What I'm getting at here is that the premise of the movie doesn't bother me. The premise is fine, and a lot stronger than some other Star Trek movies (whales in space, for starters).

What I'm talking about is the … well, screw it. Let's start at the beginning.

The first reel or two — the whole Kelvin sequence — is really good filmmaking. The evacuation/birth/sacrifice bit is well done, unapologetically melodramatic and all the better for it.

The first time we meet Little Jimmy Kirk is when he steals his stepfather's (uncle's? I forget) car and takes it for a joyride that ends with his going over a cliff and being snotty to a cop who may have been an android or who may have just been wearing the world's most uncomfortable motorcycle helmet. This is meant to show that little Jimmy is troubled and rebellious. This is fine; as a story beat it's okay. Except it ends with his dumping a classic car off a cliff into a quarry. A cool scene, to be sure, but that's kind of the nuclear option of rebellious youth, no? That's the nuclear-holocaust-followed-by-widespread-cannibalism option of rebellious youth. What's it supposed to tell us about little Jim Kirk? That he's angry? That he's foolhardy? That he's a bad driver? Was his intention to drive the car off a cliff when he jacked it, or did it just start out as a teenage joyride that went out of control? There's no indication in the film of an "oops" moment from Kirk, so it comes across like he had a plan and he carried it out and fuck you, stepdad (or mom's brother or whatever). Which is pretty damn harsh for a kid.

Were we supposed to come away with the impression that Kirk's stepdad/uncle/whatever abused him? Like physically? Because that's the level the character's motivation would need to be at, I think, to justify premediatively stealing his stepdad/uncle's car and driving it off a cliff. Or maybe it was a suicide attempt, and at the last minute Kirk changed his mind? No, too dark.

Anyway, moving on, because we're only on the second major scene in the movie.

Young Spock's arc works for me, to be honest. His daddy married a human woman, and kids are mean. Vulcans are brutal, barbaric people who only stay civilized by sheer force of self-restraint, so his whole arc makes sense to me. I will speak no more of it, because I've got no major complaints.

Flash-forward to the "present" day: Kirk is getting drunk in what the establishing shot thoughtfully tells us is a total middle-of-nowhere bar. A middle-of-nowhere bar that happens to be populated by a dozen first-year Starfleet cadets — plebes. In uniform. Who are fifteen hundred miles from their campus. With a captain. Was it a field trip? Was he their chaperone? There's a shipyard nearby — which is surprising but fair enough; you don't need any particular geography to build starships, and wide-open spaces meant the land was probably cheap. Were they there to see how starships are built? I never went to a military academy, but I knew people who did, and I recall no plebe-year field trips to the graving docks at Newport News, but what do I know.

So for absolutely no reason we have a herd of cadets and a decorated officer hanging out in a dive bar in Iowa. Well. Not for absolutely no reason. The reason is so they can meet Jim Kirk. We have three meet-cutes in the span of ten minutes: Uhura, "cupcake" (who exists solely to enable a brick joke) and Pike. Pike delivers the best line in the movie and one of the best lines in film in recent years: "Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives. I dare you to do better." That's a damn good line, right there, and Bruce Greenwood delivers it remarkably well, so when I saw the movie in the theater I didn't care that the setting of the scene made no sense. The scene existed to get Pike in front of Kirk and to deliver that line, which is great right up to the point where you start thinking about it.

The Kobayashi Maru sequence, I thought, introduced a nice twist. In "Wrath of Khan" we learn that Kirk cheated on the test and got a "commendation for original thinking." In "Star Trek" that's changed to being brought up on disciplinary charges. More plausible by far than picturing him getting a tousle of the hair and an "Oh, you clever scamp."

But then the story breaks again. Because he's suspended, Kirk doesn't get assigned to the flotilla of ships that are all apparently desperately under-crewed. McCoy fakes an illness to smuggle him on board (plausibility stretches) with absolutely no consequences (and the plausibility snaps neatly in two). Aboard the Enterprise, McCoy spends the first indeterminate-chunk-of-time-reasonably-assumed-to-be-hours-at-least nursing Kirk … didn't he have actual job responsibilities? He's just a cadet himself but he's part of a ship's chain of command — a midshipman at least; presumably they were all sworn in as temporary ensigns during that assembly in the hangar we see the tail end of where the assignments are handed out — but he never appears to report to anyone or do anything except herd Kirk. Why? Because it's funny. "You got numb tongue? I can fix that." It's funny as hell, so we go with it, despite the fact that McCoy should have been (a) busy and (b) disciplined and possibly even charged for smuggling an unauthorized person aboard ship.

Talking of the ship … are there no actual officers on Earth when the Vulcan distress call comes in? We've got Pike who'd be an entirely plausible ship's captain were it not for the fact that he was apparently off drinking in a bar with cadets for some reason just three years earlier. If he's an instructor, what's he doing in command of a ship of the line? Ships already have captains, even if they're just on shakedown prior to mounting the broom. Is Spock supposed to be the XO? He was running the bridge simulator just days earlier. Okay, there's a nice nod there to "Wrath of Khan" with Spock commanding a ship full of cadets on a training cruise, but in that context the Enterprise was an older ship, out of date, and had been specifically assigned to training duty. The "Star Trek" Enterprise is, as Pike says, "brand new." Why doesn't she already have a crew?? McCoy, Kirk and Uhura are middies (except Kirk's not even in the chain of command because he, like Dante, wasn't even supposed to be there that day). Spock is an instructor. Sulu is a replacement for a sick helmsman (which was a nice touch; at least they mentioned it) and Chekov is a seventeen-year-old kid. There are hundreds of other people on the Enterprise — we see them all over the place — but the ones who get dialogue are all either total newbies or teachers … or Pike, but again, we have no idea what his day job is.

So the Enterprise makes it to Vulcan just moments late because Sulu forgot to release the parking brake — a bit I loved, by the way. I howled in the theater at Sulu's deadpan, don't-even-look-down bit of business with the controls. Funny, and plot-necessary, because by the time they get there the other six (or whatever it was) ships in the flotilla are a debris field. Which means the Romulans destroyed six Starfleet ships in seconds. They have some "make flotilla go away" button on that bridge of theirs, and they pressed it hard. Which makes its absence from the rest of the film more than a little conspicuous.

Nero's halting the hostilities because he recognizes Spock's ship works for story purposes; as we learn later, Nero's already taken the other Spock someplace where he can watch. Nero's dark, man. He's Scott-Tenorman-must-die dark. "Here's some delicious chili while you wait, Spock. And here's Radiohead to laugh at your tears." Seriously.

The big action sequence is big and actiony, and both technically well done and sensible. In a time when the trend is toward totally over-the-top incomprehensible set pieces, the four-man fist fight on the drilling rig was a model of restraint. The stakes were high on two levels, Chekov gets a "yay!" moment followed by a reversal when he loses Spock's mom, the whole thing just generally works. The captain is a prisoner, and with him lost the Enterprise under Spock's command follows orders and high-tails it out to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, which had previously been established to be down at the shops buying some milk. Or whatever they were doing.

But now we return to the problem of the Enterprise being criminally understaffed. Spock is now in command, but he apparently has nobody to support him. No department heads, no division officers, apparently no billets at all. This is partly justified — the chief engineer and CMO were both killed in action. But at the very least there's got to be a navigation officer somewhere aboard, or if not an actual navigator (we have computers for that now?) at least someone for the helmsman to report to. There's got to be a weapons officer in there somewhere as well, what with all the, y'know, weapons aboard. Maybe not those exact job titles, since chain of command has evolved drastically over the centuries and could be presumed to evolve further in the future, but there should at least have been people with those job responsibilities, and they should have been part of an established chain of command. Later in the film, when Spock has an outburst and relieves himself of duty — which dialogue for some reason described as "resigning his commission," which is really very different — there's a moment on the bridge where McCoy declares that they have no captain and no first officer to replace him. He doesn't say they have no engineer, but he might as well have, because he's next in line, and they don't. But you have a navigator! You have a weapons officer! You have a whole chain of command with a precisely defined order of succession! Because, y'know, it's a dangerous job, and commanding officers are expected to die or be rendered unfit for duty. They thought of that in advance!

But no, apparently all the department heads and division officers had lungworms, and the brand-new, not-even-out-of-shakedowns-yet flagship of the fleet was chucked off with a crew of teenagers and clock-punchers. Which is exactly the sort of thing that would never happen in any universe where the laws of, like, gravity are in effect.

But again, all these convolutions in the story exist solely to put Kirk in the chair in the middle of the bridge. Everything that happens, apart from a number of really awesome character beats, is driven by the force of the plot.  And said plot hinges on the entire administrative structure of Starfleet taking stupid pills when they got up that morning.

Which brings us to the end of the movie where Kirk, in recognition of his breaking about a hundred laws starting with stowing away aboard a starship and culminating with disobeying the standing, lawful orders of a superior officer in a time of war, gets to skip five rungs on the ladder and is promoted straight to captain. Right out of the Academy.

They could have at least thrown in a clumsy line of dialogue mentioning the fact that, hey, we lost six ships and about five thousand people out there, including a ton of officers, and did you notice we couldn't even muster up division officers for the flagship, so we're really short-staffed right now. Kirk's the only one who filled out the little-known, seldom-used "Please promote me five grades in one go" form, so what the hell, we're going for it.

But that in and of itself would have been a problem … because they promote Kirk to replace Pike, who gets promoted to rear admiral. (Or just "admiral," in dialogue, which knowing how this Starfleet operates probably means Grand Admiral of the Fleet and Also Emperor of All the Russias or some shit.) If they promote Kirk up the ladder like stupid because they're short on commanding officers, why do they promote their one surviving commanding officer from the whole mess to a desk job? It makes no sense!

Except when you remember that the whole movie exists to put certain characters into certain roles, and if that means we have to ignore not just the laws of nature (this is science fantasy, after all) but basic logic as well, so be it.

And really, there was no other way. Yes, I could pull a Dorkman (with all due respect) and come up with my own story to replace this one, but truthfully? I'm not convinced it would have been any better. If we want to see Kirk when he's at the Academy and when he assumes command of the Enterprise, then we either have to ditch plausibility or make that movie take place over a span of about ten years. Because that's how long it would take for the greatest captain ever to go from being a middie to commanding his own ship of the line. Once we throw that out, every other twist and convolution seems like small cheese.

Now that I've said all that (and to anybody who's still reading, hi), let me reiterate: I love "Star Trek!" It's a blast! The performances are, without exception, rock solid, and occasionally outstanding. I was highly skeptical that an actor who'd never done a feature film before could carry the movie as Spock, but he pulled it off admirably. He didn't have Nimoy's gravitas, but for crying out loud, who could have? Chris Pine was funny and arrogant and obnoxious and charismatic, which is what the script called for. Simon Pegg nailed Scotty's accent, which is a feat in and of itself. And so on. The actors all turned in top-shelf performances. The visual effects were flawless — I might have made some different choices had I been in charge, but that's not the same as saying they were flawed.

But more importantly, the movie pays off what it sets up. The biggest promise of the film is that by the end, we'll see these characters in the roles they played in the TV show, and we got there. With some twists, of course — Spock and Uhura had some chemistry in the TV show, but now they're a full-on item. Nero's character is defined by a desire for revenge, and he acts accordingly; he changes whole battle plans for ridiculously petty reasons because he's got motivation. He's not as great as Khan — "I've done far worse than kill you. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you." — but he's everything a Star Trek villain needed to be, and just enough more to keep him interesting. The movie does what it promises, and as such, I think it's at least in the running for being called a perfect movie.

Unless you, y'know, think about it. Then it makes no goddamn sense at all.

Wow. That was really long. Sorry, folks.

Now that's an interesting angle on it. The whole "imagination" thing, I mean.

Imagination has always been a vaguely frightening thing for me. I don't know if I have an especially vivid imagination or just an average one or what — I have no idea how I'd compare mine to anybody else's to find out — but the notion that I can just conjure up detailed, totally realistic images and sounds and, like, smells and stuff in my head, SEEING them without actually seeing them … well, it's weird. It's always kind of freaked me out, in a way.

Talking about a movie in terms of the book on which it was based is always tricky, but doubly so in this case, because the screenplay and novel evolved in parallel. They're clearly meant to be the same story, but they're conspicuously not identical, and one can't help ascribing significance to that. But in any case, the book lays out this sort of back-story for the monolith-makers. It says that they searched the universe, and found the most precious and rare thing in it was mind. I'm pretty sure that's the word Clarke used: "mind." So wherever they went and whenever they could, they cultivated mind, and that's what they were doing with the monolith in Africa. They were turning apes into creatures-with-minds.

Which of course presupposes that all living things on earth except humans DON'T have minds, which is more of a philosophical statement than a provable fact, but whatever, that's the premise of the story. Either that novel or its sequel, I forget, paints a bigger picture, describing pre-sentient life both on Europa and in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Oh, that's right, it was "2010" that included that bit. Because it made a thing about how the monolith-makers made the choice to exterminate the Jovians because the Europans seemed like they were a better candidate for eventual sentience.

It's a great question, though, what the monolith-makers would think of HAL. Their backstory (vague though it is) implies that they started out as organic life, but through technology learned eventually to imprint their minds on the structure of spacetime itself. So would they see HAL as a new organism independent of us … or the next step in our evolution? And if it's the latter … would they welcome our eventual advancement to their level, or be threatened by us?

See, part of what I like so much about the film "2001" is that it leaves a lot of questions just totally unanswered, which appeals to me because the mystery and the possibility are sometimes more fun than the eventual revelation. It's like they say, nothing in scarier than when you're watching a horror movie and the screen just goes to black. Because what you're imagining in the dark is WAY scarier than anything the filmmakers could depict.

Well, I guess what I imagine (there we are back there again) the monolith to be all about, or the monolith-makers to be all about, or what lay beyond the monolith for Bowman, are all way cooler and more fun than anything that could ever be shown on a screen.

You know, while we're on the subject …

I've loved "2001" ever since I was a kid. I have no memory of seeing it for the first time — I was born in '72, so obviously it had to have been on TV or something. But at first, it was just the "wow, cool" factor. As I've gotten older and more overthinky, I've come to really admire how much depth the movie has. It's open to a variety of interpretations, which makes it fun to watch and reflect on and think about. There's just so much THERE, in an intellectual, pondery, puzzley sort of sense.

Take this for example: HAL is really the only character in the movie who's motivated. I mean in the film-school sense. He's the only character in the film who actively wants something — to carry out his programmed mission — and acts accordingly. Every other character is purely reactive. The apes at the beginning of the film are starving; they'd have died out had the monolith not showed up. Floyd doesn't really do much of ANYthing in the movie. He just responds to the discovery of the monolith on the moon by lining up for a photo-op. Even Bowman, who's arguably the film's protagonist opposite HAL as the antagonist, acts only in response to other events. He only proposes disconnecting HAL after HAL's fault prediction turns out to be wrong. He only goes through with it after HAL freakin' MURDERS his shipmates and threatens his own survival. Really, the only initiative he takes in the movie is choosing to board the pod and visit the Jupiter monolith … until you remember that he's basically following the orders given by Floyd in the briefing video.

So consider this: We have the apes, sitting around literally waiting to die until the monolith shows up. Then we have man at the end of the 20th century, master of the globe and near-Earth space, complacent and idle until the second monolith is discovered. Then we have Dave Bowman — who is the personification of humanity — content to eat his earth-toned paste and watch the news through the whole movie. Nobody actually DOES anything on his own in the whole film … except HAL, who again, is driven only by his programmed-in desire to follow orders.

Viewed through that lens, it's really kind of a misanthropic movie. It says that humanity just sits on their asses until some external event forces them to respond. That in the big picture, we're all just apes cowering under rocks and gazing up at the moon in a depressing parody of comprehension.

But we can also think of it in exactly the opposite way. The ape-like pre-humans in the first act have gone as far as they can go under their own power. They're gatherers and scavengers, and they're surviving, but only just. The monolith comes along and gives them a little nudge, and on the strength of JUST that little nudge — hey guys, antelope thighbones are heavy — humanity explodes over the whole Earth and out into space. The match cut from the bone to the satellite is probably the most effective flashforward in all of cinema, emphasizing the straight-line connection between the apes and modern man by turning four million years of history into an "and then."

Remember that the Tycho monolith didn't actually do anything, unlike the original Africa monolith. It didn't change anybody who came into contact with it. All it did was send a radio signal out into space. It was humanity that chose to follow that signal. That was an even subtler nudge than the first one, but it was enough. We built a big-ass spaceship and fired it off into the dark just to see what was there. And what we found was a door, and we didn't just go "Huh, door," and go home. We opened it and barged through, because that's what humanity does.

Viewed through THAT lens, it's a powerfully humanist film. Look how awesome we are.

And thing is, I don't think either one of these interpretations is bogus. I think they're both totally valid. We can get into a debate about the artists' (Kubrick and Clarke) intent, but if we let the work stand on its own, it can be appreciated in many different ways, ways that totally contradict each other while remaining valid and internally consistent.

That's why I love "2001." That's why it's more than just a movie, to me. It's not merely a story, not merely a sequence of and-then events told in order using pictures and sound. It's a sort of open-ended meditation on what it means to be human. It's a springboard for thinking big ideas about existence and the cosmos, and that's fun. I don't necessarily mean to say I'd like to do nothing but that for the rest of my life — sometimes you'd really rather watch a pretty girl walk in slow motion away from an exploding gas station. But "2001" provides an opportunity to think about big, philosophical things, and sometimes that makes for a really fun time, and that's why I like it.