12/23/2005: "Say what now? (Spoiler free)"

music: Genesis - Tonight, Tonight, Tonight
mood: hungry

I finished listening to 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday. Like I was telling Dan when I got home, there aren't many time when I can use "OMG WTF" and really mean it. This was definitely one of those times.

I actually had to listen to the last disc again because I thought that maybe I had inhaled some kind of fumes while listening to it the first time around. I understood the very end a little tiny bit more than before, but not by much.

So I put on my Geek Hat (really, when does it ever come off?) and fired up the Web to see if anyone could explain things for me. Most of the sites and discussions pertain to the movie in particular, but from what I can tell things line up pretty well between the two. After all, Kubrik and Clarke sort of wrote the book together for the movie. And from what I can tell, nobody else really knows what the ending truly means either.

In reading others' ideas and theories it has become clear to me that I wasn't focusing on what almost everyone else thought was the most important part: HAL. I thought the idea behind HAL and what happened was interesting and what HAL does is a very important plot point. However, I was surprised that HAL came and went relatively quickly in the book. My attention shifted to the bigger themes. The monoliths. The extraterrestrial intelligence behind the whole end of the book. The locations at the end of the book. These things made me completely forget there was a HAL 9000 on the Discovery.

I wonder if I'm alone in this? I'm looking forward to seeing the movie now. I have a feeling that HAL is played up quite a bit.

I'm kind of worried that I'll be disappointed in the movie in comparison to the book. I know I will be, but these days I judge all of those types of disappointments against Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban: the book versus the movie. Compared to the book, the movie was a shallow, trite piece of poo. I'll never read another Harry Potter book before seeing the movie again as long as I live. I'm just hoping they did proper justice to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.