thanks for sharing your thoughts kane. i'm sure you grok what i'm going to say, too, in response.
firstly, i agree. this was a tour-de-force, beautiful in conception, beautifully wrought.
there is the notion in sf, on a continuum to fantasy, of plausibility. arthur c clarke felt compelled to eschew any scientific 'improbabilities', such as faster than light travel, from his narratives. others feel & do differently. you could say it was a matter of perhaps taste, perhaps education, perhaps open-mindedness, perhaps appetite for accepting a fantasy, or metaphor.
that said, however, improbabilities can arise because the writer hasnt done their homework, isnt willing to work around the difficulties. it can, and often does, simply reflect sloppy work, ignorance, lack of respect for the educated viewer. often the stuff of which b-movies are made.
i'll give an example - when they unbricked the hull, they were exposed to space, and sat there gaping & breathing, rather than decompressing into an unpleasant but swift demise. now some people are prepared to leap over these things, others not.
the deeper truth is that any alien encounter we should imagine that we do not initiate would be certainly dangerous, not unlikely fatal to our species as an independent concern, imo. life-bearing planets are rare, their tree of life would be utterly incompatible with our own, leaving the superior technological culture, which presumably would not be tooling around in space just for the fun of it, little choice but to terra-form the planet to their requirement, leaving a small collection of our biome to a well-encapsulated zoo. so that is my view. others may have a different one. but it is certainly an informed view, one that can be defended.
my way to view this film is that this is fantasy, a dream within a dream. also a metaphor for the masters making the rules for the wise men and the fools. in dreams, other than that, anything goes :)
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