Movie Night at the Virtual Cinema: 2001: A Space Odyssey

-

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been using SKYBOX VR on Oculus Quest to watch movies in a virtual cinema that I didn’t get to see when they were theatrically released. The illusion of sitting in a movie theater is a convincing one, minus any reaction from the (non-existent) audience. It doesn’t change my perception of the films I’ve been watching — I’m just doing this for fun: to whet my appetite for going to the movies, and for a little VR escapism.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I hadn’t been born yet when 2001: A Space Odyssey was originally released, but I’ve seen it several times, the first time probably when I was about 10 years old on TV one night. Truth be told, I found it boring (and I wasn’t alone: the film got mixed reviews when originally released), but I gained an appreciation for it in later years. 

The film begins during prehistory, with humanity’s ancestors being influenced by a strange alien monolith, before flashing forward to 1999 where a similar object is found buried on the moon. This object, in turn, sends a transmission towards Jupiter, where an expedition is later sent to investigate. The crew of the spaceship Discovery One arrives at Jupiter, only for the ship’s computer, HAL 9000, to famously go nuts. And then it gets weird.

Watching it again recently, for the first time in years, I had a few observations.

First, it was neat to watch it on a big screen — albeit a virtual one. As I mentioned previously, the illusion presented by SKYBOX VR is a convincing one.

I was surprised by how unlikable I found the character of Dr. Heywood Floyd, who leads the effort to keep the discovery of the monolith on the moon quiet. He has a smug air about him. The other scientists and personnel who travel with him to examine this second monolith also come across as lacking the sort of seriousness a discovery like this would (or should?) evoke. When they arrive at the location of the monolith, they all stop to have their picture taken with it.

Astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) come across very stiff (especially Poole), with some of the dialog being almost Dragnet-esque (was Jack Webb the ghost writer?). And while the film poses some questions, the plot itself is paper-thin. This is probably heresy to fans of director/co-screenwriter Stanley Kubrick and co-screenwriter/original story author Arthur C. Clarke.

But my biggest complaint with the film is it’s pacing. Even though contemporary reviews were mixed, the film is now considered a classic (it was Roger Ebert’s “Desert Island Movie”, and is in the National Film Registry), but despite that, there are long stretches of the film which basically showcase the special effects, not the story. We get to witness Dr. Floyd’s flight to a space station in excruciating detail, lacking dialog and instead accompanied by classical music. When HAL goes nuts and kills Frank, we get a long sequence where Dave heads down to the pod bay, instructs HAL to turn a pod, gets in a pod, and flies to get Frank. And we get a looong sequence of Dave flying to get Frank. Minutes go by where we’re just watching Dave work the controls of the pod. At the time the film was released, there was a fascination with space travel, but was this level of minutiae ever interesting? And then there’s that sequence near the end where Dave encounters the larger monolith near Jupiter. It just goes on and on, with plenty of effects and no dialog. It reminds me of the later film Star Trek: The Motion Picture which tried to replicate this film (and unfortunately succeeded), falling victim to the same problems. I recently completed a personal fan edit of Star Trek: The Motion Picture where I cut a lot of the lengthy effects sequences, including one which was 10 minutes long without dialog.

I did enjoy watching this, but found myself starting to nod off at times. As a humorous aside, SKYBOX crashed with “An unexpected error has occurred” right before HAL turned on the crew. Coincidence?

Some people love this one, but I found it to be a mixed bag.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Resolving the "n timer(s) still in the queue" Error In Angular Unit Tests

-
A few months ago one of the developers I work with ran into the below error in an Angular unit test: 1 timer(s) still in the queue The fix was to specify a particular amount of time in the tick() call as shown below: it( 'should set accountConfirmationDetails when getAccountConfirmationDetails is called' , fakeAsync(() => {          // Arrange          let  spyGetAccountConfirmationDetails = spyOn(accountService,  'getAccountConfirmationDetails' )         .and         .returnValue(Promise.resolve(AccountMockData.mockAccountConfirmationDetails));                    // Act         fixture.detectChanges();         tick(15000);          // Assert         expect(spyGetPaymentConfirmationDetails).toHaveBeenCalled();           expect(comp.zone).toBe(42);           expect(comp.hasValidProfile).toBeTruthy(); })); Hoping this helps someone!
Read more

How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

-
Image
I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t
Read more

How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

-
I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)    {       
Read more

Silent Renew and the "login_required" Error When Using oidc-client

-
I recently implemented the Silent Renew functionality of oidc-client in an Angular application I work on, and was getting reports that the users' tokens were still expiring. This made no sense to me as I'd verified the code was working during development, but yesterday I found the problem and am hoping it will save someone some time. The error we were getting back was "Error from signinSilent: login_required". This indicates that the user's session is no longer active on IdentityServer and they must re-authenticate -- which, of course, is what we're trying to prevent by using Silent Renew. In our case, the problem wasn't with the Silent Renew functionality, but rather the user's session was expired. The reason why  it was expired was because, for some reason, we were setting the session length to 15 minutes instead of the default 10 hours . What was occurring was that Silent Renew was attempting to renew a token after 55 minutes (60 minutes expirat
Read more

Fixing the "Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation" Error In An Angular App After Upgrading to webpack 4

-
I'm currently in the process of upgrading an Angular application which does not  use the Angular CLI from webpack 2 to webpack 4. The incremental upgrade from webpack 2 to 3 was easy, but once I made the jump from 3 to 4, I encountered a lot of problems. I went through them one by one, but the one that had me stumped was the following: Unhandled Promise rejection: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. ; Zone: <root> ; Task: null ; Value: Error: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. The code was transpiling/compiling fine, but this error was occurring when I'd navigate to a page containing this pipe. This code has worked fine under webpack 2 and 3. I made sure that the pipe was being set up as a declaration , which it was. What finally  corrected the issue for me w
Read more