HAL in 2010 was tragically touching. I always felt Dave came back for him because HAL was a victim of callous manipulation.

I loved 2010, but then I never connected completely with 2001. I need a more linear story.

HAL was just trying to carry out his secret mission orders to the best of his ability.

Is that shown in the movie, or are you relying on ACC's retcon in 2010?

Um, yes. It's never directly stated in the film, but you can arguably piece it together from what we are shown - the secret message from Heywood Floyd, combined with Floyd's secretive nature in dealing with the Russians.

But yes, I generally (and unscientifically) arrived at this interpretation based in part on ACC's explanation of HAL's behavior from 2010. It never occurred to me to think of this as a retcon, but I can accept that this is because it's the retcon I subscribe to.

But you know what REALLY bugged me about it? I sat thru the whole thing, dodging the huge anvils of MESSAGE (the starliner should have been called Anvil), even to the end of the credits where Wall-E replaces Lumo's bulb with a new energy-saver bulb. And then I looked at all the Wall-E tie-in merchandising, esp. that bit of landfill-to-be that Mal got for Xmas, a small Wall-E that responds to sound and dances. And the hypocrisy of Disney/Pixar just pissed me off. They are Buy-n-Large, by and large.

Thisis a statement of beauty...and don't get me started on my Beauty and the Beast rant...And I would like to state for the record that I'm going to beat the rush and proactively agree with whatever Raq says about movies.

Phew. That will save a lot of 'dittos.'

don't get me started on my Beauty and the Beast rant...

You mean how Belle sings in her opening song (her mission statement, if you will) that she wants adventure and the wide world, and she ends up playing house with dogboy (granted that he had a KILLER library)?

Way to model independent women, Disney.

I always thought that once he was free and they danced, the would have adventure and the wide world together. But B & B is my favorite fairy tale.

It never occurred to me to think of this as a retcon, but I can accept that this is because it's the retcon I subscribe to.

This. It was in the plot synopsis my dad gave me while we were watching (me being about eleven and desperately needing footnotes in order to follow the damn thing), so it never occured to me that it wasn't part of the movie all along. I will grant that it's there in an obscure subtexty way and could easily qualify as a retcon.

It's in the 2001 script, too, although the expositioning scene isn't in the movie because Kubrick is Kubrick. But yeah, I don't think it was ever their intention that HAL just goes nuts for no reason at all, so I wouldn't call it a retcon.

Yes, yes, I get the whole parable stuff, how Eve found a vegetative substance, gave it to the male leader of people, and it triggered him to gain a ton of Knowledge, after which he had to lead his people out of Eden (the Axiom).

I did not get that at all! Huh. Look at that.

"Beauty and the Beast" set my teef on edge. I literally started complaining about that film *In* the movie and didn't stop for 2-3 days later. My roommate at the time said to me: "what did you expect? Disney ruins a lot of fairy tales."

Only that shut me up.

Beauty and the Beast is argued to be one of the first feminist Western fairy tales (it is my favorite fairy tale) and Disney fucked all that up - and even threw in some Frankenstein references just for the fuck of it.

I quite liked WALL-E, especially the first third. But the end, with the return to the desolate Earth, should have turned into the Jamestown colony in The New World, with the unprepared dying off at startling rates.

And I never assumed that HAL was anything but rational. In fact, I thought that was the point: rationality can often lead to intellectual dead-ends, but humanity was touched by the creativity of the obelisk.