During the movie 2010 there was rising tensions between the Soviets and the Americans which could have led to war, but I phrased my reply in a subtle way to the film Wargames which was resolved by a computer playing noughts and cross (tic-tac-toe) and asked the question how about game of chess.
Yes, I remember that movie. It was with Matthew Broderick. But it was back in the eighties if memory serves. I remember Matthew Broderick because in "Two and a Half Men", Alan Harper aka Jon Cryer claimed to be him to get preferential treatment at the clinic. Of course, it didn't work.
I can't shake the feeling that somehow the people in charge should have been able to convince HAL of the necessity of hiding the true purpose of the Jupiter mission from Dave and Frank. I mean, of course HAL was designed to process information without distortion or concealment, but still...assuming there was a good reason not to tell the crew about the monolith, shouldn't HAL have been able to go along with that? I mean, he wasn't being asked to lie for shits and giggles, there were reasons that he was given the orders that he was. Still, though, had Dave and Frank not threatened to disconnect HAL, perhaps none of this would have ever happened...seems that was what finally set him off. But US/Soviet tensions were at an all time high when the movie was made. (I'm actually surprised they managed to find so many Russian actors for the film!) There's no way anyone could have predicted that the USSR would fall just a few years later.
I guess, if we are going to invoke WarGames (I was playing the Invoke WarGames Gambit, declined scenario, but... ), it's worth mentioning that, without tic-tac-toe actually being in the system, the WOPR wouldn't have been spurred to examine all of the GTW scenarios for winnability. IOW, playing tic-tac-toe was necessary to save the world!
Seems Hal was a little too clever for his/everyone's own good. They had no idea that he could lip-read especially sideways which for a human being (even a trained one) is extremely difficult.
Speaking of lipreading I've been told that people who can do that get a kick out of watching old silent movies. Because the actors would often exchange barbs while... miming their roles.
I also wonder if Dave and Frank could simply have asked HAL to let them have a private conversation, like Chandra does in 2010. When Chandra does it, HAL immediately complies, but then again - at that point, HAL didn't have the conflicting orders that he was burdened with in 2001...
But Hal was already deceitful at that point because since he could lipread, he would have understood the order to turn the pod around and he didn't do it. So he may not have complied with the order (to give them privacy) and eavesdropped on the conversation.
Not to mention Chekov who's basically a caricature of a Soviet as seen by the Americans of that time (You know the Russians have invented everything shtick...) to say nothing about that ridiculous accent that for some reason they've decided to keep even in the new trek.
But it's unlikely that he would have complied given that he already was a bit scrambled eggs at that point.
Well, yeah, HAL was in the throes of having the incompatible directives. We are doomed to wonder, but never know!
The crew in hibernation knew about the true nature of the mission. Dave and Frank were kept in the dark for security reasons as they still had contact with others outside the space agency (although with the increasing time delay in signal transmission, it would be easy enough to intercept messages). It was the conflicting nature of the HAL's orders that turned him psychotic. As for Russian actors, Elya Baskin had immigrated in 1976 and Natasha Shneider came to America in 1978. Saveliy Kramarov was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1981 after a Western news media campaign and become persona non grata. Jan Triska was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to the US around 1977. I couldn't find any information about Oleg Rudnik, Vladimir Skomarovsky, and Victor Steinbach. So about half of the "Russian" cast had come to the US before the movie was made.
Here is where that bomb of a movie, METEOR got it right. No question what those platforms were for. Visually speaking, Moonraker shuttles entering 2001’s station would make more sense…with Orion III and Drax’s film a better fit. Now, were-heaven forbid-a reimagined movie done—Clarke’s work would be more closely followed. CGI would do a better Moonwatcher. The monolith would float, then clear…and an ebon spear would indeed make the jump cut to a stylus. Dream Chaser stop Falcon Heavy is the ride to ISS, with Stan Borowski’s NTR to the moon. The lunar cave would be huge compared to the Lunar campsite. There you have the civilization…with Discovery being the SCORPION concept craft from Spaceflight magazine’s cover a year or three back. Mini-series…ambient music…some exposition…some episodes like Gendy’s PRIMAL. I’d love to see those deleted scenes on a TV in the background of a miniseries…or as dream sequences
This movie definitely has a lot unpack in it's story and meaning. Even if you don't want to go too indepth in understanding the movie, I'm sure that we can all agree that the cinematography is just absolutely stunning.