> There's a monolith on a prehistoric plain, teaching our pre-human ancestors
> critical survival skills, including how to kill. Eons later, a matching
> monolith, dubbed Tycho Monolith Anomaly 1 or TMA1 for short, is found on the
> moon. Long ago the clever aliens buried the second object deep beneath the
> lunar surface supposing that if the screaming hominids they first observed
> reached the point where travel to and manipulation of the nearest off-world
> planetary body was possible (along with the ability to detect deeply
> shielded electromagnetic sources), the next level of their instruction could
> begin. The next level was important because even though, in many ways, we'd
> moved far beyond the screaming ape stage, in many other ways we were still
> poo flinging jackasses. Only, the 'poo' was nuclear tipped and could end
> the human story.
To give credit to the detractors -- I'm not among them -- the point about nuclear poo-flinging was practically absent from the movie (IIRC).
-- Andy