re: #36 freetoken

Sadly true. I suspect the emphasis on the visual action keeps any time spent (on screen) in contemplation mode to a minimum. It’s a general weakness of cinema, and when films are intentionally made to break that (say My Dinner With Andre) they get automatically confined to being “art films”.

Even great SciFi films that are morality tales, say Soylent Green, get loaded with action sequences. 2001 is considered boring by modern standards.

90 minute movie length roughly lets you do a screen implementation of a short story of short novella. So unless the navigation issue is a central plot point of the story the odds are it won’t be brought up. Unless it’s something of a McGuffin to get a plot going. (Case in point is a Harry Harrison short story where the character is on a planet to repair a beacon - which evolved natives have unintentionally damaged. The beacon is there to provide the interaction point. Why it exists is simply covered in passing in a few sentences.)