That’s called Padding The Film. Same thing they did in Star Trek: The Motion Picture with those approximately 6 1/2 hours of footage of the ship travelling through the innards of the V-ger cloud to get to the actual center…
It’s way more than that. If you saw 2001 in theaters, it truely was an awesome site to behold, albeit, a creepy one.
[packing up my analysis and going home]
Don’t be sad TWDuke. The fact that it wasn’t supposed to mean that, doesn’t mean it doesn’t. (Is that sentence comprehensible to anyone but me?)
They needed something, be it a song or speech or anything, in that point in the movie. Ok, so Clarke thinks the song is there only because he had already heard a computer sing it. That needn’t be the only reason. If it was not so appropriate it might not have been chosen or even sugested.
I saw 2001 for the first time as a midnight movie at the IMAX theater on Chicago’s Navy Pier.
It was awesome, man.
Seeing it later on the small screen was totally different, and it did feel a bit like padding then.
Couple o’ notes:
Details like the orbiting H-bombs, the emotional distance between humans, and the fact that Bowman and Poole were kept in the dark about the true mission of Discovery, show that Homo Sapiens is still in a tribalistic stage of development, with serious potential for self-destruction. HAL might be seen as, in a way, a higher moral intelligence, since (according to the novel) he is unable to reconcile his core function of analyzing and providing accurate information, and his instructions to withhold crucial information from Dave and Frank – to lie.
The “light show”; I always saw this as cinematic shorthand for an experience that was simply beyond a modern human’s capacity to absorb and comprehend.
2001 should have won an Oscar for makeup, for the Australopithecines; however Planet of the Apes came out the same year.
The monoliths are my idea of what a truly advanced machine would look like: no apparent moving parts, but with a definite AI and the ability to manipulate matter and energy in ways we’re only beginning to imagine.
And yes, the movie is a masterpiece, in the old sense of demonstrating that its maker was a master at his art.
I’ll second this. I tried watching the movie but I couldn’t stomach it at the time. What the other poster wrote is pretty much it. The black thingies are supposed to advance human evolution. They’re also spaced out so advancement doesn’t happen at the wrong time.(To avoid having god monkeys or something like that.) I suppose others could answer this better since I read the book about 15 years ago.
It’s important to note that the movie and book do differ in several places, and one such place (at least IMO, though I’m fairly certain it’s fact) is the ending. SPOILERS The book explains the room that David ends up in as an alien recreation, designed to mimic an actual hotel room. Apparently, the aliens gathered this concept from out broadcast TV waves (no joke, the book fell apart at the end). David then opens a cupboard and opens a box of cereal (or some food container) and finds a blue sticky substance, because apparently, aliens didn’t know, or couldn’t recreate what we eat. sigh I loved the book up until that point; I nearly cried.
“out” should be “our” in my previous post.