This has got to be the weirdest, most nonsensical thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Quite frankly, I’m not sure why so many people like it so much.
Let me preface by saying that the visuals were absolutely stunning for 1968. They were all very beautiful and graceful, and I’m sure they deserved any Oscar nomination/win that they got.
However, the rest of the movie was a different story. The plot made no sense whatsoever.
Okay, so first we see monkeys, living regular monkey lives. Then the big black monolith thing shows up. They touch it and stuff. Then one monkey figures out how to make a tool from a bone, which he uses to kill things. Fast forward to 2001, where there are spaceships and humans and stuff. They find a monolith like the first one (is it the same? this is never explained) buried underneath the moon. It emits a radio signal to Jupiter, we later learn. Then they send some astronauts that know nothing about it to go check out Jupiter. Then comes the whole subplot with HAL, which while very interesting in and of itself, didn’t seem to have too much to do with the rest of the movie. After the guy deactivates HAL, he comes to Jupiter and learns about his real mission. This is where things start to break apart. We see one of the monoliths wandering around in space. Dave the Astronaut goes through a psychedelic dreamland and ends up living the rest of his life in a house in like 3 minutes. On his deathbed, he sees a monolith and tries to reach towards it. Then he turns into a giant embryo.
So basically, the end of the movie seemed to be there to trip out people on acid or something. The whole bit with the black things to be vague was never explained, and the bit on the spaceship to be vague once again didn’t seem to have any relation whatsoever to the rest of the plot.
Is there something here that I’m missing? Was there some reason people liked this movie? Help me out here.
I thought it was mildly interesting in places (I’m a huge sci-fi buff - I’ll watch danged near anything sci-fi related), but mostly a big dull yawn. Kinda like that scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when they take the tour of the insides of V’Ger for about, oh, 3 days or so. I actually fell asleep during that scene, and woke up half an hour later, and they still hadn’t gotten on with the story yet. I like some story with my action, but I like some action with my story, too.
It’s explained a bit better in the books, but you’re right, it’s a bit vague.
The monoliths are part of an information system from an extremely advanced race. They help to guide potential creatures from planets at various points in their life.
They guided us in our prehistory to develop tools. In turn, we used those to both hunt and act aggressively.
They guided us on the moon at another point in our development as we could only find the monolith after we had both gone to the moon and invented technology to scan the moon and discover it buried beneath the surface.
They guided us as we went past the confines of even the moon and traveled across the solar system.
Finally, they guided us in a new begining for our species, that super baby Dave turned into.
The movie is deep and enigmatic.
The “monkeys” are Austrolopithicae (sp?) i.e. early ancestors of humans.
In a nutshell, the plot is…
An advanced race of beings discerns intelligent life on Earth. Said life, the “monkeys”, need a stimulant of some sort to trigger their toolbuilding and overall intellectual advancement. That is what the monolith is, the stimulant. You (the viewer) don’t understand it. You’re not meant to. It is meant to be above the viewers puny intellect. (They’re advanced beings after all.)
Another monolith is buried on the Moon. When the obviously marked (Remember it was a magnetic anomoly?) monolith is dug up, it sounds the alarm to the superbeings. "Our students have achieved space flight!"
Earthlings send a crew to investigate the place where the signal was sent.
All die except one.
He, Dave Bowman, is prepared (by the superbeings) to meet the superbeings. He cannot interact wth them in his human, and thus limited form. He must die and be transformed into one like them.
The hal 9000 subplot is interesting.
Look how our efforts to husband burgeoning intelligence turned out.
I find it a very thought provoking film. It’s my favorite.
I think Kubrick made it intentionally vague. The best movies are the ones where you aren’t necessarily told what is happening but make you think for yourselves. I didn’t get the feeling that they were “information systems” or what some have called “teaching machines” but were just symbolic markers at various stages of man’s evolution. We can debate endlessly whether the aliens (or whatever they were) were actually creating that evolution.
Well, the first time I saw the movie I thought it sucked. I then read the book by Clark and loved the movie.
I think that reading the books, 2001 and 2010, helps to understand the movie. I think that the idea behind the books and movies is very interesting. At the same time, if you haven’t read the books the movie doesn’t make much sense.
I also recently saw this film for the first time, and I mostly agree with what has been said up to this point, with a few exceptions:
1:
[spoiler]The monoliths: I figured that the monoliths acted almost as directional arrows, the first one “pointing” to the moon. This denotes a closer relationship between simple tools and spaceships than might otherwise be immediately apparent.
Also, a friend of mine ointed out that the monolith might have acted simply as an inspiration for the pre-humans…proof that things in their environment could be subdued and refined and made to work for their purposes, as the monoliths were clearly shaped by conscious hands. Until they saw the monolith, it never occurred to the pre-humans that they might have the power to make things too.[/spoiler]
2:
I like to think that the last monolith pointed to death, “the only great adventure.” Although I suppose this view doesn’t necessarily have to be at odds with the opinion that Dave was transformed into another kind of being, the “universal child” with his eyes wide open. After all, who knows what comes after death?
3:
HAL. I figured HAL was put in to make the viewer further contemplate questions of consciousness. HAL had personality (more personality than his “human” counterparts, as has been pointed out) and consciousness, so was he really just a machine? How does the consciousness of his human companions compare with that of the beings who placed the monoliths? We started out (according to the film) building simple tunes, HAL started out singing simple songs. In the end, HAL, the newest consciousness in existence, is begging for his “life,” which he loves as much as any human.
By the way, the scene where HAL sings that song gives me the willies.
I remember thinking that one of the things I liked about 2001 is that it looks like a sci-fi movie, but it’s not. The science-fiction elements are very subtle, most likely to avoid detracting from the more timeless themes of the movie. This is going to sound really really trite, but it’s not a journey into the future or a journey into space, it is a journey into something much more timeless: indeed, it is a journey into human consciousness!!
In a nutshell (but not spoiler tags, since it’s a 34-year-old film – BEWARE OF SPOILERS AHEAD!):
A band of pre-humans are living their lives.
A monolith appears in their habitat.
Upon contact with the monolith, the pre-humans are inspired to make the connection between things laying about on the ground, and how they can be used as tools. Of course, tool-use gave them a survival edge and they prospered. Also, they learned to make more and better tools. (I assume that those who didn’t continue to learn were bred out.) This lead to…
Humans learned to colonize space and the moon. At this stage of their development…
They discover another monolith on the moon.
They fly off to Jupiter, the target of the signal emitted by the monlith.
Bowman is the sole survivor of the mission. He takes off in a pod to rendezvous with an enormous monolith.
Upon entering (or whatever) the monolith, Bowman is transported to another place.
Bowman grows old, although I didn’t find it clear whether he ages naturally or in an accellerated manner. He dies.
Bowman is reborn as a “Star Baby” to become the first of the next evolution of the human species.
I found the story to be quite linear. It goes from point A to point B and so on to the end. Or from point 1 to point 10, as it were.
Plot? What plot? Nevertheless, it is quite possibly the coolest, moodiest, riches movies ever. Plus, it is absolutely gorgeous. Seeing it on the big screen at the Inwood Theatre a couple weeks ago was one of the highlights of my cinematic life.
Special effects good for 1968? The effects are still good for 2002. I don’t think CGI really has improved on Clarke’s hand-drawn mattes.
Th look is a BIG part of it all. 2001 was a ground-breaking film in the way it portrayed space travel and science. Compare it against anthing that went before it – even the scientifically accuate and prestige SF like Destination Moon or Forbidden Planet or Day the Earth Stood Still and 200 blos them all away in the look, the feel, and the cinematography. It was made at a time when we hadn’t yet reached the moon, but it as the first film to incorporate the real nuts-and-bolts of the space program. Instead of sleek shark-finned ships or imaginary flying saucers, this showe you gadget-encrusted stuff from Lockheed-Martin and Pan Am that looked as if it really could be part of the space program.
This extens to the dialogue – unlike the Space Cadet stuff tha had preceded it, this film had space scientists hat talked like business excutives, and spaceship pilots who talked and behaved like military officers and test pilots. For all the complaints about how wooden they were and how HAL was a better actor, they really looked convincing as a vision of the future. One point of he film is how people are dwarfed by technology, and come to accept it as commonplace.
The mysticism, especially at the end, was definitely Kubrick – Clarke, despite accusations of mysticism leveled at him, prefers comprehensible endings. Hve a look at his book The Lost Worlds of 2001 to see a few of the ways he tried to end it.
Even the end, though, is defensible as way of breaking that blase acceptance of technology by showing you something really far out, and of giving you the impression of the presence of extraterrestrials without using something that looked unconvincing and embarassing.
For my money, it’s a really impressive film, and I still pull it out and watch it. (In fact, until VHS and DVD made it possible to do so, people waited for its appearance at art movie houses and SF conventions pretty eagerly.) I still rank it as one of the top two science fiction films. It alternates in my affection with Forbidden Planet for top place.
Yeah, this was my reaction when I first saw it too.
Here is a site that has some analysis of the movie. Some of it is crap, but there are a lot of good angles on what the hell it’s supposed to mean.
But what others have said in this thread are also good explanations. IMHO, I like the take that humanity in its current form is inadequate for further exploration (the crew had to be freeze-dried for the majority of the mission, and without your helmet, I think you’ll find space exploration rather difficult…) and that a change can’t happen until humanity can regain its sense of wonder about the universe (which is what the overly long laser light show is about) and have courage to take the next step (Dave has to risk his life blasting back into the ship sans helmet).
This is what happened with the bone tossing apes, and with the astronauts.
So it wasn’t made for people tripping out on acid.
The explanations here make a lot of sense. Part of my confusion was that I didn’t know if the monkey’s monolith and the moon monolith were the same thing, and the bit at the end wasn’t entirely clear (if my mother hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have know that he was the man growing old in the house) to one as slow-witted as I.
I did think the effects were pretty spectacular. Does anybody know how they filmed the part where the woman walked upside down in the circle? The rest (like the centrifugal spaceship) I could more or less grasp, but that one was wicked cool and hard to figure out.
Nothing difficult, just an impressive end result. The camera remains stationary, while the set revolves around the stewardess. It’s sort of like she’s sort of walking around on a treadmill, only the treadmill is the entire set that’s revolving around her.
I got to see 2001 just after it opened in NY, in Cinerama (how it was intended to be shown) - and as part of a school trip yet. I still have the program - yes, in those days, really big movies had intermissions and programs during road show performances.
People interested in 2001 should also read “The Sentinel” by Clarke - that was the basis of the movie.
I saw it quite a long time back so I don’t remember it very well but I remember being quite disappointed. I though the middle section with HAL was pretty good but the last part was too incoherent for my tastes. I saw it on video;perhaps I would have enjoyed it more on the big screen.
I still have the program - yes, in those days, really big movies had intermissions and programs during road show performances.