2001- A Space Odyssey

T

TaylorTRoom

1,000+ Posts
What a great movie! I haven't seen it in 28 years, and back then it was a regular commercial TV broadcast. I recently purchased it in HD-DVD, and watched it through. There is so much great about it that I missed before.

Lots of spoilers below*********************************

Basically, the movie starts out 1 million BC, with an alien monolith giving some struggling pre-humanoid apes a little push intelligence wise to help them learn how to use tools. They use their first tools (clubs) to help hunt food, and quickly thereafter, to turn the tables on a stronger tribe that had been abusing them.

It then flashes fwd to a time in the future when the US moon colony discovers a similar monolith buried on the moon. As soon as it is exposed to sunlight (which would only happen if somebody dug it up), a radio burst is sent from the monolith to Saturn. You see, the monolith was put there a million years earlier as a sentinel, to let the aliens know when/if the apes would develop enough in intelligence to travel in space.

The movie is somewhat slow-paced. This is good, because you want, as a viewer, to simultaneously appreciate the future technological vision, as well as appreciate the epic story.

It really is an epic story. there are great echoing themes, for you see just as the primitive tribes fought, the future tribes do too (the US does not want the Russians to know that they are sending a team to Jupiter to investigate the monolith further). Just as the aliens gave the apes intelligence, the human mission has an artificially intelligent computer, HAL9000, that humans created.

It's a huge mistake to take HAL on the mission, because it figures out what's up with the monolith, and decides that it wants to take the next evolutionary quantuum leap, instead of humans. HAL almost pulls it off.

It's a very interesting movie. Kubrick decided to have very subdued acting, which creates an otherworldly tone, and allows for the computer's "personality" to seem more human in comparison than it would otherwise. Great existential questions raised about "what is man" (i.e. are the aliens ready for humans to be as violent and aggressive as they are?).

Anyone else really enjoy this movie?
 
I have always thought it's a bit of a bore and over-rated. HAL is pretty cool, though.
 
That's not as fun as my explanation. Oh well.

In 2001, they did make it clear that HAL was "freaked" by the lip-read discussions of shutting him down. HAL wanted to "live".

Is 2010 worth renting/buying?

BTW, I don't know if this movie is available in Blu-Ray yet, but I assume it will be if it isn't. It's worth getting in high definition.
 
2001 was about man and his tools.

At the beginning, once man mastered tools, he prospered. By the end of the movie, man was mastered by his tools (HAL).
 
2001, A Space Odyssey is one of the great science fiction movies (if not movies in general) of all time, IMO--a cinematic work of art.
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I saw the sequel, and it was teh suck--nowhere near as good as 2001. You're not missing out on anything if you pass on it.
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2001 the film and 2001 the book are pretty unique in that neither was technically based off the other. They were created in parallel in while there was cross-pollination between the two, there are some actual differences in the story. At a basic level, in the book they go to Saturn and in the movie they go to Jupiter but there are a lot of other differences as well.

What happens though is that the book and film are slightly different perspectives or interpretations of the same ideas. Each one is greater for the existence of the other. If you haven't read the book, you must read it immediately. It is fascinating to compare the two and reading the book will increase your appreciation for the movie. If you didn't think much of the movie, even the ape scenes are interesting after reading the book.

2010 the book is almost as good. 2010 the movie was based strictly off the book and is pretty standard hollywood fare.

By the way, HAL is one letter earlier in the alphabet than IBM. Arthur C. Clarke claims that's a coincidence though.

I'm a nut for this film. I once recorded a voicemail message where I asked, "answer the phone please HAL" to which he responded, "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" and we went back and forth until HAL says, "this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye". BEEP.
 
I liked 2010 but I can understand why some would not like it. It's very different from 2001 and it sort of narrows down the mystery of the monolith and gives it cheap religious implications (I was very irritated by Dr. Floyd's insistence as if he knew almost exactly what the monolith is even though he tries to qualify it in speech). Nonetheless, I did like the idea of Jupiter becoming a star and Europa thawing out and becoming a planet. Only problem I have is that there wasn't a 3rd installment of the series that tracked its development and its ultimate contact with Earth.
 
I read the 2 novels and didn't like them. At least not as much as I liked 2010. The premise of 3001 was beyond absurd and 2061's plot was pedestrian at best. If ever there were sequels to the movies, I wouldn't want them to have anything to do with either of those (but if forced to pick, 2061 for sure). From the limited rumors I've read, Hanks was only interested in 3001. I've never seen anything about him wanting to do 2061






















Spoiler Alert













The premise of 3001 is that Frank Poole, yes the same Frank Poole you saw float dead in space in 2001, is found floating around in space and revived somewhere around Neptune (iirc) and he goes back to Earth discovering that human brains are now able to interface with computers. In addition, Clarke ****** around with the timeline of the original 2 books and it contradicts a lot of things (for example, he gives the date of the USSR's extinction being the actual year, 1991, even though the Soviets were a world super power in 2010's novel and movie)
 
It's interesting to note how much Lucas borrowed from Kubrick (the incomplete but functional Deathstar is an homage to the incomplete but functional space station), and how much he just blew off (Kubrick doesn't pretend that there is sound in space, or gravity on a spaceship unless generated).

I've always heard how much Lucas wanted to echo cultural myths in his Star Wars series, but do you see how many Kubrick uses? Prometheus, Frankenstein, even the Odyssey. And mankind, upon discovering the sentinel beacon on the moon, sending a spacecraft to Jupiter to confront what's out there? Tower of Babel.

Truly a great piece of film-making. Hitchcock would have been proud of the way Kubrick showed the HAL-controlled pod move towards Poole, cut away, and then show Poole's flailing body careen off into space.

I also liked the grim and efficient way that Bowman shuts down HAL's intelligence. He knew from experience that HAL was "smarter" and more able to understand possible outcomes. No false drama of a debate with HAL. His termination of HAL was every bit as cold-blooded as the first pre-human killing in scene 1, and HAL's killings of the crew.
 
More geek confessions: Everytime I get a new computer, I register its name as "HAL." I also have the soundtrack, which has all the creepy avant garde voices. I have also read the book.
 
Brilliant movie-great story creatively filmed. Love rewatching it every year or two.
I didn't think the monoliths aided the early human in making tools, I thought they were just monitoring and signaling devices-when a certain milestone was achieved, it sent signals to the civilization that left them behind, checking to see what progress mankind had achieved.
Didn't know that about HAL, being programmed with an unresolvable paradox. That makes sense. HAL made a great villian in the movie.
 
here's a thought about HAL-

A lot of our understanding of the world is guided by the culture we are given. For example, a lot of differences between the English speaking people and the French can be explained by the differences in philosophy between Descartes and Locke. Different models of reasoning eventually lead to different reasoning conclusions.

Given that, if we were to ever create a sentient computer, but programmed it to communicate with our language and our reasoning paradigms, doesn't it stand to reason that it might be as willing to kill as humans are? That it would also be territorially protective, and aggressive in confrontations?

Food for thought, and an example of the great issues brought up by this vivionary movie.
 
Seriously, HAL was nothing more than a tool like the ones the cavemen used. The point of the movie was that man finally lost mastery over his tools.
 
I think that HAL was created to be a tool, and a very vital one (HAL was "briefed" on the mission, although the crew wasn't). However, he transcended that state, and achieved sentience. HAL saw itself as being a more advanced being than the crew (he beat them at chess, judged their art, operated the ship). The struggle between HAL and the crew could be seen by HAL as similar to the struggle between the "advanced" pre-human and the "non-advanced" pre-humans- it was time for the lesser beings to be pushed aside.
 
Great film with effects that were way ahead of their time.

There was only one inaccuracy during the entire film as far as how things react in space.

Anyone remember what it was ?
 
Evidently, the room was modeled after a room at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Perhaps the aliens captured it from Bowman's memory?

The thing that makes the movie great, and frustrating, is the way Kubrick refuses to stop and explain stuff. You have to figure out that the rotations on the space station and the spacecraft are to create centripetal force. You have to decide if there is any significance to the US taking on the mission (the single most important voyage in human history) without including the Soviets.

The end sequence? I think the monolith was showing Bowman the big bang beginning of the universe, the creation of galaxies, and the solar system. Then it showed him (in a differant light spectrum) the monolith travelling the Earth until it found the Serenghetti, and presumably the pre-humans that it could work with.

The aging business, and Bowman seeing himself? In the alien world, time is much less of a constraint, and holds less significance than in ours. The aliens seem to be able to traverse it as well as we do the physical dimensions.

A great movie to have so many interpretations and themes.
 
Saw it several times at the 70mm screen at the Americana .Wonderful film. Visionary. ANd special effects an entire generation ahead of all the others.
 
****Spoiler*****************************************************8














The technical mistake was when Heywood was sucking through his straw on the weightless shuttle flight, and removed the straw, the remaining contents flowed back down, instead of staying in the straw.
 
Creatively, this is Kubrick's best film, IMO. His consultation with Arthur C. Clarke was one of brilliance (for the record, Mr. Clarke did not pen the novel version of this until after the movie was released--and to the movie's benefit, as certain themes presented in the movie were better explained in Clarke's novel).

And Kubrick (& Clarke's) screenplay was based off of an Arthur C. Clarke short story entitled "The Sentinel".

As for HAL, one of the movie's themes hints at the possibility of HAL actually having emotions (as Dave says to the interviewer for the BBC, "Well, he's programmed that way... to make it easier for us to communicate with him.") However, I think the issues and delimmas that contront him ultimately reminds us that HAL is a very rational entity. He is the most accurate computer ever created, one that is designed to share information as accurately as possible. However, he has been given orders to with hold certain facts about the mission from the crew, which conflicts with his greater responsibility of providing precise, irrefutable data to said crew. HAL's conflict: how does he reconcile one order in lieu of the other.

So, in my mind, HAL makes a rational decision: he eliminates the crew, which solves the problem of having to supply them with information about everything while also having to hold to NASA's instructions about not revealing anything (in advance) about the nature of the mission.

In fact, during HAL's early conversations with Dave, it seems he is trying to prod Dave into investigating the nature of the mission for himself (which would relieve HAL of the responsibility of keeping the details secret)

"I've never been able to free myself of the (suspicion) that there are some strange things about this mission."

In any case, it is a great work of art stylistically and intellectually. However, many of my friends who have sat down and tried to watch it have been left in the dark. Also, the pacing of the movie isn't for everyone. Kubrick really focused on the special effects and the cinematography, because there just hadn't been anything like it up to that point.
 
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