2001 A Space Odyssey: help me out here. What the hell is the message?

OK, I've seen the movie several times, even twice on the BIG SCREEN when it first came out. Have read the book. And re-read the book. Read it again, making notes in the margin. Am a reasonably intelligent woman. Have managed other Arthur C. Clark books with no trouble.

WHAT IS HE SAYING IN 2001 Space Odyssey???? Or did Kubrick just muddle the message?

Oh, and have a giggle

http://www.kubrick2001.com/

;)

This movie is about what a drugged up anti-establishment trip the late 1960s were. Despite all our computers, we are just monkeys using sticks and that goes double for LBJ and his war in Vietnam.

<== this is just a stick

<== these are monkeys him too ==>

Everything after Hal gets shut down is just an acid trip and that goes double for the floating baby in space. This is what Kubrick said about it in 1968:

"You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film--and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level--but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point."

So, to put it generously, the movie is tabula rasa; it's about feeling more than thinking, traveling more than arrival, experiencing more than deconstructing. Or, to put it bluntly, it's really pretty bullshit.

We didn't heed it and we now have FAUX and puppet politicians, lost blonds and short attention spans.

Redstone

WE HAVE OUR WINNER!

and, no I am not surprised at who would dare say the obvious truth! :hi:

All I remember is that they used the Pan-Am logo in the film!

HA! Fools!

(from Wikipedia)

Stanley Kubrick encouraged people to explore their own interpretations of the film, and refused to offer an explanation of "what really happened" in the movie, preferring instead to let audiences embrace their own ideas and theories. In a 1968 interview with Playboy magazine, Kubrick stated:

“You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point."

And since some movies are too, get one of those clip on lights for dark theaters ;)

"In a lot of ways, 2001 is the ultimate cinematic Rorschach test. Any review winds up saying more about the reviewer than about the film itself.

Instead of trying to tell you what I think it all means, I will satisfy myself with saying that I think 2001 is a singularly important film. Aside from Citizen Kane, it may be structurally and stylistically the most significant film in the first 100 years of cinema. More than any other film, before or since, it shows that film can be used for something beyond mere storytelling. Almost all other "great films" still hold to a more traditional narrative structure.

Not so here. It would be pointless to summarize the plot of 2001, because the plot is almost beside the point. This is cinema as mood piece, the use of imagery to stir the mind in ways that go beyond reason. 2001 is a film to be experienced and then dwelt upon at length, rather than just watched. If no one comes to the same conclusions, so much the better. I seem to remember that director Stanley Kubrick compared the structure of this film to that of symphony. I think this is accurate. 2001 is as open to individual interpretation as any good piece of classical music.

I have said elsewhere that I would not classify this film as science fiction, unless one considers metaphysics to be a science. Still, Kubrick's insistence upon rigid technical accuracy means that the science-fiction elements are some of the most sophisticated ever committed to film.

In this vein, the middle and later sections of the film which follow Heywood Floyd to the lunar crater Tycho and then follow Dave Bowman to Jupiter and beyond present us, the viewers of today, with a strange contradiction. Even though the film's view of man's relationship to technology is rather bleak, the level of technology portrayed for the years 1999-2001 appears wildly optimistic. It is fascinating to see just how big we were dreaming back in the 1960's.

2001's predictions about the future are a wild collection of hits and misses. It's true that there are no giant wheel-like space stations in orbit, but the first elements of a more modest station are already in place. Its interior, however, will not resemble the concourse at Heathrow. And although the Pan-Am space plane was overly optimistic, both about luxurious 747-style passenger travel in space and also about the existence of the airline itself, the design of the ship does accurately predict the basic shape of the space shuttle we currently fly.

Like I said, the film's view of man's relationship to his machines is almost relentlessly pessimistic. How could it be otherwise when the only character with a semblance of a personality is a sentient supercomputer, and a homicidal one at that? The scene in which the HAL 9000 kills the still hibernating astronauts is especially chilling when the camera focuses on the computer ubiquitous red eye, like a traditional movie would dwell on the face of a murderer surveying his handiwork. With a human killer, we could read the expression on the face, maniacal glee or tortured guilt. With HAL, the lack of any possibility of expression means that we have a killer whose motives are both unknown and unknowable. I challenge even the makers of The Blair Witch Project to concoct a scarier scenario than that.

And the following scene, in which the pitiless killer begs for its own existence as David Bowman coldly and mechanically disassembles its higher mental functions, adds an equally chilling coda to that idea. Our attempt to create technology in our own image has succeeded in duplicating even the darker corners of our nature.

The human characters are overshadowed by both HAL and the alien monolith, but unlike other technology-driven effects films, this is not accidental or a deficiency. In 2001, the human characters are almost elements of the scenery, their interaction part of the background noise. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) is a non-stop stream of unctuous pleasantries. His bland company-man exterior makes his reminder that security oaths will be required from anyone who knows about the monolith all the more ominous. He seems like a nice-enough guy, but his words hint at rather authoritarian attitudes.

Astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), on the other hand, seem to have totally submerged their personalities into their jobs, until they almost act like machines. Their responses seem almost programmed, automatic, while their computer goes about having a nervous breakdown. I found it ironically amusing when, in response to a reporter's question, Poole says that HAL acts like he has emotions, and says so in the most unemotional voice of which a human is capable.

2001 is not a movie for the people who log into the Video section of Amazon.com and blather that Armageddon is "the greatest movie ever made!" This film makes demands that its audience try to understand what it is trying to say without it being explained, but doesn't care if we fail to do so. The pace is almost glacial at times, but the film rewards and doesn't bore those willing to make the effort."

but the light show was tedious and I wish I had taken a book at that point.

Interesting comments. I do thank you for them. Being a fan of both Sci-Fi and metaphysical, I had hoped to get more from this one, but just never came away with any real feelings at all. I keep trying every few years, but I still fall asleep during all that light show stuff.

The old age scenes were good, but the light show was just tedious. I keep hoping someday I will find meaning in that. Guess it just isn't the scene for migraine sufferers. Watched it again this afternoon, and I have another Space Odyssey headache.

at the age of 13 (at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood) it did instill a sense of wonder in me, about the universe, particularly the size and construction of the universe, and to a lesser extent mankind's place and purpose in the universe. Soon aftewards I read Licoln Barnett's book "The Universe and Dr. Einstein" which explain's Einstein's theory of Relativity in laypeople's terms. That provides answers to some of the more concrete questions but not the metaphysical or spiritual ones. So I think the film started me on a quest for knowlege other than what I was receiving in my regular schooling. The "cosmic questions" that weren't really being addressed in the regular public school currculum, where we were building California missions out of sugar cubes and learning to paint our names in Japanese characters and playing dodgeball in between. I admit that some stretches of '2001' are slow and would be considered boring my many viewers. The long scene of the spacewalk with the astronaut's breathing for the only sound was left that long to make the viewer feel how tedious and uncomfortable that a spacewalk would actually be. That's what I read. The star-gate "light show" sequence is actually my favorite part of the film so I'm sorry to hear that it gives you a headache.

typically cut-and-dried, meticulously planned out studio project. They based it on a short story, but they shot more than 400 hours of film, trying different special effects and methods, adding and discarding scenes, changing the title several times, and ultimately discarding 95% of the footage that was shot. I think Kubrick's vision of the film changed throughout the production. In a weird way, I think it enhances the "enigmatic" quality of the film, and thus (in the view of some people) its artistic value, that even the director of the film is mystified by his own creation.

Or don't leave a crazy AI in charge when you go EVA?

I never leave bed without my helmet.

It's a long sordid story filled with wiseguys, loose women, international intrigue, currency manipulations, job interviews, GD flame wars and Republicans. You don't want to know.

:popcorn:

Actually, I should take that advice. Fell outta bed and just missed knocking my noggin on the floor this morning... Long story and I don't wanna talk about it.

No, let it be. Sounds like a thread killer.

bonds of earth's grip and people walked on the moon and shit like that?


i imagine there were people still alive in 1968 who still remembered the industrial revolution and "horseless carriages." i'm sure going into outer space, the rapid escalation of technological advances, changing social mores, and assorted other things made a framework for many active imaginations.


or something.

i wonder if there were some people who waited until they were "peaking" when they went to see that. i bet it was "tripped out man" and shit like that.

But, yeah, my granddad was alive when the movie came out, but he wouldn't go with us to see it. He stopped going when Mae West stopped making films and swore he wouldn't go back until she started making them again.

Damn good thing the old coot died just before Mira Breckenridge came out! It woulda killed him. :rofl:

The end of the movie Dave sees himself laying in bed, a very old man. Then there's the shot of the human embryo. So what I came away with is that we (humans) see ourselves as old and wise, while the universe sees us a not yet born.

We have a long way to go.

Mz Pip
:dem:

Hitch hiker's guide has the most direct plan for those of us on this little rock ;)

and thanks for all the fish! :hi:

Mz Pip
:dem:

I watched the movie and read the book. It's very deep and metaphysical but it's very hard to grasp its' meaning.

Blue

This was first printed in a book by Jerome Agel on 2001, written at that time by a 15 year old high school girl named Margaret Stackhouse.
I have read numerous interpretations of the film and this is as good as any. I'm sure you can find some Kubrick sites with analyses of all his films.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0009.html

Unless it's your own trip, in which case be my guest.

Actually, now that I think about it...the movie was BETTER in Portugese -- and I don't speak Portugese!

Don't touch them if you don't know what you're doing.

I have seen.
Sums up so much.
Humanity has proven it over and over.And we don't show any signs that we will ever stop.

Then I saw it as an adult (a few times) and really tried to understand it, but it bored me.

looked like a sperm?

And it was carrying DNA (Dave, to be exact).

And at the end there was an embryo.

Did I miss the sex scene???? (or was that all the groovy lights?)