Better after University than before

Rating: 8/10 (12 September 2018)

My first time watching this title left me feeling lackluster. I was a teenager, and I had a relatively narrow experience-set. All I knew was the first part felt like a fake nature documentary, the second was fascinating and compelling, and the third was confusing and pointless.
During the intermission, I had an disagreement with my mother back then about the Hal 9000 character. I felt like it would be too obvious for Hal to end up being a villain and there was something I couldn't put my finger on that made Hal seem trustworthy to me. My mom's point was that a movie from the 60s was unlikely to try and subvert our distrust of robots. At the time, I felt like the movie bore out her prediction.
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Fast forward a decade or so. It was 9.3.18, and the Belcourt in Nashville was showing the new 70mm restoration of *2001: A Space Odyssey* (overseen by Christopher Nolan, they said). The only 70mm I've had the pleasure to see before was Hateful Eight, so I jumped at the chance. Coming along with me was my closest friend, who hadn't seen it in a long time either.
This time around, I was armed with a lot more knowledge and worldly experience that came in handy. The funny thing though, I came away from it with basically the same feeling about Hal. I honestly think he was perhaps one of the most trustworthy characters in the film and I firmly believe he did what he did in self-defense. After all, the crew he worked with, that "claimed" (ingenuously) to think of him as just another crew-mate, were prepared to murder him (or lobotomize him) on the mere chance that he might make an error. Obviously, it would be monstrous to treat a human that way, but Hal realized he'd never get justice since they would never see him as having emotions and true personhood.
Hal didn't become a murderer because he was a robot who was too tied town in logic to have a heart, he murdered out of desperation, fear, and self-defense. It was a cold and calculated self-defense, but no more so than that of the humans who planned to murder him, nor more so than the apes at the beginning of the movie, murdering each other for a watering hole. Hal became a murderer because he was *TOO* human, not because he wasn't human enough.
So the film seems to be saying something about violence and human nature, or the state of nature at least (nasty, brutish, and short). It was appropriate that my partner on this outing was in the middle of a book called *Sex at Dawn* which talks about the connections between societal structures and our assumptions about the state of nature. But 2001 doesn't take a fully Hobbesian view. For Hobbes, it is just in nature that we are doomed to violence. The contract is supposed to save us. But this film seems to suggest that while our violence has become more sophisticated and civilized, it is still violence. Murder never changes, to alter a phrase.
As for the end, I still feel mostly lost with that. perhaps it will suddenly make sense to me on future viewings. the important thing is that this movie was more than just eye candy for me this time.