visual condensation of humankind's evolution amid the stars

Rating: 10/10 (3 May 2001)

If you haven't seen this movie by now then you must be living on Mars. 33 years after its release 2001 can still generate controversy and comment. On this web site alone 300 + reveiwers have made some very enlightening remarks and insights into what is still regarded as one of the all time best movies around. Most of the comments have been in the positive sense with a few exceptions. When 2001 came out in Apr 1968 man had still not yet landed on the Moon. The film garnered equal praise and harsh criticism. Scientists loved the idea of 'Hal' the artificial intelligence computer, essentially the central character of the movie and Hal's amazing capabilities. But critics argued that the film was confusing and fragmented, lacked any coherent storyline. Sometimes you come across cinematic art that demands more than just a passive sitting back and sensually aborbing its content, 2001 is one of those movies that demands your attention and is best thought of in reflection and contemplation. It communicates by many different means, allegory, symbolism, motif.
One of the most interesting comments I ran across was the cryptic remark of a German reviewer who stated that" 2001 IS the monolith". What does this really mean? Rather than go through a brief explanation of the sequence of the film I suggest if you haven't seen it, rent it now and come back here for more interesting tidbits. Kubrick never fully explained his movie but always suggested that people 'experience' it rather than analyse its workings. Humans being what they are chose the latter probably unsatisfied with the simple 'experience' mode of viewing it. There are two scenes in the movie which are justaposed to each other and separated by 4 million years of time. The first scene involves a small family of Chimpanzees who are unceremoniously ousted from their waterhole by an overly aggressive band of renegade chimps. The ousted group would have died off without water until the mysterious presence of a monolith-like device appeared without warning in their midst. After its appearance one of the banished chimps 'discovered' that a femur bone could be used as both a weapon and an aid to survival. When the banished chimps come back to the heavily guarded water hole they are armed to the teeth to challenge back their only means of survival. By killing the renegade ringleader all the other aggressive chimps disappear unable to defend themselves from the new" bone weapons" used against them. 4 million years forward and we have a similiar fight for survival involving a computer intelligence and a human in space.
The computer has killed off all the astronaut's companions and has now shut out the lone survivor, Commander Dave Bowman, from the spaceship Discovery. In fact what the computer Hal has done is handed Bowman a death sentence. Bowman needs oxygen to survive and he has a limited supply on board his pod. Faced with a computer that will not obey his commands he winces for a few minutes and then miraculously comes up with a plan to get on board the Discovery. The computer reminds him that he has forgotten to don his helmet and going through the escape airlock would be rather difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. But Bowman does the impossible outwits the computer and regains control of the craft just like the ousted chimps regain control of the waterhole. In the second scene there is no monolith in sight to 'assist' Bowman. However comments in the past about 2001 recognise the monolith as representing God, and therefore God assists the chimps elevating them to the stature of humans through ' divine intervention' if you like. But notice two elements linking the scenes, water and oxygen. These are two of three essential elements for human survival, the third being, food. What better way to link all three elements than to have the characters in space constantly eating all sorts of edibles ("tastes like chicken, Yeah, they're getting better at it all the time"). From the spaceflight commanders to the space stewardesses,from the astronauts Poole and Bowman to Dr. Floyd forgetting about zero gravity and his food tray, food abounds everywhere in the middle segment of this movie. These are our basic needs for minimal survival, if we are deprived of any of these we will eventually die. If we look again at what leads up to the second titanic scene between man and computer we get another insight into something much more disturbing. Hal controls all aspects of the ship and engages readily with the crew answering any of their questions. Its simply my contention that Hal believing that it was a' conscious entity' makes an independent thought about its position in the mission to Jupiter. Hal decides that it is superior to any of the crew under its serviance and any humans past ,present or future. The reasoning Hal uses is pure logic to reach this conclusion. Hal somewhere in the middle of a yet again 'unstimulating' game of chess with one the astronauts, Poole (water again) decides to rid itself of all human cargo and proceed to complete the mission by contacting the monolith itself. Bowman and Poole do not know of the existance of the monolith but are on board to assist in the mission and help revive the 3 hibernated scientists on board. Hal not only knows about the monolith but somehow understands its importance and the importance of the mission to be completed. So the computer sets a trap for Bowman and Poole and makes the brilliant deduction that the astronauts will rationalise that Hal is in error at predicting a faulty AE35 high gain antenna device. What Hal is doing is playing 'chess' with the crew members lives. Its heady stakes in space. When mission control tells the astronauts that Hal is in error predicting the fault because a replica Hal 9000 unit on earth says the AE 35 unit is not faulty, Poole smirks , and asks Hal to account for the earth simulator's diagnosis. What Hal says next is so earth shattering that the entire movie pivots on the answer. "I attribute it to human error", Hal intones confidently, "Its always been human error, it always will be". The crew miss the cryptic message in the statement, ie. computers are perfect, humans will always be in error, so why should humans make the contact with the monolith, it should be the computer Hal, a superior conscious entity. The crew are baffled by the statement but sense something is wrong and decide to unplug Hal before its does something serious to the ship and themselves. Some scientists worry that the progression of computer technology is getting out of control, or more specifically out of human control. The speed of computation today now streaks ahead of human ability to digest and assimilate the raw data that these machines produce. Could there be a a point where we, as a species, lose all control to the computers and then become subservient to them. That day will come , maybe not in our lifetime, but it will come.
Hal knows what Bowman and Poole are up to and 'checkmates' them effortlessly adding to its confidence as a superior conscious entity. Hal knows about another superior conscious enity, the monolith. However Hal does not fathom the depth by which the need to survive is embedded in the human psyche. Bowman succeeds by using his training , resourcefulness, mobility and something much more important, both sides of his brain, the irrational with the rational. Bowman takes command of the ship and reestablishes human superiority over its own technology. In other words humans have reached a stage in evolution whereby they are primed and ready for the encounter with an alien intelligence. But remember I said that some audiences gave the monolith the symbolism of God. If you substitute Hal with God and the discovery ship with the earth and play the sequence again you get an astonishing piece of revelation. God stops humans from , what? becoming superhumans. This is the Nietsche principle that is order for man to become superman, God must die. In order for us to evolve we will probably have to jettison all religions to do so. That's a radical idea, it was in the German philospher's time, it is today. But an even more stunning revelation awaits us if we follow the pure logic of this. Man creates machines/computers. If Hal is substituted with God then ,by Aristotelian logic,man CREATED God. Therefore man will REVERT back to God in the future. Should lightning ever strike me down with this notion then I'll know I was wrong.
Kubrick was cryptic to say he hoped nobody would find any meaning in his film. I think this was also a clever experiment to see if the audience could come up with some personal meanings that would set a trigger going in everybody's mind. If we could recognise something in the movie that Kubrick was trying to convey by non- verbal means, something that was recognisable to us at sometime in our evolution. Well lets try this, the monolith again could be something else, something that most people readily can connect with.
If we substitute monolith with trilithion and then mention the word Stonehenge. If we mention IBM and computers and Stonehenge and the year 1964, some of us will get the connection. In 1964 a researcher using an IBM mainframe (IBM is one of the commerical logos used on the Hal machine in the movie) discovered alignments to various stars,Sun and Moon etc. The whole episode created incredible controversy at the time between scientists and this was a year or two prior to 2001 coming out. Computers and monoliths (3 in the movie, or the same one 3 times, trinity religious motif), computers and trilithions (3 stone uprights) . If you want to garner more fun with numbers why not zero in on the number of astronauts on board the discovery , five, 3 in hibernation and Bowman and Poole, 5 is the mumber of man. Seven tetrahedral shapes accompany Bowman to the Jupiterian surface, 7 is the mumber of perfection and a number associated with divinity/sacredness. We can also see that there are three separate alignments shown dealing with the monolith. In the Chimp sequence, when the monolith appears, the sun crests over its rim and behind that the New Moon is shown. In 2001 on the Moon itself, the monolith there exhibits the same alignment only this time the cresented light source has to be a 'New Earth' since this is viewed from the Moon's surface. When Bowman journeys to land on Jupiter we see the final alignment which consists of 6 spheriods including the surface of Jupiter. Then the monolith inserts itself into this alignment emphasising the number 7 again; perfection. As stated above by saying '2001 IS the monolith' means that forbidden (hidden) knowledge awaits us when we view the movie. Ask yourself this final question, why do we , as a species, have the URGE to explore?