Provocative Poetry in Motion Picture evokes questions, questions

Rating: 10/10 (21 May 2012)

Stanley Kubrick's Magnum opus is a series of interconnected provocative visual metaphors that stir up the human mind so that the most interesting questions emerge out of this cauldron. As I can decipher, the central, most provocative question that emerges is: What is the purpose of life? And more specifically: What is the ultimate human purpose? As Andrei Tarkovsky put it "The goal of all art is.....to explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or, if not to explain, at least to pose the question". Kubrick, the wizard of films, accomplishes this admirably in most of his films. To be sure, this may not strike everyone as true, but that is the nature of art – it's target audience is always a select one – even to the extent that some targets are hit harder by that art than it does even its creator, and boy, as a teenager (around 14 then, the timing was so crucial!) I was hit hard by 2001 when I saw it – both in heart and mind. The visions that Kubrick hands down to us are provocative and challenging, and that is exactly how I took it. The first effect of this film is that it mystifies – creates a general sense of mystery and wonder. Only then do you come to the specific mysteries – the concept of evolution is one which is now a hotly debated issue and we are nowhere close to resolving it. Another mystery is that of time - provoked by the images which sometimes seem to slow down so much that time seems to stop (an irritant for so many people), and at then sometimes it accelerates or even jumps at a dizzying speed. One of the key characters, HAL evokes questions like: just what is intelligence? Is it even possible to simulate human like intelligence in machines? The answer to that one is becoming increasing clear: no. The point is that even if we know that AI at the human level is impossible, does not invalidate AI research completely, as A.C.Clarke put it: 'The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible'that's food for thought. Then there is a flood of questions about the relationship between machines and humans that have critical moral and ethical dimensionsbut I'm running out of space here, so I'll close by urging viewers of this film to go over it carefully and articulate questions that address the core nature of us as human beings.