"This conversation can serve no further purpose"

Rating: 10/10 (18 January 2015)

I first saw 2001 about fifteen years ago, as a teenager and on a tiny TV, and predictably enough I didn't react too well to it. Where was the action? Where was the incident? Where was the dialogue?
Now, at the age of 30, I've had the privilege of seeing it on the big screen at the BFI Southbank and you can consider me a convert. I'm not going to call it easy going, but it's an exquisitely beautiful film with a sense of real weight to it.
The plot concerns mankind's progress as it's guided by unseen aliens, whose only interaction with the human race is to leave ominous- looking black monoliths in various locations for it to find, each of which has an obscure yet undeniable effect on those who find it. A plot like this could lend itself to heavy-handed moralising - the monoliths, after all, are teaching tools - but the film's brilliance is in the way it keeps its plot in the background. There is no overt message for the audience to absorb; the aliens' motives, such as they are, are never revealed and the audience is invited to speculate on the role the monoliths really have and what the final outcome is to be.
In the meantime, the human race is required to prove itself worthy of the monoliths. The first one is given free to the hominid species, but subsequent monoliths are more carefully hidden and require some effort to locate; the second, for example, is placed on the moon and must therefore wait there for four million years before humanity's technology progresses to the point of being able to uncover it. The second monolith seems more accessible in relative terms, but the spacecraft crew sent to find it are beset by a murderous, malfunctioning computer. While the link between the HAL 9000 and monolith plot line is never made clear, I like to think they have something to do with each other; HAL effectively represents the next obstacle for humanity to overcome, and Dave Bowman, through his resourcefulness and bravery, outwits a superior intelligence and proves himself worthy of the film's extraordinary ending sequence.
Throughout, a link is drawn between technology and weaponry, and it seems as if technology is a phase that mankind has to go through on its journey to something more pure. The apes' reaction to the first monolith is to learn to create weapons out of bones, therefore coming to dominate their environment and leading - via a startling piece of editing - to the evolution of the human race as an assertive and spacefaring species. It's never made clear whether the second monolith on the moon leads in any direct way to the creation of HAL, but I will suggest that these supercomputers are conspicuous by their absence in the scenes prior to its uncovering in the Tycho crater. The final image of the star-child, on the other hand, is technology-free, bookending the film - mankind has in some respects regressed to a natural state, but in a form that has passed technology by and no longer has any use for it. In these terms, the difference between HAL and the apes' bone-weapons becomes slight.
The film is the embodiment of Clarke's own law, that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It is not meant that Bowman should understand the experience of the ending, and nor is it meant for us to walk away from the film with more answers than questions. It's a film that's simultaneously optimistic in its faith in humanity to overcome the trials of the universe, but also terrifying in its Lovecraftian subtext: that mankind is a tiny part of something huge, and its purpose within a greater plan is not for it to know. Perhaps the film encourages us to believe that there's a plan at all, or perhaps it presents mankind as incidental - are we just an idle fancy for the aliens? Perhaps the entire human species is nothing more than an alien's homework project. Believe whatever keeps the vacuum out.