Dave's not here man

Rating: 8/10 (20 September 2007)

The movie opens with 20 minutes of darkness, so don't adjust your TV.
A bunch of monkeys, supposedly early humans, are shown interacting with one another when a mysterious monolith appears. Then the monkeys suddenly can walk upright and realize that they actually want to beat the stuffing out of each other. They also evolve so that they could use tools, shed their fur and start trading stock.
Way in the future...
I imagine that 2001 must have seemed like a long way off when Clarke was writing the book. His vision unfolded about as realistically as Orwell's 1984, but I'll save that for another rant.
Being that this movie was made in the 60's, Clarke's version of the future didn't include gender equality, because there were plenty of tightly dressed females in positions of subservience throughout the picture.
Some astronauts find a monolith on the moon. When the sun shines on it, it makes a high pitched sound, much like the one Jim Carrey makes in Dumb and Dumber. Another monolith is found orbiting Jupiter, and someone assumes the two were connected.
The press wants to know what happened up in space, but no one will tell them. Apparently, Clarke didn't foresee the media having total control over everything in the future, either. Good thing he wrote some more books, later on.
Some more guys were sent up into space, to investigate. Of course, no one actually tells them about the monolith, because that would make too much sense.
The HAL 9000 computer, who by the way, is the most likable character in the film, next to the monkeys, is responsible for maintaining the safety of the crew and it's ship. Unfortunately, HAL is a few fries short of a Happy Meal and has an agenda of his own.
HAL expresses some trepidation about the mission. Of course, it helps that HAL actually knows what the mission is about, since the crew obviously doesn't. HAL probably realizes that poking the monolith is a bad idea, since we don't actually know what it is, and it's likely to poke back.
Dave and Frank, cleverly hide in one of the pods and try to talk about HAL behind his back. Naturally, they forgot that HAL can read lips. Humans really are just monkeys without fur.
Once the two men were alone together in the pod, they couldn't think of anything worthwhile to say. The conversation actually went something like this...
"What do you think about the mission?"
"I don't know. What do you think about it?"
"So, HAL computers don't make mistakes do they?"
"Nope, they're infallible."
"Okay, just checking."
Seriously, I've heard more convincing verbiage in a Budweiser commercial. Men don't talk like that about anything. They discuss their bowel movements with more enthusiasm. Maybe in this particular future, males are all civilized and introspective. But, they're still monkey's without fur. So, it probably should have gone something like this...
"Great, now HAL can't hear us. What's the plan, Frank?"
"I don't know, Dave, but this mission is totally bogus. They send us out here into space without telling us why. We should shut HAL down and get the heck out of Dodge. I don't care how good the medical benefits are."
"I'm with you so far."
"Hey...you don't think he can read our lips in here, do you?"
"No, Dave. He's a computer."
"Right, what was I thinking?"
HAL goes medieval on the crew and kills them all, except Dave, who's his favorite. He must not have liked Frank very much, because he gets his hose cut and goes flying into space, like an untied party balloon.
HAL refuses to let Dave back into the ship, after he goes out to rescue Frank. Dave ends up going in the old fashioned way, by jettisoning himself through the safety hatch at tremendous speed.
Once back in, Dave shuts HAL down and only after we have to listen to HAL sing and whine about how his mind is going, do we get to find out why these dudes were in space to begin with.
Dave pushes some high-tech looking buttons and a message pops up on screen:
"Oh...by the way, kids, we found a big, black rectangular thing on the moon and it's sending radio transmissions to Jupiter. There's another black, rectangular thing orbiting Jupiter. We think these things hold the secrets to life, the universe and everything, and we didn't tell you sooner because we didn't want to compromise the security of the mission. Have fun on Jupiter. Let us know how it all turns out."
Dave goes to Jupiter, the monoliths line up and Dave has a psychedelic experience involving a bunch of flashing, colorful lights. It's quite impressive, if you consider this was made almost ten years before the formation of ILM. I highly recommend that people stay away from the LSD while watching this film.
After his "trip" Dave finds himself in a antiseptically clean house with Regency style furnishings. He sees himself eating dinner as a middle-aged man, dying in his bed as an elderly one, and then as a fetus, overlooking Earth. Then, the credits come on. So glad the ending tied everything together for me, because I was really lost up until then.
As an added bonus, there's another twenty minutes of darkness after the credits, allowing the soundtrack to play in it's entirety.
It's worth watching just for the early special effects, cinematography and musical score, which includes "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and a bunch of funky vocal pieces by a Romanian guy named Ligeti that you really shouldn't listen to if you are home, alone at night.