A New Way of Interpreting 2001

Rating: Null/10 (27 July 1999)

There was a weird point made -some kind of a mystery- in this movie. Of course it is needless to say that this movie was made to be that way, but there was an apparently implying point. That is - the point where Dave shows HAL9000 his drawings of the crew on ship. From HAL9000's reply "I see great improvement, Dave."(Sorry it's not accurate), we know that it was not the first time Dave had showed HAL his drawings. And HAL's "Could you hold it a bit closer please?" was also the point. The idea is - that Dave knew how well HAL could recognize patterns! If this idea is right, it will change whole the story. It will mean that Dave had used HAL -very intelligently- to kill other crews, and then killed HAL, a complete crime. It also means that this movie referred to the human-kind's very first murder, and the most recent (or last) murder. We also remember that at every appearance of monolith, there was a requiem by Ligheti. So if we take it this way, a tool was still a tool, even with all these years past. I first thought that this movie had implied the evolution of a tool, a tool exceeding human beings enough to make human beings as tools, but now I think it's not the only possibility. By the way this idea gives its last scene a well agreeable meaning too. That Dave had touched god's anger- and he was sentenced to hell. He was given a life of an eternity in a room of nowhere and nothing. He has to spend time in that place of nowhere, forever. The worst -most dreadful, deadly- punishment for committing a crime like this was, "having to live forever". The starchild appearing in the very last scene was of course not his real body - it was his mind-, Kubrik's expression of Dave's nostalgia for his mother earth. With the music Zaustra cynically implying the birth of "superhuman"...