A MILESTONE IN FILM HISTORY

Rating: 10/10 (22 August 2018)

As far as meaning, significance and cultural instigation are concerned, 2001 features innumerable referential approaches: to mankind, to God (and/or to the Demon), to the future, to our responsibility as of 1968 as we faced new realities; to the rediscovery of language; to the brand-new systems of knowledge; to the man-vs. -machine struggle. Stanley Kubrick directed this iconic film, in which mankind finds a mysterious, obviously artificial object buried beneath the Lunar surface and, with the help of an intelligent computer HAL 9000, sets off on a quest. Hal is error-proof - his ontology is infallibility. (And Nota bene the homophone pun: Hal is pronounced as hell. Beforehand, during the Paleolithic period, primates faced the mechanics of their primitive, primary life, and their capital objective = simple resistance, at a biological level. Those mankind precursors were not yet fully superior to other animals because they did not have the capacity for symbolic communication; they only communicated through signals. They mastered no connotative capacity at all, only some kinda denotative capacity. Their booming intellect was still impotent for making abstractions. Then an immense, polished, geometric, rectangular monolith, - the revelation of the newly coming Neolithic revolutionized universe (the Polished stone Era) - and subsequently the discovery of the media and the instruments - extensions of our physical members. The unknown monolith is almost an apparition of God. Also the germ of thought. The ape-man assaults the skeleton of a dead animal, picks up a bone (which had previously been used as a weapon to win the battle for a water pool ), begins to brand it euphorically, while disrupting the skeleton, throwing it up in the air and - incidentally the greatest anecdotal ellipse in the history of cinema: - and the bone fuses into a 2001 spaceship, sliding through the imponderable silence of the cosmos, to the sound of Johann Strauss' Blue Danube. The phenomenon is then repeated: the monolith is found on the moon, and the astronauts who approach it exhibit a similar behavior to that of the primates, when they touch it. An expedition to Jupiter, with three crew members in hibernation, only to be restored to their vital faculties when they arrived at the destination, the other two alive, and the electronic computer (Hal), leading the ship. Kubrick & Arthur C Clarke conceived the behavior of the Cyclops-eye machinery by, say, matching Homer's Odyssey. Something like Hal may indeed become reality and be capable of own emotions and mental initiatives. There resides the impasse for mankind, with its philosophical implications.