Great Documentary. I'm in awe at his thoroughness.
kubrick
- Thread starter sonnyboo
- Start date
The monolith represents an "alien" lifeform. The film shows that they helped instigated evolution by "teaching" the ape-men to use the bones as a tool, thus separating them from animals. The film skips to the next evolutionary step which is space travel and having the technology and ability to get to the moon, and to dig deep enough to discover a buried Monolith. It sends a signal to a much larger Monolith orbiting Jupiter. The whole HAL9000 storyline plays a role in this because it shows the evolution of artificial intelligence and the perils therein, paralleling the way the ape-men killed with a tool, our own tools killed humans. Once entering into the "stargate" as it is officially known, the psychedelic acid trip shows the imperceptible to a human man. He "ages" as he is trapped in a room where he is stripped of his humanity to learn and unlearn everything outside of the perception of what we as humans can and cannot know or comprehend. The aging process is the peeling away of the human physical form to something else, as space/time is a very limited view of the universe. Eventually Bowman is "reborn" as the Starchild, a human/alien hybrid because he now knows what no other human could know at that point in time.
To me, all of these are deeply and clearly tied as one story in very distinct but related chapters.
There's no way you could get all that detail from the movie. Either you got all that detail from the book, or you're doing a whole lot of speculation, I'm guessing the former.
I have never read the book, but I watched my 1080P disc of it a few weeks ago and that is what it meant to me. I thought it was fairly obvious, albeit not in the usual filmic way of having someone SAY it out loud with exposition. It was purely cinematic and it seemed very clear to me that this was the intent, bit as Kubrick would say himself - it's up to you to form your own opinion and whatever it means to you is all that matters.
Everything I wrote is in the movie and that is my personal interpretation, not based on anything (especially Peter Hyams 2010 movie) outside of what I saw in my last viewing.
My understanding is that the book has many discrepancies because once the author and Kubrick split, they created a lot of differences, including many details and dates, etc. HAL's birthday is a point of major contention as in the 1990's the book and the movie had a big date difference and it was one of Kubrick's only public statements during that decade when he corrected a newspaper doing a story on HAL's fictional birth date.
Well, that's cool that you got so much out of it. Thing is, though, what you've mentioned is not (in my opinion) even slightly clear in the movie. There's a whole lot of room for speculation, and I'm sorry, but I do believe your commentary on the film to be almost entirely speculation. And, as you mentioned, Kubrick seems to have made it clear that the interpretation was intended to be open-ended.
"I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does," Kubrick once said of "2001." "You are free to speculate," he added, "as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film."
Also, you don't need exposition to be clear on what's happening.
awesome documentary, stan was the man. ever genre of film he did, he made the best film of that genre.
yup, the best or close to the best. being so good at so many different genres is one of the main things that made him so great!
I recommend watching ACO and definitely seeing Full Metal Jacket if you haven't already. The Dehumanisation of Gomer Pyle is intense.