|
On a desiccated African savannah four million years ago, man's ancestors are competing with tapirs for food and preyed upon by feline predators. One day, they wake to discover a black monolith, which the group hesitantly touches. They soon discover the use of tools, using a bone as a club, which they use to kill tapirs for meat and to protect their small water hole from a rival group.
Above the 21st-century Earth, a space plane slowly and majestically docks with an orbiting space station. The only passenger on board is Haywood Floyd, a senior official with the National Council of Aeronautics. He meets the head of station security, makes a picture phone call and talks to Russian colleagues while awaiting departure for the moon. He tells the Russians that he cannot discuss rumors of an epidemic at Clavius. Floyd boards a spherical lunar ship, where he is again the only passenger. The ship makes a slow descent and landing at the Moonbase, where Floyd briefs station personnel, apologizing for the epidemic cover story and quarantine of the base, emphasizing the need for absolute secrecy regarding their discovery. He then takes a flying moon bus to Tycho crater, during which they discuss an alien object that was buried on the moon four million years ago. They disembark and enter the excavation, which contains an identical black monolith. Floyd touches it, and while they are posing for a photo the monolith emits a piercing signal.
Eighteen months later, an interplanetary spacecraft is traveling toward Jupiter. On board are David Bowman and Frank Poole, three members of a survey team in cryogenic hybernation, and a sentient HAL 9000 computer, which operates the ship. A spherical module, whose central ring rotates to simulate gravity, houses the humans. They spend the long months of the voyage exercising, watching television interviews, receiving video messages, doing systems checks and playing chess with HAL. HAL reports that a component in the communications antenna system will soon fail, so David goes EVA in one of the small spherical pods to replace the component. They test the component and can find no malfunction. David and Frank enter a pod to have a private conversation, and they agree that if HAL is malfunctioning they will need to disconnect him and continue the mission manually. HAL is able to read their lips, however, through the pod window.
Frank goes EVA again to replace the original unit to see if it will actually fail. While a space-suited Frank is outside the pod, HAL uses the pod arms to cut his air hose. David, seeking to rescue Frank from this apparent accident, goes in another pod to retrieve him. When David returns with Frank's body, HAL will not allow him to re-enter, telling him he cannot allow him to jeopardize the mission. HAL also discontinues life support for the three members of the survey team. David has forgotten to bring his helmet, and must re-enter the ship through an emergency hatch by hurtling through vacuum into the airlock. He then methodically disconnects HAL's memory and logic modules while HAL begs him to reconsider. When HAL is fully disconnected, a video recording by Floyd explains for the first time that the mission, known only to HAL, relates to an alien monolith on the moon that sent a signal toward Jupiter.
David arrives near Jupiter to discover another monolith orbiting among Jupiter's moons. When David goes EVA in a pod to investigate it, he is drawn into a space-time anomaly, and an inexplicable and harrowing voyage ensues. He sees psychedelic planes of colored lights flow past, eerie cosmological scenes, alien planetary landscapes and a scene with seven floating diamond-shaped objects. His voyage finally ends with the pod resting in a stately bedroom suite. David has aged, and continues to age further in a series of scenes where he is walking around, eating a dinner, and finally in bed obviously near death. A monolith appears at the foot of the bed. David reaches for it and changes into a large fetus in a glowing amniotic sac. Reborn as a "star child," he is then transported back to Earth, where he looks down enigmatically on his home planet.
A unique and artful triumph
 When 2001: A Space Odyssey first appeared in 1968, it was greeted with a remarkable diversity of reactions. Some mainstream critics found it to be an imponderable hodgepodge of nonsensical images, while others considered it a profound cinematic triumph replete with metaphysical, metaphorical and allegorical meanings. Among those inside the SF field, some saw it as a failed New Wave attempt to convey a science-fiction story, eschewing coherent narrative for pseudo-intellectual symbolism, while others saw it as a stunningly accurate rendering of a likely future world featuring profound hard science-fiction themes and narrative. Over the years, the negative views have attenuated, and most now consider 2001 to be one of the true masterpieces of science-fiction cinema. I first saw the movie in 1968 as a 15-year-old science-fiction fan. My high-school science teacher, the only adult I knew interested in seeing it, drove me 90 miles to the theater. I saw hidden within the amazingly realistic images on the screen a mind-expanding hard-SF narrative. I spent the entire trip home explaining what happened in the film and what I thought it meant. Some weeks later, I read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, and while there were many differences I felt my understanding of the film fully validated. One of the signatures of true art is that the response of the viewer is determined as much by the viewer as by the art itself. In virtually every case where a movie is made based on written fiction, especially within the SF genre, the written fiction is far more engaging, encouraging the reader to imagine the scenes it conveys, and put more of their own imagination and thought into the story. Movies often seem like non-interactive outtakes of certain scenes in the written work, unable to elicit equal intellectual engagment and participation. In short, the book is almost always better than the movie. 2001 was the first movie, and perhaps remains the only movie, where the exact reverse is true. While Clarke's novel is excellent hard SF, it does not provide as powerful an emotional or intellectual experience as Kubrick's film, which encourages viewers to create their own unique understanding of its themes, meanings and narrative. Everyone who has seen it seems to find some unique meaning somewhere in the film. (My quite minor unique insight, for instance, is that the seven diamond-shaped objects shown briefly during the voyage "beyond the stars" are the aliens who made the monoliths, or possibly their spaceships.) Just as no two people experience the same thoughts and feelings when viewing a fine painting or listening to a musical composition, no two people have the same experience when viewing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, being a fan of traditional hard SF, I can't help but wish that Kubrick would have included more of the narrative from Clarke's vision of 2001, while possibly removing some of the overlong visual scenes, which seem more extraneous today than back in 1968, when no one had every seen anything like them. But perhaps Kubrick was right—such alteration would have attenuated the profound artistic impact of the film. Kubrick's choice for artful ambiguity was further vindicated when the sequel, 2010, appeared in 1984. Although the film's hard-SF narrative is superior to that of 2001, the concrete, straightforward handling makes 2010 less engaging, and a far lesser event in the history of SF cinema. — Doug |
