Updated 11.18.09

Synopsis [From IMBD]: “At the dawn of man, a primitive tribe lives by hunting and gathering in a desert. The tribe discovers a black monolith, which is approached and examined. After the discovery, one of them scavenges a bone from a pile and uses it as a club, discovering the first tool. This tool is used to hunt, and eventually as a weapon to kill a member of a rival tribe.

“Millions of years later, a space shuttle carries a scientist, Dr. Floyd, to a space station orbiting earth. He is headed to an excavation on the moon where moonbase engineers have discovered a monolith. After arrival, he and a team of moonbase engineers approach the monolith, which emits a sharp high-pitched sound as the sun shines on it.

“Eighteen months later, a spaceship is headed to Jupiter. Five scientists are aboard, none of whom know the purpose of their mission. The ship is controlled by an artificially intelligent supercomputer, HAL, which is treated as a sixth member of the crew by the other five. During the trip, HAL claims to detect an impending hardware failure in the ship’s communications system. Two scientists, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, replace the component, but find no fault in it. They are concerned about HAL’s reliability, so they meet in secret and agree that if the component does not fail, they will disconnect HAL. HAL secretly reads their lips.

“Poole leaves the ship to restore the original communications component as planned, but HAL takes control of an empty pod and slams it into Poole, killing him. Bowman exits the ship in an attempt to rescue Poole. While he is outside, HAL cuts off life support in the ship, killing the other three scientists. When Bowman returns to the ship, HAL refuses to open the bay doors, asserting that he cannot allow Bowman to endanger the mission by deactivating him. Bowman then uses explosive bolts on the pod’s hatch to propel him into the ship’s airlock, and closes it before he is exposed to the vacuum for too long.

“Inside the ship, Bowman disconnects HAL. Afterwards, a video briefing plays, revealing the nature of the mission. The monolith that was discovered at the moonbase had sent a radio transmission to Jupiter. Another monolith was orbiting Jupiter, and the purpose of the mission is to investigate it. When the ship orbits Jupiter, the planets, the moons, and the monoliths align. Bowman travels across space and time, passing through tunnels of light and sound, crossing an alien landscape. He then arrives in an ornate hermetic room, where he finds himself rapidly aging. He then finds himself lying on his deathbed, at the foot of another monolith. He then transforms into being that resembles a fetus encased in an orb of light. This being then orbits the earth, and gazes down at it.”

Reflections. Why is this a peace film?  2001: A Space Odyssey begins and ends with images of the Earth and the planets. This sets the tone to what many have seen as the greatest science fiction film of all time, the most pompous, or the trippiest. Many call this their favorite film, but for widely different reasons: some for its prescience about technological innovation, some for its special and psychedelic effects, some for its wedding of serious 20th-century music to its central themes. The film was stunning on its release in 1968 for its almost total reliance on visual language. It’s on our list here because it’s among the first film views of humanity’s roots in, and responsibilities to, the Earth. Throughout the film the planet is the major character in the story: Dave, Frank, HAL, the monolith all play their parts, but the audience is mesmerized, overwhelmed not by blinking computer arrays or EVA suits but by the looming, numenistic presence of the planets. The Earth, the Moon, Jupiter itself give us a vertiginous sense of dread, awe or maybe, of deep peace. In the scenes of space rovers speeding across a desolate moonscape, we see the puny human presence not from the point of view of a movie audience but from that of some unseen watcher. Is it the intelligence that created the monolith, or is it the planet itself, or some mysterious presence in the universe some would call the gods or God?

Kubrick and novelist Arthur C. Clarke focus on a simple plot: the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence and the search for the source of their message to humanity in a monolith hidden for millennia on the Moon. But the context of that search is the odyssey that takes humanity from its origins to its next stage of evolution, each successive stage marked by that black monolithic slab. For Kubrick that evolution is inextricably linked to humanity’s use of tools and technology and the impact of these on human nature and on the Earth itself.

Kubrick is clear in his intent and his imagery: the first tools that humans devise —  fragments of bones that “ape” the first monolith’s abstract geometries — become their first weapons. From that realization it’s a quick jump from the use of weapons first to killing the tame animals around them, then to killing other humans, and then to creating the modern technology of death. Kubrick sums all this up in ten seconds flat: in that brilliant montage in which the triumphant ape-man celebrates his victory over his murdered rival by hurling his tibia-bone club into the sky. As the camera tracks its rise and descent, the bone suddenly turns into a spy satellite aimed threateningly at the earth. Tens of thousands of years have gone by, but humans have not changed very much from their first murderous beginnings.

This is the dramatic dilemma of 2001. As the space sequence begins, humanity has the technological capacity to destroy not only its ape-like self but the entire planet in the process. But those higher intelligences who left the original monolith to begin human evolution now provide the chance for a new jump toward “total mystery,” first when the moon monolith sends them off to Jupiter and then when they lure that sperm-shaped spaceship out of any familiar human orbits and into a realm beyond our notions of space and time. It’s no mistake that birthdays run throughout the film.

By the time we next encounter the monolith, Dave has been transfigured by both time and space. The sole survivor of the old crew, he is now stripped of all his former props: his ship, space suit, his technology, all his weapons against the unknown. In a sequence that catches time up on its own sleeve, he regresses into an infantile senility, until the monolith again appears to him. As he lies in bed helpless and reaches out to its infinite darkness, he is reborn. The final sequence of the film shows his new embyronic body circling the earth with an angelic, almost god-like gaze of peace and wisdom, separated from the void of the universe by the thinnest, most fragile of human membranes. Devoid of all defenses — ships, machines, weapons, clothing, even of his former human form — the star child floats above the Earth in unity with the universe. Peace as a positive force of rebirth and transformation could not be more graphically depicted, peace as a question to us all more pointedly posed.

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