2001: A Space Odyssey [1968 film]

9/26/25 (cinema): Beautiful. I was rapt throughout. I think of it as a movie that requires effort, active attention, but even the Tron segment held me. The benefits of seeing movies at the theater. Also my interpretation was much more optimistic than last time -- the prehistoric monolith gifts pre-humans with a great leap forward in the form of tools, which are misused for violence and destruction, but they leave a second chance for us to discover once we've achieved space travel, and the ending is optimistic -- a new start, a reset.

6/25/23 (streaming): I felt so sad and depressed watching it. It all felt so hopeless and pointless -- the bone rotating in the sky, the whole great leap forward simply being the use of tools to exterminate show more each other, and for some reason some higher power, or higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe, sees fit to "gift" our species that special knowledge. And then a computer misbehaves because it's been set a mission without full information, and then there's 15 minutes of Tron, and then Dave is old and then a fetus facing the monolith. I accept it as a beautiful tone poem rather than an inscrutable narrative. Also the internet was acting up and causing it to pause every once in a while, only for a few seconds but it gets to be like water torture, drip drip. And I was trying not to order food, and so I instead let myself scroll Facebook, where I saw an article about the BBC doing a deep investigative dive into the market for animal torture. Rich westerners paying people in other countries to live-stream themselves torturing and killing baby monkeys. I don't like this world. I wish we weren't like this. I wish we'd never evolved. Imagine if we hadn't. Imagine if our genes had zigged instead of zagged, and the non-hominid -- or non-sapiens descendants of my pre-zig ancestors were now rustling through a jungle, foraging for leaves, threatened by disease and predators and rival tribes, but not wreaking destruction and brutal, gratuitous suffering in such great quantities that how has the universe itself not cracked and shattered? show less

There are mysterious space rectangles, being all mysterious.

It's very flawed, but what's good is too good to say it's anything less than a great movie.

Concept: A
Story: D
Characters: B
Dialog: B
Pacing: D
Cinematography: A
Special effects/design: A
Acting: B
Music: A

Enjoyment: A

GPA: 3.1/4

Possible spoiler alert:

Before I read this book in high school, I'd heard great things about it. The book didn't excite me- I'm more a fantasy person than sci-fi, and, though I guess he's asking all manner of deep and important questions (where did we come from, what will we evolve into, what happens when artificial intelligence evolves, etc.?) I didn't connect to the story, so I didn't care. The movie I liked even less- all that classical music while he floats around- bleh! This one definitely didn't do it for me.

One of Stanley Kubrick's best.

Case 16 shelf 1

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 show more 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. show less