"It can only be attributable to human error."

Movies can be made to entertain people. They can also be made to entertain the director. Those movies that are given a mass release, but were made as a director’s pet project are either huge hits or major disappointments with audiences. One such movie that falls into the huge hit department is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Granted, not everyone who has seen the movie like it. Most don’t even understand it. It is doubtful that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick even knew what it was about. Perhaps Kubrick, but his collaborator Clarke, probably was in the dark about a lot of stuff.

Kubrick and Clarke teamed up to make the ultimate space opera. Clarke was a great science fiction writer. Kubrick was interested in space at the time and respected Clarke’s work. Kubrick and Clarke came up with the basic idea for the story, if you believe the movie has a narrative. Anyway, the two worked on a screenplay in which the movie was made.

While Kubrick was shooting the movie, Clarke was working on the novel of the movie. The two were supposed to come out soon after the other. It is one of those rare movies where the novel comes out after the movie. The bad thing for Clarke, but the good thing for audiences, is that Kubrick was making changes to the script while he was shooting. None of these changes were discussed with Clarke and because of this the two are different in ways.

This is a good thing for those who have seen the movie because a lot of what happens is explained in greater depth by Clarke. As Clarke said after the movie was released: “watch the movie, read the book and repeat as often as necessary in order to understand.”

Our movie opens up with a group of human beings in their ape form. Kubrick shows us how humans learned to kill. It appears that a big monolith from some alien civilization gives the apes/humans the spark to discover brutal force. This monolith has been commented on by just about every theorist and critic who has looked at the film. One of the more popular beliefs, and endorsed by Kubrick, is that the monolith acts as a guide for human beings in their evolution. The monolith comes from an alternate civilization that we don’t even know about. Something that can not be seen by human beings. This obviously makes it tough to show on film, but according to Kubrick this is what the movie is about.

After the largest flash forward in film history we arrive at the year 2001 when human kind is colonizing the moon. Obviously this was not an accurate prediction, but Kubrick and Clarke choose a date sometime in the next century when they were writing the movie and it ended up being 2001.

There really are no definable human characters in the movie, which makes this movie rather unique since it is all live-action, not animated. Anyway, some important scientist from the US has been sent to study something on the moon that has recently been discovered. This is another monolith. The alternate beings have told humanity that they have reached another step in evolution – that step is interplanetary travel.

The next segment takes place on a ship and features the most memorable character in the movie, the computer HAL. HAL has been studied ever since the movie was released. He has also been extremely influential in popular culture. There is a Jared jewelers ad running on TV right now that features a GPS system that goes crazy when Dave does not give her the jewelry he just bought. Dave of course is a crewmember of the ship Discovery that has been sent to investigate a monolith transmission on Jupiter.

HAL is a supercomputer that is incapable of error. This is why he is the only one who has been entrusted of the ships true mission – going out into the unknown to meet something that could be potentially dangerous. The humans on Earth believe this mission is too stressful on human nerves, so they don’t tell the crew about it. They misjudged the effect this mission would have on the computer. The computer expresses doubt to both his active crewmembers, other members of the crew have lived in hibernation and will be woken up once the crew gets to Jupiter.

The crew, Dave and Frank, become concerned at the computer’s weird behavior and discuss the possibility of taking him off line. This doesn’t sit well with the paranoid computer. He becomes homicidal and kills everyone onboard except Dave, who happens to kill the computer in a slow, painful death.

From here it is anyone’s guess what happens. Dave leaves Discovery for Jupiter and then there are lots of lights before he ends up in a room where he happens to age rapidly before becoming a Star Child. Kubrick wanted audiences to draw their own conclusions of this section of the movie. He did say that the Star Child was the next step in human evolution in the movie.

2001 is not the typical space movie. It isn't even the typical movie. It lacks dialogue. It lacks definable human characters It lacks a cohesive narrative. It is interesting enough to watch and make you think though.