2001

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick wrote and directed the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was inspired to write this movie because of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel. This film’s underlying message can be interpreted philosophically or allegorically. The main characters in the movie include: Dullea (Dr. David Bowman), Gary Lockwood (Dr. Frank Poole), and William Sylvester (Dr. Heywood R. Floyd. This movie is not like every other movie today where the plot is apparent, there is an abundance of dialogue, and you don’t have to sit and ponder what the movie is actually portraying. Kubrick purposely made the movie this way because he wanted the viewers to interpret it however they thought was accurate. Background information of that time era and articles on how other people viewed the movie is needed for a better understanding. The evolution of mankind is what most people interpreted from this movie.

The film begins four million years ago in the prehistoric age with a bunch of apes. The apes discover that they can use bones for tools and in essence leads to the evolution of mankind and tools. It then goes to the year 2001 where the astronauts are traveling in space to the moon and Jupiter. The core brain of the whole operation is an artificial intelligence named HAL 9000. The men on the mission rely very much on HAL and trust her completely; after all she is a computer and mankind have made computers to be very intelligent so the humans have very little work. They soon realize that HAL has ulterior motives and begins to have what they think are malfunctions. Kubrick displayed the technology of 2001 pretty accurately for looking 33 years into the future. Mankind has successfully evolved their tools throughout the years, but perhaps they got ahead of themselves. HAL eventually outsmarts the men leaving them helpless; he had it planned all along. Today, people rely a great deal on technology because it can do so much. Some have discussed that sooner or later computers will be more intelligent than humans and be able to outsmart them as Kubrick displayed.

Throughout the movie a mysterious black rectangle appears which ends up leading to a time travel. The first time it appeared was in the beginning with the ape scene and then going into the present day of 2001 where they are going to begin their journey into space. They then see it on the moon taking them to 18 months later when they are traveling to Jupiter. When Dr. David Bowman is on his own with no other life form because of HAL’s malfunctions he ventures onto Jupiter. He goes through this psychedelic phase with bright lights all around for about six minutes and then ends up in a completely white room where he is looking at his pod and all you hear is breathing. It goes to show himself in the mirror and then he sees a man sitting at a table which is him but older. The man at the table hears the breathing so gets up to see if anything is there and of course there isn’t. He sits back down at the table and the younger version then disappears. He drops his glass of wine and looks down to see that the wine is still there; representing that there is no body but there is still a soul. He looks into the bed to find an even older version of him, basically on his deathbed and all of a sudden the mysterious black rectangle appears. The scene changes to outer space and reveals a starchild. Although what the black rectangle represents is still a mystery to many, but the whole process portrays the life and death of mankind and how it evolves. The apes represented what some people think as the evolution of mankind and from there it went in various stages of time until death.

This movie can be interpreted in many ways, but a huge one would be the evolution of mankind and the tools that they have discovered and made. Men and tools started out as the simplest of things and eventually have evolved into complex objects. Some people understand them while others still have not quite caught on. When writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick thoroughly displayed how men and tools have evolved so extensively. When writing this in 1968, he pictured the future as technology based and he was pretty much right on target.