Step One on the Road to Enlightenment:

An alien race deposits the first Black Monolith in prehistoric times to advance human intelligence by teaching man-ape Moonwatcher how to make and use the first tool (which, not surprisingly, is a murder-weapon).

Step Two on the Road to Enlightenment:

Mankind, having developed technology, has passed a cosmic test by being able to reach the Moon, dig up the second Monolith, trace its signal and journey to Jupiter to find Monolith No. 3.

The Alien intelligences send astronaut Dave Bowman through the stargate as a further test, aging him to the end of his life so that he can be reborn as palladin and guide to an improved humanity.

It's a bit oscure, I admit; the film's always been criticized for not relying heavily on easily-grasped melodramatic conventions to tell its story -- and it certainly helps to have read Arthur C. Clarke's novel, which DOES rely on literary conventions to get essential exposition across.

What the film is REALLY about, though, is the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence. (HAL's NOT neurotic or homicidal; his murder of Frank Poole and the hibernating astronauts, and the attempted murder of Bowman makes perfect sense, and arises from HAL's entirely justifiable belief that they have no moral authority to harness him to their cosmic plow.)

The film's also about killing and murder, how little changes from one side of that eons-spanning cut at the end of the "Dawn of Man" sequence to the other (the satellites we see before reaching the space station are supposed to be orbiting nuclear weapons, but Stanley Kubrick chose not to provide the necessary exposition, leaving the audience incapable of inferring that) -- a theme that runs through almost all of Kubrick's films, either literally or metaphorically.

Hitchcock once famously said that "drama is life with all the dull bits cut out." It's a wonderful distillation of the nuts-and-bolts of dramatic -- and cinematic -- structure. However, I have to disagree with you. The time between HAL's deactivation and Discovery's arrival in Jupiter space is as irrelevant to the story as the four-million years that elapse between Moonwatcher's hurling the tapir bone skyward and the cut to the nuclear satellite in Earth orbit.

What is relevant, however, is what's omitted from the moment we realize that HAL is reading Bowman and Poole's lips and Poole's spacewalk, in which he's murdered by the computer using his space-pod as murder-weapon (with the two scenes separated by the film's intermission).

What Kubrick and Clarke conveniently ignore is the moment immediately after the lip-reading, when Poole and Bowman exit the pod after their conversation regarding their suspicions about HAL's behavior. At that moment, HAL (who, after all, controls every function on the spaceship) had merely to open the pod-bay doors. Bowman and Poole would've been sucked out into space, leaving HAL to kill hibernating astronauts Hunter, Kimball and Kaminski at his leisure, sparing him the rather melodramatic necessity of becoming a serial-killer and, just as importantly, depriving Bowman of the opportunity to regain control by making his daring airlock re-entry and disconnection of HAL.

Of course, had Clarke and Kubrick stuck to common sense and logic and done it that way, the movie wouldn't have had a third act, and people would've been even more confused.

I did like the computer/man battle part of it though. The one part of it I really liked. I am sorry guys, didn't like the rest. One opinion only. Don't get riled. It carries no more weight than that.

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Originally posted by perfpitch:
However, I have to disagree with you. The time between HAL's deactivation and Discovery's arrival in Jupiter space is as irrelevant to the story as the four-million years that elapse between Moonwatcher's hurling the tapir bone skyward and the cut to the nuclear satellite in Earth orbit.

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I didn't say it was relevant, or that it was a bad choice that it was left out of the movie. I like the movie as it is. Though leaving the space pod travel to the monolith out does make it more than difficult to understand what's going on.

I see 2001 as a film about biology and mind. Biologically, man just repeats. There are a lot of images that suggest sex and birth (the sperm shaped Discovery, the docking of the Pan Am shuttle, the red, womb-like moon shuttle bay, Poole emerging from the pod with an "umbilical cord", the ape and human children, the Star-Child embryo, etc.). This biology has adapted to the mind which has been progressive. The uneasy marriage has gone along ok but HAL represents mind surpassing man and biology in a negative way. Man must find a different way, represented by the star journey, to be re-born. At one moment all the planets are seen in alignment--could the way be to abandon modern life and return to a more ancient pagan accordance with things? Maybe. Maybe not.

One aspect of 2001 is a modern satire. Having seen apes live in a certain pattern, one jumps to the future and must question how much has changed and how much is the same. The Russians and the US sit around a round table. 2 bands of apes fought around a water hole. The ape tentatively touched the monolith. The astronaut does the same. Yet, a whole world has emerged. Why are some people privleged with the monolith info and others not? Who decided that for everyone? Why does the Moon Buggy worker feel pride in
his work? All of modern life is put into question when compared with the primitive roots and then again when compared with what doesn't seem to make rational sense.

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Originally posted by perfpitch:
I don't understand what you don't understand, Marian: Discovery reaches Jupiter space, Bowman goes after the monolith in the space-pod, and gets drawn into the stargate.

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My point is: The film shows Bowman deactivating HAL, then the arrival at Saturn, the Monolith (in the film it's floating in space), and then immediately the "lightshow" begins. There's nothing to suggest that Bowman has gone THROUGH the Monolith into a stargate.

Since Lou mentioned HAL's voice: Once again, they completely changed the nature of a film by an inappropriate German voice for HAL. Luckily, I've seen the dub only once.

Lou, the notion that HAL's simply neurotic was/is simply a dismissal of the film's deeper meaning by rather dull-witted film critics who probably had three more movies to see the day they went to the studio's screening of 2001. HAL kills Poole and the three hibernating astronauts, and almost succeeds in killing Bowman, for a number of easily-understood (and identified-with) reasons: he feels that their commitment to the mission is less than total; he knows for a certainty after reading Bowman and Poole's lips that they're planning to deactivate him, and feels compelled to protect his own existence; he believes that the humans serve no purpose on the mission -- that he can do their jobs as well, and far more efficiently; and, most importantly, he feels that just because humans created him doesn't mean that he owes them anything. This last has religious implications, as it mirrors mankind's ages-old struggle to come to terms with demands by gods -- in our case, the Judeo-Christian God -- that we worship them.
HAL's logic is inescapable: he didn't ASK to be created, and therefore owes his creators nothing. 2001 is, in many ways, like Kubrick's SPARTACUS: a story about a slave revolt.

If you take a close look at the film, you'll see that it's THE DISCOVERY ASTRONAUTS who are bland and almost devoid of personality. HAL's the only three-dimensional character in the film, the one with an active psychology and a certain passion for what he's doing; all the humans are de-humanized -- by design. It's all in keeping with Kubrick and Clarke's central notion that artificial intelligence will supersede the biological (except, of course, that in this case the alien inteligences that created the monoliths are in the process of fashioning a race of super-beings, starting with the reborn Bowman/Starchild).

Marian, Clarke and Kubrick had originally intended for HAL to have a woman's voice and be called ATHENA (which, ironically, is the name of one of the largest computerized airlines-reservations systems in use today). Douglas Rain, a Shakespearean-trained Canadian stage actor, was chosen to be HAL's voice exactly because he could project a cold, neutral matter-of-factness to HAL, which would operate in direct counterpoint to his complicated psychology; it's awfully unlikely that the studio was going to take the time to find an actor able to do the same thing in Deutschespreche.

It's no accident that Bowman's selective lobotomization of HAL regresses the computer back to his "childhood" at the HAL Labs in Urbana, Illinois (way back in 1992!); it ties directly to Bowman's later transformation into the Starchild.

As Oscar Wilde once observed: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

You're exactly right that all this, ultimately, has to be filtered through the minds and hearts of human audiences -- that's "baggage" a filmmaker ignores at his/her own peril -- but Kubrick was never one to pander to the audience's expectations, and this may be as good a reason as any why the film, though successful in its day as "The Ultimate Trip," wasn't universally embraced by audiences. It's not emotionally satisfying in its eschewing of melodramatic convention, though over a century of filmmaking and film-going have proven that that is what people, time and again, will pay their hard-earned money to see.