2001 A Space Odyssey

Written 16 June 2003

Warning: This film review reveals some of the plot of the movie.

I remember this movie from when I was a young pup of eight (I saw it at the theater when it first came out). Things were very different back in those pre-Star Wars days: movies didn't get hyped to death like they do now. I don't remember long lines and I certainly don't remember the pointless trailers that we seem to have nowadays. We just had movies, some good and some bad, which we enjoyed. Back then a movie didn't cost more than the annual budget of a small country to make, and it seemed like we enjoyed them far more than we do now.

One important fact to remember before seeing this film is that the pacing of movies was very different in the past. We've been conditioned by MTV and the internet to expect instant gratification, fast action and clear-cut endings. Now we complain if a shootout or a chase doesn't happen in the first ten minutes - when 2001 was filmed it took at least half a hour for a movie to even get started.

The world was different in those days as well. It was the middle of the cold war, man was working towards the moon and computers cost millions of dollars and filled entire rooms. The internet was not even a dream (not a single Science Fiction author foretold the internet and world wide web), and no one saw that a man could carry a nuclear warhead into a city in a suitcase.

At the time the space race was going hot and fast, and it was commonly expected that there would be a massive, permanent presence on the moon and in earth orbit well before the turn of the century. I don't know about you, but I fully expected not only that, but a human colony on Mars and perhaps Venus as well.

Ah yes, life was different then - more innocent perhaps. And, at the time, 2001 was quite a movie. It was a huge "wow", showing the glory of man as he expanded into space and got prepared for the stars. Of course, it was written by one of the best Science Fiction writers of all: Arthur C. Clarke. This man was a genius and his optimism and enthusiasm for mankind shows from start to finish.

2001 opens, interestingly enough, hundreds of thousands of years in Earth's past. In a very unusual scene, a dozen "apes" run around a slab for no apparent reason and seem to become, well, more intelligent. In a very cool segway a bone thrown into the air changes into a space station in the year 2001.

Over the next two hours, you will learn how something (a slab) has been discovered on the moon. A mission is to be sent to Jupiter to find out what's going on - who left this artifact around for us to find and, more importantly, why?

Along the way HAL (a very intelligent yet deranged computer) tries and almost succeeds in killing the crew. Here are some of the most famous lines in the movies:

• I'm afraid Dave
• Singing "Daisy" as HAL is disconnected
• What are you doing Dave?

It was all very dramatic and interesting in those years. I remember talking and thinking about this movie for days and weeks after seeing it.

There was a problem, however: the ending. I just didn't get it at all. In fact, I clearly remember that nobody got the ending. It was a strange, psychedelic ending which meant, to me at least, absolutely nothing.

It meant nothing, that is, until I read a book called "The Lost Worlds of 2001" which presented 2001 in novel form as Clarke would have preferred. After reading this book breathlessly from cover to cover I finally understood the movie.