By Zaheer Shahid December 26, 2021
Prologue
I am excited to write the first movie review for BUNINU. If you are a sci-fi enthusiast and planning to watch an intriguing and suspenseful movie, I highly recommend Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This movie is originally based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”, though the short story was an idea that later turned into a major motion picture and bestseller novel.
Kubrick encouraged Clarke to write the novel first and extract the movie script from that. Clark writes, “...he (Kubrick) suggested that before we embarked on the drudgery of the script, we let our imaginations soar freely by writing a complete novel, from which we would later derive the script” (7).
A Touch of Monolith
Kubrick takes us back in time when we were unable to separate ourselves from the man-ape condition. At the beginning of the movie, the evolutionary process seems to be on the verge of extinction, and other species were smart enough to hunt better than us.
So what was the main issue with our evolutionary process that Kubrick had to go back in time? I think it has to do with intelligence. In the scene when human-ape, we call this character “Moon-Watcher” (Clarke, 23), wakes up and sees the black monolith. At first sight, they are scared, but gradually they all gather around the monolith and want to touch the surface of the slab. The touch of monolith awakened us; the contact with the extraterrestrial separates us from the human-ape condition. We borrowed intelligence from a superior in the form of a monolith.
Time Traveler
Some movie scenes always stay in our minds. For me, the most intriguing and memorable scene is when the human-ape sits beside the carcass and starts to see things differently. The human-ape grabs the bone and turns that into a bone weapon. The following scene shows how one group kills one of the members of the opponent’s group, the conflict over the natural resource.
One of the best time travel moments that I have experienced in a movie is when the human-ape tosses the bone in the air; the next shot takes us to space—a satellite is orbiting the earth. We traveled millions of years in a single transition, our human-ape condition changes in a split second.
This scene is a reflection of our technological advancement in space exploration. However, it can only be possible with the support of extraterrestrial intelligence that is beyond our understanding of science.
Disconnecting Hal 9000
In the second half of the movie, we encounter another major conflict between an AI computer, Hal 9000 and the astronaut crew. When the astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) find Hal’s circuit diagnosis faulty, they speculate about Hal’s performance in the long run to accomplish their mission. Bowman and Poole secretly plan to disconnect Hal, but they do not know that Hal is aware of their motives.
Hal comes with an alternative plan to kill all the members of the Discovery spacecraft. If we look at Hal’s perspective, an intelligent machine with an emotional response to a life-threatening situation would have behaved like that. When Hal refuses to open the pod bay door to let Bowman in, it becomes evident to Bowman that he was right about Hal.
The conflict between Bowman and Hal takes us back to this central question, who is more intelligent? Is it the Hal 9000 computer with its cognitive mind like humans or humans who created Hal?
In my understanding, the movie’s main concept is the pure and trustworthy relationship between the creator and the product. This relationship changes when one of them starts to challenge the intelligence of the other. Kubrick establishes how all intelligent life forms have a destructive nature at the beginning of the film. Hence, when Hal outsmarts Bowman, the only way to stop Hal is to destroy it.
Hyper-reality
This movie’s ending has been discussed the most in recent times. I always find something unique in all these different theories and viewpoints. In my opinion, Kubrick’s vision reflects two important conjectures. First, humans are living in a hyper-reality; they are inside and part of a simulation. And humans are unaware of the hyper-reality; that’s their limitation of differentiating between reality and simulation. Second, I refer to the central question, the contestation between two different intelligent life forms. The mysterious monolith appeared a few times in the entire movie. Since the beginning, the monolith has been watching over humanity, and then humans discover one monolith on the moon. This is a similar situation to Hal and Bowman. The way Bowman has a plan for Hal’s destruction, the mysterious monolith has its goal as well, to divert Bowman’s mission that leads him to infinite interstellar space.
When Bowman travels beyond the infinite space, we see Bowman’s space pod in the baroque-style room. Bowman lives the rest of his life in this setting. One can say that the ending of the movie is an excellent example of hyper-reality. The hyper-reality in which Bowman lives is no different than the earth. The only difference is the limitation of separating the two.
Works Cited
Clarke, Arthur. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey Series). Reissue, Ace, 2000.