My Basic Ramblings: Yet another in the ever-growing list of classic movies I feel I should watch if I want to consider myself a lover of movies. So, March 28th, I watched it.
The movie stars international heartthrob Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman, as in "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." It also stars a bunch of guys in ape suits, a few monoliths, and classical music.
This movie is supposed to take place three years in the future. Uh, sure. Can you imagine it? HAL running Windows 95? (He'd hit Blue Screens of Death and claim it wasn't an error), Or, if HAL was a Macintosh, the little bomb would pop up and you'd have to restart?
Does anyone else remember from The Electric Company there would be a little skit/filler thing where there would be this big white monolith, and the "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" music (aka the "bwa.....Bwa......BWA.....BWA-BWAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum" music) and the monolith would crumble, and at the stop of the monolith there would be a vowel combination, like "ou" or "ea" or something like that? Or am I just on crack and dreaming it?
Anyway, I always pictured the monoliths to be more George Washington monument-like in shape (tall and narrow), but in the movie they're more like big chocolate bars standing on end. (Mmmm.....chocolate.)
Imagine, if you will, all Stanley Kubrick's movies mashed into one. It'd be something like "Barry Lyndon's Full Metal Shining Orange Jacket: A Space Odyssey (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lolita)" and would probably officially make NO sense whatsoever but be hailed as cinematic genius.
The movie is an hour and forty-nine minutes long. There is no dialogue for the first half hour and no dialogue for the last half hour. The script must've been about five pages long.
I started watching this movie late in the evening (around 10:00 or so) and by the time Dave was going through his little super-sonic light trip through space and time and meaning, I was nodding off. "Wake me up when the Pink Floyd laser light show's over," I told Chris. (I'm surprised he didn't fast-forward through it; he fast forwarded through the Introduction, the Intermission and the Entr'acte music. (And what a place for an intermission! Frank and Dave are sitting in the pod, talking about how HAL's psycho, and HAL's reading their lips! Frank and Dave are screwed! Man, there's suspense for ya.)
What were the monoliths for? Who put them there? Why did HAL go goofy? What's the point of the frickin' Star Child? Why were there eighteen thousand minutes of "ship landing" footage?
There are probably nineteen thousand millions of opinions about the meaning of this movie, here's mine:
The monoliths gave whomever happened up on them increased knowledge, but also sealed their doom. The apes learned how to use tools but also used 'em to whack their fellow apes to death. The humans learned that they were not alone in the universe, but en route to Jupiter (Saturn in the novel) four out of five of them were killed. Then Dave Bowman does the Star Baby thing. So, the monolith is sort of like the Tree of Knowledge from Genesis and the creation stories - intelligence at a price.
Or something like that.