2001 A Space Odyssey

 In 1968, the visionary and daring film director Stanley Kubrick and the writer Arthur C. Clarke presented the world with the film 2001: a Space Odyssey, little understood at the time, as some critics report, due to its predominantly visual narrative (just over forty minutes of dialogue in more than two hours of film) and the subjectivity of interpretations to which the viewer is led.

    The plot begins with a visit to the most remote past of humanity, when, according to Darvin and evolutionary theory, man was nothing more than a primate, wild and still not very rational, struggling to survive in an arid and hostile land, until something changed the the course of a certain band, when, leaving the cave where they spent the night in the morning, they come across a large black monolith buried in front of the “door”. Shortly after, the effects of the appearance of the inexplicable object begin to manifest themselves, awakening in them homo sapiens and his odyssey over the earth.

    From using bones as tools and weapons to conquering space, the film jumps back three million years and takes viewers on Dr. Heywood Floyd to the lunar base (note that the film was released a year before the American expedition to the Moon), where curiously a similar buried monolith was found, estimated to be three million years old; what in the past had been left in front of the “door” of a cave, was now found in front of the “door” of planet Earth. Once again, humanity is placed before the mysterious object that once made it, in one way or another, reach where it was; would a new leap be given? It seems so. The monolith appeared to be linked by waves of radiation to Jupiter. The question soon becomes obvious: are we human beings the work of extraterrestrial interventions? The question is not immediately answered, but the subjectivity of Kubrick's narrative opens up a range of possibilities for interpretations, as, for example, in one of the last scenes of the film, when astronaut Dave Bowman, the only survivor of the mission sent to Jupiter, an old man is seen lying at the foot of the monolith with his hand extended towards him: this scene may be a subtle reference to Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam, in which he extends his hand towards God after being made in his image and similarity. God, extraterrestrials, superior intelligences, 2001 does not answer any of these questions, on the contrary, it incites more restlessness and doubts on the subject.

Eighteen months after finding the black object on the Moon, a mission with six crew members leaves for Jupiter: three scientists, two astronauts, Frank Poole and Dave Bowman, and the HAL 9000 computer, the artificial intelligence (AI) responsible for controlling the Discovery spacecraft mission. Dave and Frank's function was restricted to simply serving as maintenance tools for the ship, as they didn't even know the real objective of the mission. From the discovery of tools three million years ago to becoming simple tools for machines created by man himself: was this the evolutionary leap of the human race?

    The most humane member of the mission was undoubtedly HAL, who made a point of debating with the astronauts subjects such as fear, vanity, doubt, feelings that the machine now knew how to simulate (or truly feel) better than man himself. HAL was in mission control, and he didn't want to share it with anyone else. The most humane machine ever created so far had taken on emotions and feelings forgotten by human beings in their evolutionary process. Man had become machine, and HAL had become someone. When Dave and Frank discover that HAL has supposedly misdiagnosed a problem with the ship's communications system, they realize they may be being tricked by the computer, which had the responsibility of getting them safely to Jupiter and allowing them to return. the land. HAL, feeling his plans threatened, kills, like a cornered animal, first the scientists who were in a state of hibernation by turning off their survival capsules, then Frank by throwing him into space. Then begins Dave's fight against HAL for survival, and at the end of the battle, like Dave, HAL demonstrates his fear of death while the astronaut turns off his AI's processing and memory units one by one. HAL, the human machine, dies; Dave, the man mechanized by the evolution of his species, survives to find Big Brother, the monolith larger than Jupiter's that communicated with the others found on Earth and the Moon, and once again, the man, now represented by Dave , takes a step in his evolution, being reborn as a new being, a star baby, a man who frees himself from time and space.

Stanley Kubrick and the writer Arthur C. Clarke

            A great visual experience, such are Kubrick's great classics, and these sensory experiments with which the director tells his stories began with 2001: A Space Odyssey, an extremely experimental film, an epic, slow and surreal ballet.

April 27, 2023,

review by

Sidney Matias

Casa de Livro Blog