2001: A Space Odyssey

Frank Poole is killed while outside of the ship by HAL. David Bowman doesn't realize Poole is dead so he leaves the ship to try and rescue him. While he is getting Poole, HAL kills all of the hibernating crew of the Discovery One. After Bowman gets Poole's body he asks HAL to open the pod bay door so he can get in. In a famous quote ("I'm afraid I can't do that Dave.") HAL refuses and Bowman ends up going through the emergency airlock and risking his life.

He then puts on a suit to protect himself if HAL attempts to shut off the oxygen and goes to HAL's brain room to shut him off. HAL admits to Bowman "I'm scared Dave, I can feel it slipping away." and eventually loses all of its memory except for knowing a song called "Daisy" that his instructor taught him. He asks Bowman if he wants to hear it and Bowman tells him to sing it while he disconnects HAL.

After he does, he finds out that the Discovery One reached the orbit of Jupiter and he receives a pre-recorded message of from Dr. Heywood Floyd about what the mission was about. The crew was supposed to explore a new life form whose evidence was found in a black monolith that was buried on the moon, transmitting radio signals to Jupiter. The film enters it's final stage "Jupiter and Beyond" as Bowman finally sees the 3rd monolith and departs in a pod to see it. The monolith transports apparently through a black hole or worm hole through multiple dimensions and through different universes and galaxies and Bowman goes into a state of shock.

Suddenly, he is in a hotel room with no exit. He sees himself outside of the pod and suddenly the pod is gone and he is alone in the hotel room. He walks into the bathroom and sees that he has aged and his hair is gray. He then sees an even older version of himself eating supper acting as if nothing is wrong. The old Bowman at the table looks in the bathroom and sees no one there. He goes back to his meal acting as if he's lived in the room his entire life. He forgot the mission until accidentally breaking a crystal glass, which makes him wake up out of the trance for a second. He looks over at the bed and sees himself, only older to the point of mummification. The Bowman at the table is gone and the almost corpse one in bed is moments from dying.

He looks over and sees the fourth monolith at the foot of his bed. He silently raises his arm to it then falls back dead. He is then "reborn" into a supernatural being. A "Star Child" with the ability to travel through space and different worlds freely. The entire hotel sequence is a terrarium set up by the aliens to make Bowman comfortable and allow his "rebirth. The "Star Child" heads back to Earth and the movie ends with the Star Child outside of Earth looking at it with wonder that it is the primitive place it came from while "Also Sprach Zarathustra" blares triumphantly.

Monty

2001: A Space Odyssey mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Dave gets his supper, the order of the slop from right to left is yellow, light brown, light brown, dark brown. Later when he's eating, the order is yellow, orange brown, dark brown, light brown. (00:59:00 - 00:59:50)

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More mistakes in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

More quotes from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Trivia: The leopard lying on a dead zebra was actually lying on a dead horse painted to look like a zebra. The cat wasn't too happy with that scene.

Larry Koehn

More trivia for 2001: A Space Odyssey

Question: I don't understand the significance of the monolith or the starbaby. Can someone explain it to me?

Answer: As author Arthur C. Clarke explained it, the first Monolith (the one seen at the beginning of the film and then buried on the Moon) was a space probe from an incomprehensibly more advanced alien intelligence that resided inside a star elsewhere in the cosmos. The Monolith's objective was to seek out lifeforms that had potential and "tweak" their neural evolution, causing them to evolve toward intelligence. In the case of Mankind on Earth, once the modification was made, the Monolith probe retreated to the Moon and waited 4 million years for Mankind to reach it. When Mankind reached the Moon, the Monolith sent a signal to the next phase of the experiment, which was another Monolith in orbit of Jupiter. When Mankind reached the Jupiter Monolith in a matter of months, the Monolith acted as an interdimensional portal to the other side of the universe, transporting the evolved human specimen to its creator (that resided within a star). The creator intelligence found the specimen (Dave Bowman) to be of acceptable quality and rapidly evolved him to the next level, a Star Child. The Star Child is a "godly" evolution of Mankind. The Star Child chooses to instantaneously return to its home planet (Earth), where it stops a nuclear war.

Charles Austin Miller

Answer: The monolith is a monitor placed by the aliens to track the progress of developing civilizations. When humanity found the monolith on the Moon, that signaled a certain level of technological advancement. The starbaby is the evolution of the astronaut, as the symbol of humanity, from "Earth-bound" to a true child of the universe, turning his back on the Earth and looking toward the stars.

scwilliam

In both the Arthur C. Clarke story and in the movie, the Star Child does not "turn his back on Earth"; quite the contrary, as soon as Bowman transforms into the Star Child, his first impulse is to instantaneously return to Earth, which he does just in time to stop a nuclear war. In essence, Bowman becomes the guardian of Earth.

Charles Austin Miller

Answer: In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Clarke makes clear what many already suspected: The Monolith was malfunctioning by the time it tweaked human evolution. It increased human aggression in order to assure human survival, but this was a hasty move, which saddled humanity with a never ending series of destructive conflicts. Kubrick also hinted at this in a later movie. The Monolith appears in Full Metal Jacket, presumably inspiring the soldiers in the Vietnamese War to solve their problems by killing, just as it had inspired the fighting hominids millions of years before.

The monolith from 2001 does not appear in Full Metal Jacket. There is a tall burning building in the background during Cowboy's death scene but it takes a hell of a stretch of the imagination to see it as a monolith. It's just a ruined building. Kubrick himself confirmed this in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine - it's combination of coincidence and wishful thinking.

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