Also when we decided to watch it I thought we were watching Armageddon with Bruce Willis and Jake Gyllenhaal, so you may understand my confusion when there was twenty minutes of dudes dressed up like monkeys doing literally nothing at the start of the movie.
Not only is 2001: A Space Odyssey weird and dull and trippy and terrifying, it's also vague and confusing as all hell. I didn't understand anything of what happened at the end of the movie, so I was utterly confused and scared out of my mind wrapped up in one pretty package. I get that it's a cautionary tale against artificial intelligence and technology in general, but it also incorporated ideas of a "God" and the cycle of life and death. There was a distinct contrast between technological threats and the mortality of man. I would say I liked this movie more than A Clockwork Orange, but to really watch this movie and derive as much as you can out of it you have to be invested in understanding it, or else you will just fall asleep.
Much like A Clockwork Orange, we had to watch this movie in two sittings considering the most we got through in the first sitting was a little bit more than the men in monkey costumes. I'm pretty sure the plot of this was that something strange was occurring on either the moon or Mars or some planet and no one could get a signal out of it, so this trip was being sent to check it out manned with some astronauts but also HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence machine. Now, we get a look into what is presumably the issue that they are going to check out and it's this black column that shows up out of nowhere. What I put together was that HAL 9000 did not want this mission to fix wherever they were trying to go whether because he was that black column that was showing up throughout time and space meaning that he effectively became a sort of "God" able to pass through dimensions of time, or he was in cahoots with this black column and he knew it was going to decimate all life and he wanted machines to take over. The crew also discusses disabling HAL 9000, so it gets "offended" and strategically takes out each member of the team so they cannot investigate what is happening.
You really have to be invested in this movie. There are a whole bunch of shots that just hold on one thing for two or three minutes without anything really happening. There's a few 15-20 minutes segments of shots comprised of two to three minutes shots of space with a building Greek choir that grates on your nerves and makes the tension almost unbearable.
The ending scene is what really got me. There is one man left who is trying to evade HAL 9000 and basically what ends up happening is he sees through dimensions and I was thinking about how they got these really weird and obscure shots of things and I came to the conclusions that it was probably just a negative shot of a sponge or something. Something ordinary that was altered in color (like the Grand Canyon, but blue) was how Kubrick seemed to represent inter-dimensional space travel.
Now the truly terrifying part of the movie was that (I am assuming) HAL 9000 sent this final guy through space to where he ended up in this room. As he slowly walks through it he sees progressively older versions of himself and the camera goes from the him seeing the older version of himself, then transitions to the older version's perspective and the young version has disappeared, so then the older version of the guy finds an even older version of himself and it switches perspective and the younger version disappears and so on and so forth. This whole situation escalates to a point where he turns around and finds a bed behind him where there wasn't a bed before and when he looks back at it there is a super old version of him laying there. The camera holds on the super old version of the guy and his face begins to look panicked. It shows him looking out over the bed, and at the edge of the bed is the black column. It's just a black column but it was easily one of the most terrifying moments in a movie I've ever seen. I couldn't tell you why I was so scared of this, but the progression of events in this nonsensical scenario just builds tension in a way that when there is the final reveal that the black column is there it completes the scenario in the way that nothing is completed. There is no real explanation for what is happening or why the column or the man in there and that's what is so scary about it I guess.
This movie is really odd. I know I didn't give that great of an explanation of what happens, but until you watch it there's no real way to explain it in a way that gives the full picture. The most admirable thing about this movie is how for a 1968 movie, the effects depicting space and zero gravity were incredible. Other than admiration of the effects, I see no pluses to seeing this movie. I didn't understand it and it was wildly unnerving; these are personal faux pas but they still prevent me from really enjoying this movie at all.
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