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In Reply to: I saw 2001 last night in 70mm at the Aero in Santa Monica. posted by Analog Scott on August 8, 2005 at 14:22:30:
I read the book too and still don't know what the heck that thing is. I was told it's a being/entity that has evolved as far as can be. Great flick though, I love the serious(and almost frightening)undertone that Kubrick put into a lot of his films. Sort of like a boogey man hiding around the corner, you never see his actual face but you just know he's there.
Follow Ups:
Most of the time in movies alien encounters are vey straight forward and all questions are answered. it's like the aliens are basically human with a different look and we can fully relate to them and visa versa. I think Clarke gets the idea across that an encounter with an alien entity would almost certainly be incredibly wierd and leave us with more questions than answers. just consider the time and effort that goes into understanding the comunications and social orders of other animals here on earth then consider how much more difficult it would be ti understand and relate to advanced beings that evolved in an entirely different envirement. i hink all we are supposed to understand about the monolith is it is of an alien entity.
The monolith was a teaching tool.
The teaching aid of an intelligent designer perhaps?
Primary School - It taught the trogs to use tools and, if you like, accelerated their evolutionary development.
High School - A magnetic field anomaly is detected on the surface of the moon
High School Graduation - The monolith is found and excavated on the moon. When exposed to light, it blasts off and is tracked so somewhere near Saturn.
University - The monolith inspires the first interplanetary journey.
University Graduation - The giant monolith is found and the weirdness begins :~)
Or perhaps it is a bio lab and our development is it's project. Or maybe it is comunication device and mere comunication with these aliens is so profoundly affecting that it changes the course of mankind. Or maybe they are just there for other reasons and our chance encounters with them have such an effect. Or maybe something else. That is the beauty of it. It leaves us with questions or at least our own interpretations. It is weird which is what such a real life encounter could only be as opposed to the conventional straight forward understandable (because they are fully explained) alien encounters one finds in most scifi. And when you think about it, before 2001 just about all alien encounters were with aliens invading us in flying saucers. This movie was soooo far ahead of it's time that we are still catching up.
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