Films/DVD Asylum

Movies from comedy to drama to your favorite Hollyweird Star.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

Fresh Musings on Kubrickâ€™s Monument for the Ages: 2001

Posted by halfnote on May 10, 2008 at 21:52:06:

It doesnâ€™t seem to matter how many times I see this film â€¦ whether I see it from the beginning or pick it up halfway through â€¦ there is always some aspect of this peerless cinematic work that I seem to have failed to distill or meditate upon.

The UHD network has been showing 2001 for a few weeks now in glorious 1080i. I watched it once from beginning to end, and have seen segments, adventitiously, here and there, a few times since.

Tonite, one or two other things struck me.

Everyone remembers the simple eloquence of the scene in which HAL murders the three crewmen in their suspension capsules. Their faces, barely visible though the little windows of their capsules, slightly blue, with the electronic charts on the wall above them showing their vital signs â€¦ and then, the charts go flat; and alarm goes off, and a small visual display flashes â€œCOMPUTER MALFUNCTION â€¦ COMPUTER MALFUNCTIONâ€.

It certainly IS a â€œmalâ€, or malevolent, function, isnâ€™t is? And it raises the whole question as to where malevolence, or an entire ethical system for that matter, comes from, doesnâ€™t it? It is merely a matter of self-preservation? Is it purely a matter of calculated advantage? Or is it something beyond that, something even metaphysical? Here we have an inamimate calculating machine commiting murder. Is he responsible? It brings to mind Daveâ€™s earlier chess game with HAL, doesnâ€™t it? Soon after, they play for KEEPS. It also echos, millions of years later, the battle of the man-apes over the water hole that begins the odyssey.

Ironically, it is HAL â€œwhoâ€ is supposed to be in command of all the ships functions. Yet, in the simple flashing indicator which reads â€œCOMPUTER MALFUNCTIONâ€, Kubrick slyly suggests that there is a higher authority. HALâ€™s actions are being â€œjudged.â€

There is another powerful element of this murder scene which is very easy to overlook. All the subjects who are murdered are asleep. â€“ or more precisely, they are in suspended animation. They are, in a sense, already dead to the world. At first, their deaths seem to us less significant than the murder of Frank Bowman. On the other hand, in their state, they are utterly innocent. And so their murders, seen from this perspective, are all the more terrible. They become emblems of the tens of millions of nameless, unknown innocent people murdered throughout history in the name of personal ambition. They also occupy an interesting point on a scale which has life on one end, and death on the other (or consciousness and inanimacy, if you like), which Kubrick (and Clarke, to be fair) continuously probes throughout this film â€“ most obviously in the character of the psychopathic and, at the same time, inanimate HAL 9000 computer.

And, before I put you to sleep, Iâ€™d like to close with one more observation. The film opens with beautiful and colorful stills of vast landscapes, shots that would make Ansel Adams take notice. The film closes with similar shots at the conclusion of Daveâ€™s journey, this time chromatically shifted to the point of psychedalia, and ostensibly rooting the picture in itâ€™s late 60â€™s era. Yet, the intentional contrast between these two landscapes raises important questions: Why is one strange, and the other familiar? Why is the one â€œfar awayâ€ and the other â€œhomeâ€? And finally, how far has humanity REALLY travelled from the painted landscapes that open the film. And so, as the film â€œrootsâ€ itself in time, it transcends it.