2001 : A Space Odyssey interpretation

This movie is one of the most difficult movies I have ever watched. I believe most of us would agree on this. If I did not watch this movie with my classmates and Nathan, I am pretty positive that I would never have finished the movie, and plus, I would be much more confused than I am now. I was somewhat confused when the movie started, not only because I had to wait for a long time for the title and the theme music to go away, but when the movie did start, the main characters were apes, not human. The title of the movie includes the word 'space', so I expected something about technology, or at least the setting would be in modern days. However, instead, the apes, which I would rather call monkeys, but due to the subtitle 'The Dawn of Man', I should call them apes, appears.(I am not sure if this sentence makes sense) Now I believe that 'The Dawn of Man' part is skillfully made and is absolutely needed for the whole story, but I have to sat that I was quite bewildered that time. I was thrilled to see the scene of the ape throwing the bone, and a space shuttle showing up suddenly. This scene is referred to as one of the most well edited scene, so I have heard about it even though I I had no idea which movie it was. After the apes touched that monolith, they became to know how to use bone as a tool, and after billions of years later, human were able to go to the moon to find another monolith. I am still bit shocked how Stanley Kubrick would come up with this idea that the start of us being scientific was a single use of a bone, and also how he succeed in showing it with a single scene (a bone turns into a space shuttle).

Weirdly, I do not have much impression to the second story. Maybe the first and the last stories were indeed shocking, so relatively the second one was not that memorable. It is somewhat funny because I did not notice that the second story was over when the third story started. I was confused why there became two characters, and a machine called HAL9000. I wonder why Kubrick did not insert subtitles between second and third story.  HAL is considered as the most evolutive machine ever. Dave and Frank, and three scientist who are hibernating are leaving for Jupiter. HAL9000 is considered as the 6th crew of the journey since it is highly intellectual so could possibly be considered as a human being. I think it is quite ironic that in the bible we read in our class, shows that human beings were made on the 6th day of the creation, and in this movie, HAL9000, the creation that human made is considered as the 6th crew of the ship. I think the sequence when Dave turns off the operation of HAL was very memorable. HAL keep talks to Dave to stop doing it, and its voice is very calm and slow as usual. If it were a real human, it should be sound very nervous and shouting to Dave, but instead, it keeps saying "I am dying Dave"  in very calm voice without showing any feeling. I think that this means a machine can never become just like human no matter how much it is developed. 

The movie is very consistent, meaning that the ending of the movie is not easy to understand either. I was baffled when I watched the man grew older on Jupiter. It was not until later that I found out that the man was Dave. It feels like there are two people in the room, but actually it is not. It is just Kubrick's outstanding way of revealing the story in a very extraordinary way. I believe that it is almost impossible to understand what the huge fetus at the ending scene means if we did not know that the movie is inspired by Nietzsche's book 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'. The baby refers to Uebermensch, the new man kind after the present human being. Maybe this was the reason why 'they' sent the monolith to earth in the first place, to create a new man kind. 

I found very interesting and very agreeable statement while I was searching for the video clips. It said : 

The 99.9% of the people who watched this movie in 1968 said "wtf was that?!", 

the 99.8% of people who watched it in 2011 said "wtf was that?!"

Sorry for the language, but I could not agree more! It is definitely true that this movie is difficult to interpret, and even if some do succeed in understanding it, the interpretation differs from person to person!