Great Moments From Cinema - 32

The Monolith Of Intelligence

Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM; 1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Major Cast: Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL 9000

Film Synopsis: From the dawn of man to his quest in search of new civilizations, this film is an exploration of what classifies us as intelligent life-forms and asks if we are prepared to take the next step towards uncovering the mysteries of the universe.

My Favorite Moment: An ape throwing up a mammalian bone and the scene cutting to a spaceship of the same shape.

Why I Like It: It will possibly take a much better person that me, perhaps a philosopher, to review this movie; such is its vast scope. A landmark in the history of cinema, the film is as stunning today, as it was 38 years ago and I believe that it will stand the test of time for the next 100 years. The movie is more to be sensed than seen, like a piece of art or a maestro’s concerto. It may not rank on top of everybody’s lists of favorite films, but it is one of the most transcendent experiences and certainly the single most influential sci-fi film of all time.

The movie opens at the time during the dawn of mankind and when apes were the inhabitants of this planet. Kubrick spends 20 minutes here, establishing how man may have evolved as a race; how the advent of a monolith, with its smooth sides may have inclined the apes to think and use their hands as tools; how there were clans even amongst apes and how the first intelligent thought may have been to use bones as weapons to fight. One of the apes does this wherein he picks up a bone and starts striking the rest of the skeleton of a dead animal. His strokes become more violent and finally as he throws the bone up in the air, Kubrick cuts to thousands of year’s in the future and in outer space where a ship is orbiting the earth. Set against the background of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, the most recognizable theme from movies, this is probably one of the most exhilarating moments in cinema. The movie resumes at the dawn of 21st century when another monolith has been discovered on the moon and just as the previous one had pointed to the sky as the next step in man’s journey, this one points towards Jupiter. This sets off a mission commanded by the pilot Dullea and which, amongst other crew members includes the super computer HAL 9000. What happens next makes HAL one of the greatest super villains of cinema. Kubrick leaves the film open-ended and forces the audience to ask several questions such as, what might be the key to our development as a civilization.

People should only see this film when they are mature enough to grasp its overall implications. It requires tremendous patience and perhaps multiple viewings, for a person to appreciate its cultural significance. But no film education is complete without experiencing this movie and sooner or later one will arrive at it. It should be mandatory viewing for anyone who thinks that movies are just mindless waste of time. It shows what makes humans intelligent, how insignificant we are as compared to the universe and how it may be the time to take the next step.