So I showed this to my girlfriend tonight. She had never seen it before. Overall she found the film intriguing but some of her comments were pretty funny such as,

"So how long does this acid trip last"? - This was in reference to Bowman's journey into the monolith.

"Why is this guy the only passenger on the ship"? - In reference to Heywood Floyd being the only one on the shuttle from Earth to the station half way to the moon.

"Pan Am?? They're long gone"!

Valid questions, I think, especially about the acid trip.

What did you tell her about him being the only guy on the ship? My understanding was that it was such a big deal, and being kept secret, that they flew him up alone.

Yup that's exactly what I said to her and that it was explained in the novel. I've been meaning to read it again.

She was also quite impressed with how good the special effects were for a film that came out in 1968.

Not a bad question there. Explained a little better in the book, it showed how important the event was and the need to keep it quiet that they went through the major expense of sending one man up there. Not to mention their faith in him being capable of handling what was going on.

Ahh my favorite movie.

Nothing better than when the shuttle approaches the space station, "An der sch�nen blauen Donau".


A few years ago, my 9 yo niece and I watched it. When I explained that the apes got "instructions" from the monolith that helped them evolve into Man, she said with some insistence that God made Man! OOOOps


Conflict --> insanity



WC

Next up I think I'll introduce my girlfriend to Dune.

The Monolith didn't push Man, it was there to witness and report if/when intelligence started to show in the apes. It recognized what was about to happen. The noise was the transmission. The timing does make it seem odd though.
Then on the moon it did the same thing. We were able to find it, so were clearly taking the first steps away from Earth and it reported again.

Raw is correct except for the "apes" part.

What you saw on Earth was early Man (most likely Homo habilis) which were not the same as apes.

The movie does a poor job of showing this as you just see it sit there and the hominids look at it and then do nothing.

In the book, the monolith functions as a large video screen, hypnotizing them as it experiments with their brains. One is made to tie a crude knot, another collapses and dies when it tries the same thing, after which the monolith stops and takes a couple of days to analyze the failure.

In the film, the monolith is passive aside from the transmission. In the book, it's quite active. Likewise Bowman's trip through the star gate was done just bizarrely in the film, not making sense like it does in the book. There he passes by stars, sees a ship graveyard, living things on the surface of a red giant...



The Jedi Master

you try showing wargames to someone that was born after the end of the cold war

My feeling is that the monolith plays an active role in human evolution, even in the movie. It just seems awfully coincidental that the early hominids were struggling to survive, then the monolith appears, and one of the hominids has a reaction, and there's a cut to the monolith, back to the hominid, back to the monolith, then it picks up the bone and starts using it as a club. I thought it was a pretty clear way of saying that the monolith was inducing the change.

I feel that's reinforced at the end when Bowman is taken through the star gate and comes back as the star child - he was altered by the monolith, or the intelligence behind the monolith, same as the early hominids.

Yeah, but you know what I meant.


The Monolith didn't get there at that scene, it just made an appearance. They were left around the galaxy a long time before Man started evolving.
Bowman was changed, but for a purpose and as an individual. Later HAL is too.

Check out this scene. The ape, hominid, whatever, is just foraging along, then suddenly lifts its head up, and there's a cut to the monolith. Something changed at that moment, and I think the cut implies pretty strongly that the monolith was responsible.

In the book, the monolith is 100% responsible for the pre-humans starting to develop tools.

Yes, Billzilla, and I think that just reinforces my comment. My post was in reference to the comment below from RK, about how in the movie the monolith was just there to observe, but I think in the movie, it was also responsible for the development.

I'll have to re-read it then, I didn't get that from it.

RK, here's a condensed version of it, from a site called SparkNotes, which is kind of like Cliff Notes. it summarizes the novel pretty well, and the part about the monolith's first appearance on Earth is discussed in the first several paragraphs.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/2001/section1.rhtml

Actually, I'll just paste in the relevant parts here:

As the tribe approached the Rock on its way back from an unsuccessful day of foraging, a foreign sound, a repetitive vibration, began. As the sound increased in volume, the man-apes were drawn closer to the Rock; they stood in front of it, totally hypnotized. Unknown to the man-apes, their minds were being studied, their bodies probed, and their actions controlled.

One entranced man-ape picked up a piece of grass, tried and failed to tie a knot. Then another man-ape tried and another, until a young man-ape tied the first knot ever on Earth. When Moon-Watcher was possessed, he picked up stones, trying to throw them at a bulls-eye on the monolith. An intense pleasure overcame him when, after many attempts, he finally succeeded.

As the days went on, the monolith ignored most of the man-apes, but continued to interact with some of them, including Moon-Watcher. His mind was being developed, even though his instincts made him want to break free of the monolith. One day as a group of pigs came across his tribe, Moon-Watcher experienced an entirely new set of impulses. He looked around for a rock, picked it up and ran toward a pig, and killed it. The man-apes learned to feast on the dead pig�their hunger problem was solved.

I would be surprised and pleased to see anyone of any age sit through the length of the movie and have any observational comments at all. I love the movie and novel but find that discussing them is not like talking about many other popular subjects. I have simply accepted that I am unusual in my society when it comes to my artistic tastes.

Absolutely, that's "film grammar" 101. The three hour movie has a total of just twenty minutes spoken dialogue, most of which isn't that relevant anyway. All the more emphasis is put on the shooting of the scenes, the cutting, and the music selection.
One can safely assume that there is no unnecessary scene in the film (except maybe the "acid trip" which today's audiences would probably prefer to be shortened, not the least because the "wormhole jump" has become a movie trope of its own in countless other science fiction movies and TV shows (particularly "Stargate" and the intro to the Doctor Who seasons of late). The audience "got it" by now; back then it was both a novel concept that had not been used often in science-fiction stories to begin with, let alone be visualized before. But I think Kubrick simply got carried away a little with this scene, probably for the combination of colors and music which probably appealed to his movie director's taste.

I absolutely love Bowman's journey to the "infinite" as is. The beginning with the bright colored line patterns followed by the odd nebula-like images I find the most interesting.