I saw 2001 last night and thought peoples' explanations for the movie would
be a good subject to talk about.

52 responses total.

Well, Clarke *claimed* it was an expansion of one of his early short stories
("The Sentinel", 1951), but that seemed to me pretty thin.  The contrast
between Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss (in the sound track) was kind of
striking.
(What kind of "explanation" did you have in mind?)

And he really didn't mean for people to get the wrong idea about HAL.
You'll note that if you shift the letters H-A-L you get I-B-M.
And, IBM actually stands for "I Buy Macintosh."

   There is a book, titled _The Making of 2001_ (I believe) that is a
must-read if you appreciated the movie.  It fills in gaps that are
otherwise difficult to fill.
   Every time I've seen the movie I get different things from it, and
maybe learn a little.  It *isn't* one of the short little films that you
can see once, and say "oh yeah, I saw that...".  But most of Clarke's
writings are like that.
   It is interesting to note that Dr. Clarke is not nearly as optimistic
about the future now, as he was when he wrote 2001.  As an example,
_Rendevzous with Rama_ paints a brighter picture of what will come than
the following books in the series, like _Garden of Rama_.
   But back to 2001...

The two sequels to the book also explain a bit of what was going on.

     I still stand by my Fruedian interpretation.  I think the producer
is extremely repressed... Something about his brother.  The guy in the 
bed... Hmmmm.

Vipul, your Freudian interptrataion is worthless.  It was a man in the bed, not
a women and certainly not his mom.  Unless he was suggesting a sex-change
operration??? hmmmm...I'll think about that one.  The movie made sense untill
the end...maybe because Vipul fell asleep and couldn't explain it any longer.

Due to a dearth of activity in the scifi conference, I've linked
this in as scifi item 13, as well as agora item 10.

 Clarke passed his love for 'shrooms on to Kubrick.  No further analysis should
be necessary.

It was not his mom in the bed.  It was his brother.  The author/producer had
some really repressed feelings.

Well, then it doesn't conform to Freud's ideas.  Besides, Vipul is such a
bastard anyway... :)

Have you seen 2010 anyone?

Yeah...it wasn't as good as 2001 - I think it's because it had a plot.

2001 was about as visionary a movie as could have been created - or
could be created today. 
  
Ididn't know abut the book _The Making..._, but if there is a copy
to borrow .......

i saw 2010 -- because i used to babysit for the older kid of Bob Balaban,
the guy who played the computer scientist.

Gee, I just saw 2010 because I thought it would be a good movie.

you're just jealous because popcorn got paid to see it.

2010 wasn't +all+ that bad.

True, but it didn't live up to the book.  Certainly the book's
vision of American/Soviet (well, Russian now, I guess) cooperation
was more accurate than the movie's continuation of the cold war.

It was, however, a reasonable guess, given the original time ...

_2001_ was more Kubrick than Clarke, and who knows where *that* guy is at:)

(clarification: i paid to see 2010 the same as everybody else.  the
reason why i wanted to see it was because Bob Balaban was in it.)

(There's probably very few people in the WHOLE WORLD who saw 2010 for
that reason.)

OK. What part did Bob Balaban play in 2010?

2010 was a good movie in its own right I think, *But It Didn't Follow The
Book!*.  If you saw the movie, please read the book.  The only thing I'll
say is that, for example, the conflict between the US and USSR is nonexistant
in the book...

Bob Balaban plays the computer programmer/ computer psychiatrist.

(More specifically, Bob Balaban's character was HAL's tutor.)
 
Even more interesting than THE MAKING OF 2001 is a Clarke book titled
LOST WORLDS OF 2001, which intercuts Clarke's account of the filming with
discarded drafts.

Davel in #1: Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" covers the idea of an
alien alarm on the moon which is uncovered by humans.
 
Besides the stupidly added Cold War conflict in the film version of 2010,
I was appalled to see that the special effects work in the 1980's sequel
was considerably below the level acheived in the 1968 film.  The makers
of 2010 should have hired ILM.  :-)
 
Picky, picky:  The ship Discovery had three EVA pods.  In the film version
of 2001, they were all lost:  one was used to murder Frank Poole, one was
lost when Bowman came in the emergency airlock, and the last one went
off to the aliens' hotel suite with Bowman.  There is, nevertheless,
one pod back in the Discovery in the film version of 2010, probably because
the producers felt it was necessary for the visual look of the 
Discovery interior.

Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is one !fine special effects company!
  
And for 2001, the magic future was the "infant" at the end. I started
to write a sequel based on that infant but got distracted by reality.
However, in effect (philosophicaly) the "infant" created a 
StarWars-type network above the Earth which "captured" any hostilly-fired
ICBM-type stuff and thusly prevented planetary nuclear conflagraton, to
which the earthlings responded by deciding to populate the Universe
ala Asimov's Foundation series, which I had NOT read at the time.
  
Now if I could just get that infant to "grow" and integrate him/her
into the Foundation Series (which I have now read) ....

Item 26 raises the point of "why is there still a pod in Discovery in 2010"
They all appeared to get lost in 2001. I had the same thought. However, if
you read the book, you'll see a passage about Bowman retrieving the second
pod by remote control. Which brings me to another question: DIDN'T ANYONE
*READ* the *BOOK* 2001????
All these question about "Like, what di it all mean man? Like, the ending
was all psychodelic and confusing..."
If you read the book _2001_, all the details are explained and it makes
alot of sense.

Yeah, but if you read the book, it says the monolith is on Saturn's
moon Iapetus.  A movie should be able to stand up on its own, and
not rely on any "novelizations" to explain its flaws.  (Then again,
I didn't think the movie of _2010_ was all that great.)

1.) Yes, I agree, the _2010_ movie was not great.
2.) And yes, I agree again, a movie should not require that you read a 
separate book to understand it. But the explanation *is* available in the
book, I'm just surprised at the number of people who still don't understand
the ending when there is an explanation available.

In 2001 which came first the Movie or the Book ?
2061 just gets weirder.

RE: In 2001, which came first, the movie or the book?
Answer: Yes.

Clark worked on the Novel 2001, at the same time as he and Kubrick worked
on the sceenplay 2001.

Wasn't 2001 (both movie and book) based on an earlier Clarke story, "The
Sentinel"?

Yes.

I don't like the artistic decision they made changing the discovery of live
plant-animals on Europa from the Chinese refueling to a 'space pod'.  That
just seemed stupid.

Maybe they just didn't want to pay any Chinese actors.

Ow!

2001 is playing next week at the Michigan Theater.  It does look
great on the big screen too!

The one drawback is that has no real plot and is as exciting as watching
paint dry.  I love the scenes deling with space technology best because 
they're the best attempt to make things realistic I've ever seen.  Although
it is humourous to listen to HAL say that he was built sometime in the 80s or
early 90s.

Hmmm.  The year 2001 is less than 8 years away.

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