"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones," declared Joseph Joubert. Happily, that axiom does not always apply to old movies, particularly great ones such as Citizen Kane or Casablanca, which are familiar to people born decades after they were first screened. And so it will be with Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," which Turner Entertainment is currently restoring and recutting for a new theatrical release in the fall of its namesake year. Previews will be released in stages throughout 2001, the first of them already past on New Year's Day at London's National Film Institute, another Feb. 18 at the Berlin International Film Festival, several more on March 7 (the second anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's death) in selected cities around the globe; and a general theatrical release in October.

When I first saw Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" back in 1969, I had not a clue about and virtually zero interest in computers, which I considered to be, when I thought about them at all, which wasn't often, something no more relevant to my life than, say, electron microscopes.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the movie, which was being heavily hyped among my teenage friends at the time. I didn't really understand what Kubrick and screenplay author Arthur C. Clarke were trying to say, but the visuals were unbelievably cool -- better than any movie I had seen before.

In not "getting" what 2001 was about, I had plenty of company. The late Rock Hudson, who attended 2001's premiere, reportedly commented: "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?" That suited Clarke fine. "If anyone understands [the film] on the first viewing, we've failed," he declaimed.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Scientists fail to recognize what an artistic tour de force 2001 was, awarding it only a measly single Oscar, for Visual Effects.

Those who just laid back and let the experience wash over them left the theatre with a more positive impression. Franco Zeffirelli, himself a director of artful medieval costume dramas, sent a telegram to Kubrick with the message: "You made me dream eyes wide open." The San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Times and The Toronto Star all named 2001 1968's movie of the year.

Many of you reading this, weaned on the Star Wars trilogy, and prequel, gazillions of Star Trek episodes, and computer aided special effects in movies like those in The Titanic, would have difficulty imagining the visual and conceptual impact 2001 had when it was released in 1968. We had simply never seen anything remotely like it. I mean heck, color television had only been available for two years in my part of Canada at that point. The remarkable thing was that Kubrick had to do it the hard way, taking more than three years and tying up acres of MGM's studio space, as well as an abandoned new York corset factory, for sets. Even more remarkable is that after three decades, I still have not seen any film quite the equal of 2001.

Four years ago, I borrowed a video copy of 2001 from the library, curious as to how it would hold up after nearly 30 years, and thinking that it was an artifact of '60s culture that my kids should be introduced to. Would the pioneering special effects still dazzle, or would they look hokey and amateurish like the early episodes of Star Trek do? We watched it. Then we watched it again the next evening. The kids, then young teenagers and much more technologically savvy than I was at their age, were enthralled. So was I. Kubrick's three decade old magnum opus had held up extremely well.

Two years later Apple Computer revived HAL 9000, the computer and homicidal villain from 2001, as a stage prop for Steve Jobs at MacWorld Expo and an advertising spokesmachine. Apple issued a "cinematic, made-for-the-web advertisement -- a TV commercial that’s not for TV," using HAL 9000 monotoning a narrative about the then fearfully-anticipated Y2K bug and the Macintosh.

2001 itself was larded with product plugs. The space shuttles in Act 2 carried Pan-Am logos. Space Station accommodation was by Hilton with restaurants by Howard Johnston; in-flight computer systems were by IBM, and videophones on the space wheel carried Bell (now AT&T) nomenclature.

Although IBM acted as consultants, supplying advice about computer technology of the future, Big Blue "requested" that the IBM logo not appear on the Jupiter ship "Discovery's" on-board computer once they discovered that it would be cast as the heavy.

Consequently, what probably would have been an IBM 9000 became the HAL 9000 -- the letters IBM displaced backwards by one character. IBM was reportedly not amused. Kubrick explained, his tongue presumably jammed into his cheek, that HAL stood for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Yeah, right! Incidentally, the original voice of HAL 9000 was supplied (after originally-slated Martin Balsam was deemed "too emotional" in his delivery) by Douglas Rain, a Shakespearean actor from Winnipeg, Canada, who read his lines without ever seeing the rest of the script.

2001: A Space Odyssey was based conceptually on Arthur C. Clarke's 1950 short story "The Sentinel," which Kubrick and Clarke adapted into a screenplay for the movie. They got a few things spectacularly wrong. Notably (doubtless attributable to IBM's philosophy at the time) the notion that mainframes like HAL were the future of computers. Powerful microcomputers and tiny microchips were still unthought of, at least at Big Blue.

However, they got a great many things remarkably right too. For instance, Kubrick's moon footage was created more than a year before Neil Armstrong actually landed there and it turned out to be uncannily accurate. Another thing that no one in cinema has yet done as well and as effectively as Kubrick, is the way that he superbly illustrated the effect of weightlessness in space. "Exceptionally accurate portrayals of space flight," was Armstrong's own comment. "Now I feel I've been in space twice." agreed Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.

The movie has also stood up quite well as cultural iconography, especially in the computer and filmmaking orbits. besides Apple using HAL 9000 as an advertising shill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department working on artificial intelligence research is dubbed "the Hal Project." Steven Speilberg reportedly was heavily influenced by, and spent many hours watching, 2001, while he was making "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind," and there is a tribute shot to 2001, which according to Roger Ebert is Tom Hanks' favorite movie, in Hanks' latest film, "Castaway."

My friend James P. Cooney, a professor of philosophy at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and author of the recently published book, "In Search of Community: Reversing the Course of a Nation in Conflict" (CeShore, Pittsburgh, PA), says that "Within two years [of first seeing the film], I had proposed, developed, and taught two courses in Science Fiction at the State University of New York at Oswego (among the first to be offered in that genre on the college level)... Every Philosophy course I teach, now concludes with excerpts (Thank God for the remote control-- the film is a bit boring and slow moving, now, in parts) from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have now viewed the film well over a hundred times and have used it in at least 30 college classes."

Kubrick was panned in many quarters for making 2001 cryptic and inscrutable -- even incomprehensible. I certainly found it so as an technologically naive and philosophically illiterate 18-year-old viewing it for the first time. For example, Kubrick purged the voice-over narrative and most of the dialogue from the original screenplay, and almost half an hour rolls by before the first human words are spoken -- and then mainly banalities that do little to illuminate the plot. "I tried to work things out so that nothing important was said in the dialogue, and that anything important in the film be translated in terms of action," Kubrick explained. "The screenplay is the most uncommunicative form of writing ever devised. What I'm after is a majestic visual experience." He succeeded in creating one.

Arthur C. Clarke commented at the time that "The most remarkable thing about 2001 is that it is doing so well without any concession to popular taste. Kubrick never once said, 'Let's not let the popcorn set get away.' It's so uncompromising that people realize it deals with much bigger issues than science alone."

That uncompromising motif is one of the reasons I like 2001 so much. I don't consider compromise a virtue.

Complaints about 2001 included:

• The ending is too opaque and confusing.

• The spaceships move with glacial slowness, as does the plot, making it boring, and the whole story could easily have been told in a 60-minute TV show with commercials.

• What the heck was that big black domino-shaped thing that kept appearing on the rare occasions when something interesting happened?

• What relevance does a neurotic, paranoid computer have to a bunch of ape-men and a mysterious black slab?

• And by the way, what were those apes doing in a science-fiction movie about space exploration?

• What was the "cosmic light show" in aid of?

• How come the characters don't talk much and say essentially nothing when they do?

• Was Stanley Kubrick on LSD when he made this thing?

Kubrick himself was unmoved by the criticism. "How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001."

And if you think that Kubrick was being arrogant and pretentious comparing himself to Leonardo in the same breath, wait till you see the movie before you pass judgment. If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to run down to the video store or library and pick up a copy. If you appreciate fine cinematic art, you're in for a rare treat.

To (I hope) whet your appetite further, here is a capsule description of the film, which is divided into four acts that seem only superficially related to one another at first. In fact, a common thread runs through all four, tied together by appearances of the black monolith (actually a large wood slab coated with a mixture of black paint and graphite) in the first two and the fourth acts.

I have no qualms about revealing the plot, such as it is, to those who have not yet seen 2001. This is one film where your experience (the correct word) is enriched by foreknowledge of what to be looking out for.

Act 1, "The Dawn of Man," opens in the Pleistocene Era, about 4 million years ago, and is populated by those famous apes, who were really actors in superb ape-costumes, with the exception of two baby chimpanzees. It has been speculated that 2001 did not win an Oscar for best costume design only because the Academy thought the characters were real apes.

Our ape-like ancestors are initially portrayed as animals, living in terror of being eaten by predators and competing with other hominids and vegetarian animals for food and water. One group of apes is driven away from the water hole by a stronger band. Without water they are doomed.

Then, the black monolith mysteriously appears from nowhere outside the defeated apes' cave one morning, and they gather around it in curiosity. As the sun, moon, and earth drift into perfect alignment, and Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra," thunders out its climactic crescendo, the apes' leader, Moonwatcher (Dan Richter), reaches out and touches the monolith, which emits a terrible shriek, and everything is changed.

A new awareness appears in Moonwatcher's eyes, a look beyond the capacity of any ape. He is no longer an ape-man; he is now a man. He roots through a pile of animal bones as an idea forms in his newly conscious mind. He picks up a thighbone and swings it violently down into the pile of bones, which break and scatter. He has discovered how to use tools -- specifically weapons. He can think.

"Now he was master of the world," read the original narration of the scene, cut by Kubrick, "and he was not sure what to do next. But he would think of something."

After Moonwatcher and his clan learn to use their new tools to kill animals for food, they go to reclaim the water hole. Moonwatcher kills one of his formerly stronger adversaries. Mankind's first tool has become a murder weapon. Drunk with newfound power, Moonwatcher triumphantly raises his fist and flings the bone-club high into the air, where it spirals against the blue sky and fades into.....

Act 2, "The Sentinel"

.... a 21st Century satellite platform carrying nuclear warheads orbiting the earth -- some 15 years before Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" plan. and three decades antedating Bill Clinton's Strategic Defense Initiative.

Ascending from Earth past the orbiting bombs we see the Orion shuttle (modeled after a German toy, but very similar to the U.S.Space Shuttle in appearance), a scheduled (Pan-Am) spaceliner bound for SS 5, a dual wheel space station. The space vehicle moves toward the station to the strains of Johann Strauss's "Beautiful Blue Danube," played by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra -- accompaniment for a majestically choreographed waltz in space.

Orion carries only one passenger on this trip: Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), Chairman of the U.S. National Council of Astronauts. We first see Floyd asleep with his seatbelt on, his pen weightlessly floating in the air beside him.

A stewardess, wearing Velcro-soled Pan Am Grip Shoes (2001 was made before Velcro was a common household item) to keep her feet anchored to the Velcro floor, enters the cabin, retrieves the pen, and gently replaces it in Floyd's pocket. Orion approaches SS 5, where Floyd will catch his connecting flight to the Moon. During the graceful docking sequence, be sure to note the instrument readouts in Orion's cockpit, which, incidentally, were filmed animations and not the computer graphics they appear to be.

As the airlock lounge opens, the stewardess tells Floyd: "Here you are, sir,..." -- the first spoken words of the film. Floyd makes a Picturephone call to his daughter, "Squirt," (played by Vivian Kubrick -- the producer's daughter) a conversation notable only for its banality. The Picturephone was designed for the film with the help of Bell Laboratories' John R. Pearce, who designed the 1960's pioneering Telstar communications satellite.

Floyd encounters some Russian scientists on their way home to Earth, who query him about mysterious goings-on at Moon bases in the U.S. sector; there have been rumors of a plague outbreak, which Floyd denies any knowledge of. He does reveal that he's going there to investigate an unusual occurrence. The dialogue between Floyd and the Russians is as dull as dishwater, a keynote for virtually all conversation in 2001. Human passion has apparently been diluted by dependence on technology, but the emotionless nature of the characters is spooky.

Some commentators have observed that Heywood Floyd's polite but measured small-talk with the Russians is a cold war-era reprise of the ape-men's battle over the water hole (the astronauts are even drinking water during the conversation), and that the exchange's latent hostility is only thinly veiled.

Floyd excuses himself to catch his connecting flight to Clavius Base on the Moon via an Aries shuttle. Aboard Aries, he is served a meal delivered to him by a stewardess in one of the best special effects scenes of the film. He has to slurp his liquified food through plastic straws, but in one of 2001's few technical bloopers, the food in the straws retreats into the tray when he stops sucking, which wouldn't happen in zero gravity.

He also pays a visit to the bathroom, and is shown reading 2001's only intentional joke, arcane and prolix instructions for using a "Zero Gravity Toilet."

Aries lands at the moon base -- the visuals once again spectacular and masterfully executed, where Floyd makes a painfully dull speech to Clavius personnel, in which he apologizes for the "cover story created to give impression there is an epidemic at the base" -- necessary says Floyd, in view of the "discovery," which "may well prove to be among the most significant in the history of science." An object of unknown origin has been found in the crater of Tycho. he tells them. The object, Tycho Magnetic Anomaly - One (TMA-1), emitting an intense magnetic field, has been buried 40 feet below the lunar surface, and is four million years old. This deliberately buried object is considered proof of extraterrestrial life, and the Clavius personnel are sworn to secrecy.

Floyd then enters his third spacecraft of the day -- a Moon Bus to Tycho, upon which there ensues more banal conversation and some sandwich-eating. At Tycho, Floyd's party dons space helmets and descends into the excavation where TMA-1 lies -- the same mysterious black, inscrutable monolith that Moonwatcher and his band had encountered four million years earlier. Just as Moonwatcher did, Heywood Floyd reaches out to touch the monolith with his gloved hand, as the Sun and Earth come into alignment. Sunlight hits the monolith for the first time (it has been excavated during the 14-day Lunar night), and again it shrieks -- and emits a powerful radio signal. The astronauts are as disoriented by the sound (which they hear through their helmet radios) as Moonwatcher and his ape-men were. The sun-triggered radio signal is aimed at Jupiter, indicating that the monolith has been discovered.

In Act 3, "Jupiter Mission 18 Months Later," we find the 700 foot long Discovery spacecraft making its way toward the giant planet. Continuing the film's thematic motif, Discovery resembles the skull and vertebrae of some monster dinosaur.

The ship's globular front module houses a spinning centrifugal habitation ring, carrying five astronauts -- three in cryogenic suspended animation chambers, and two -- Mission Commander Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and his First Officer, Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) -- manning the ship. A sixth "crewmember" is the HAL 9000 computer. The module also contains docking bays for three space pods -- tiny spacecraft used for maintenance and shuttle duties.

During a televised BBC interview, HAL brags about being "foolproof, and incapable of error". Oddly enough, HAL is the most "human" personality in the movie -- being devious and duplicitous in contrast to the other uniformly Prozac-calm characters. Unlike the emotionless humans, HAL turns out to be neurotic, paranoid, arrogant, vain, and scheming, and despite his monotone voice and deadpan delivery, we recognize him as a sinister eminence from the start, with his Cyclops "eye" peering through a larger, flickering red lens. And in a strange way, HAL is also the only really sympathetic character in 2001.

The pressure of perfection gets to HAL, who has been programmed to ensure that the mission is carried on successfully to Jupiter at all costs. HAL knows the details of the true purpose of the Discovery's mission, which have been withheld from Dave and Frank, although this information is known to the three sleeping astronauts, whom we never meet. HAL had been programmed to lie to Bowman and Poole if interrogated about the true purpose of Discovery's mission.

HAL contrives a plot whereby he alerts Dave about the impending failure of an "AE-35" unit, which vectors Discovery's radio antenna. Dave uses a space pod, and takes a space walk, to replace the suspect AE-35 and retrieve it for testing. Dave and Frank can discern no defects in the unit, and because HAL is supposed to be errorproof, they become concerned about what his apparent mistake portends for the mission. HAL passes it off as "human error". Since HAL has terminals in every part of Discovery, Poole and Bowman retire to one of the soundproof space pods and turn off the radio so they can converse privately about HAL's disconcerting behavior. They perceive that HAL is malfunctioning, and discuss strategies for dealing with the problem. Frank suggests disconnecting HAL and reverting to Earth-based control. Dave worries about how HAL will react to this plan, but agrees that there is no alternative. Neither astronaut realizes that HAL has been reading their lips through the pod's window.

Interestingly, the London Daily Telegraph's reported recently that researchers at the School of Information Systems at the University of East Anglia, have developed a computer that can lip-read with 40% accuracy. Professor Andrew Bangham, the project leader, is quoted observing: "We have found that people can't do much more than 60% without a lot of knowledge about the context, so that is pretty good." end of course, voice recognition dictation software, like MacSpeech's iListen, which I am using right now to dictate these very words, can interpret spoken communication with better than 90% accuracy at a cost of less than one hundred 2001 dollars.

Frank takes a space pod out to replace the AE-35 unit again. During his space walk, HAL rams him with the pod, cuts his air supply hose and sends him spinning off into space. Dave mounts a rescue mission in another space pod, but Frank is already dead. Dave chases Frank's body, secures it with the pod's robot arms and returns to Discovery. In his absence, HAL turns off life support for the three hibernating crewmen. He believes he must be in command to ensure the mission's success. Confronted with disconnection and failure, he decides to eliminate everyone capable of disconnecting him.

Arthur C. Clarke said that he "personally would like to have seen a rationale of HAL's behavior. It's perfectly understandable, and in fact would have made HAL a very sympathetic character; he had been fouled by those clods at Mission Control. HAL was indeed correct in attributing his mistaken report to human error."

When Dave returns in the pod, HAL locks him out.

Dave: "Open the pod-bay doors, please, HAL. Hello, HAL, do you read me?"

HAL: "Affirmative, Dave. I read you.... This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."

Dave is obliged to improvise, deciding to propel himself in through an emergency air lock by detonating the explosive bolts securing the pod's escape hatch. HAL sees what Dave is up to and reminds him that in his haste to rescue Frank, he forgot his space helmet, which means he will have to face high vacuum unprotected in order to execute his plan. Dave perseveres in spite of this hazard, and is successful.

Back inside Discovery, Dave Bowman enters HAL's memory banks -- one of the things Kubrick got spectacularly wrong. HAL's functional capabilities (save for his artificial intelligence -- admittedly a substantial qualification) are arguably little better than those of the G3 PowerBook I'm writing this story on, but the bay that holds his memory modules is three stories tall. Dave dispassionately and methodically proceeds to disconnect HAL's oversized ROM chips while HAL pitifully pleads for his "life."

HAL: "Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. ..."

HAL: "I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you."

Dave: "Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me. "

HAL: "It's called 'Daisy.' Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two."

While lobotomizing HAL, Dave Bowman also discovers a video recording made by Heywood Floyd which reveals the purpose of the Jupiter mission to him. He now knows that he has been sent to find the destination of the monolith's radio signal in Jupiter space -- something HAL had known all along. By showing Dave the video, HAL has admitted defeat, and registered his dying wish that the mission be completed.

In Act 4, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," Discovery finally arrives in Jupiter Space, and there, orbiting the big planet, is another monolith, waiting for... what? The first appearance of the monolith catalyzed the ape-men's' transition from animal to human. The second signaled man's exploration of space. The third awaits man's arrival at Jupiter. David Bowman will be the prototype for the New Man, but first he must take a journey.

Sensing this necessity, Dave leaves Discovery in the remaining space pod and follows the monolith through space. He knows he has to touch it, as Moonwatcher and Heywood Floyd did. During the pursuit, the celestial objects -- this time Jupiter's moons -- once again move into alignment, the monolith disappears, and the Star Gate opens.

Bowman's trip through the "tunnel of light" has been described as "the closest thing to an LSD trip without actually taking the drug." In his pod Dave travels at fantastic speeds, in great pain and disoriented by the lights, which are reflected on the faceplate of his space helmet, through which we see his expression change from awe to agony. this is also, in my estimation, by far the weakest segment of the movie, and the one that has held up least well over the intervening three decades. One reviewer describes it as "hopelessly hippie-dippy," which is a fairly bang-on evaluation.

Emerging from the tunnel, the pod travels above the surface of an alien planet (actually the Hebrides in Scotland and Monument Valley) and fetches up inexplicably in a hotel suite furnished with Louis XVI reproductions -- the so-called "Regency Room."

The traumatized Bowman is stricken by a seizure, and his hair has turned white. The rest of his life passes in the room in what seems like a few short minutes. Strange laughing sounds emanate from behind the walls, but their source is not revealed. The room is a cage. Bowman becomes an old man, sitting at a table eating dinner. He accidentally knocks a glass onto the floor, and as he reaches down to pick it up, he glances over at the bed and sees an ancient person lying it -- himself again.

The emaciated man in the bed man blinks, and lifts his hand attempting to reach out and touch something. A monolith has appeared at the foot of bed. The withered Bowman is a reborn into the Star-Child. He leaves the room and we see him above the earth.

Analyzing 2001's Philosophical, Cultural, and Artistic Significance

So what does it all mean? More than anything, Kubrick wants to make us think, but about what?

For me, who recoils from the hubris and vainglorious arrogance of humanist philosophy, I find much to concur with in Kubrick's vision. First, he rejects the neo-Darwinist notion that our human qualities developed through the process of natural selection and evolution of our animal intellect. Moonwatcher's being conferred with human intelligence and self-consciousness through the metaphor of touching the monolith is much more consonant, although not entirely so of course, with the Biblical account of God breathing a living soul into Adam, the first man. It is fascinating to compare the imagery of God touching Adam's extended finger in's famous fresco on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, with Kubrick's repeated motif in 2001.

Kubrick also rejects the self-congratulatory humanist construct that "man is inherently good" by nature, by making his proto-man, Moonwatcher, a murderer almost from the very beginning of his human consciousness. Man becomes a murderer early on in the Bible too, when Adam's son, Cain, slays his brother, Abel. Moonwatcher's metamorphosis from being an animal reacting to his surroundings and circumstances purely by instinct, to being a thinking man, hostile to his fellow creatures and contriving to control and dominate his environment, is consonant with the Biblical concept of original sin -- not Darwin's humanist evolution.

In the Bible, Adam and his wife become conscious of good and evil and thus responsible for their moral choices through disobeying God and eating the forbidden fruit. "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand, and also take of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever...," God says, before banishing man from the garden forever to struggle with the tension between good and evil impulses within himself.

As Kubrick put it in a Playboy interview: "Our ability, unlike the other animals, to conceptualize our own end creates tremendous psychic strains within us; whether we like to admit it or not, in each man's chest a tiny ferret of fear at this knowledge gnaws away at his ego and sense of purpose."

Kubrick also debunks both the humanist vision that man is getting better and better through increasing knowledge, and the modernist apotheosis of technology with his portrayal of life as Kubrick sees it lived in a technologically advanced artificial environment-- a "mechanarchy" as he called it. His 21st Century humans have become machine-like themselves, even more machine-like than their machines in the case of HAL. Heywood Floyd phones his daughter, but has nothing much to say to her, and her mother isn't home. Frank Poole impassively listens to his parents' birthday greeting. Even when HAL murders Frank and the other astronauts, Dave Bowman remains emotionless. His hasty effort to rescue Frank is merely a reflexive response to his training, although forgetting his space helmet still bespeaks his human capacity for error. He is unaffected by HAL's pleading. The first emotion that registers on his face is during his ordeal in the tunnel of light. Kubrick's people have been drained of their humanity by their dependence on their creations.

This dependency resonated in the, as it turned out, overblown angst over the Y2K bug in real life 1999, which made HAL 9000 a more than whimsical medium through which to address it. As Tim Gallagher of the Ventura County Star newspaper observed in an early 1999 editorial, "Maybe this alarm clock going off in the middle of our high-technology dream is not such a bad thing. It is time for us to realize how spoiled by technology some of us have become. And it might be time for business to realize that technology that prevents human contact is not the wave of the future." Indeed, the human characters in 2001 are nothing else if not alienated -- alone.

In my opinion, 2001's ending is its second-weakest part (after the tunnel of light). Kubrick has stated the human dilemma well, but doesn't know how to resolve it. To me, the hulking, inarticulate monolith and the cackling extraterrestrial beings behind the walls of Dave Bowman's ornate prison cell represent a sorry and pitiful notion of superior beings, compared with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and His revelation of Himself to mankind in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Creator God of the Bible is not an aloof manipulator, and Kubrick abandons the Biblical concept of human free will implied in "The Dawn of Man" at the point Dave passes through the Star Gate. In the Biblical story, God becomes human and redeems humanity rather than man becoming god-like.

The Regency Room scene is just a bit too art-house obscurantist for my tastes. Who is the Star Child, and what is his significance to humanity's future? Will he be a savior or a destroyer? The book version of 2001 ends: "Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something." We are left wondering what.

Of course, that is Clarke and Kubrick's intent. "If you understood 2001 completely, we failed," said Clarke. "We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered."

2001 succeeds spectacularly as an enduring work of cinematic art, somewhat less so as a work of philosophy, and has received distinctly mixed reviews as popular entertainment. So, in the actual year 2001, how shall we grade it as futurism and/or prophesy?

Well, firstly, full marks to Kubrick and Clarke for getting the date right. I recall wondering why they chose 2001, instead of the round-numbered 2000, as the date for the movie title. Of course, as I am now aware, the third millennium commenced this year, and not in the much-ballyhooed Y2K.

As noted above, they also correctly anticipated the future use of graphical screen readouts, rather than the analog dials that were state of the art in 1968. There is (almost) an International Space Station in place in 2001, with Americans and Russians in the vanguard of its design and leadership, albeit much more modest that the big, luxurious, space wheel in the film. On the other hand, a lunar base is well in the future, as are Hilton hotels, and scheduled passenger flights into space by commercial airlines. The videophone is almost here, but Kubrick and Clarke failed to anticipate the miniaturization of computers, and the revolutionary significance that would have. By what must be a fascinating coincidence, NASA scientists recently announced that a particularly likely extraterrestrial locus potentially supporting life would be Europa, one of the four moons of Jupiter. In Clarke's sequel to 2001, 2010, aliens warn mankind not to disturb their habitat on Europa,

Sadly, Stanley Kubrick missed living to see the eponymous year of his masterpiece. He died on March 7, 1999, after a lingering illness. Arthur C. Clarke, on the other hand is now 86, and living as semi-recluse in Sri Lanka. He must be very satisfied that 2001 is still an object of discussion, commentary, and admiration a third of the century after it was made.

Charles W. Moore

You can find a HAL 9000 simulator at:
http://www.tbid.com/hal/

You will find more information and links pertaining to 2001: A Space Odyssey at:
http://www.palantir.net/2001/index.html

and here:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0062622

Charles W. Moore

.