2001 a space odyssey essays
Of the many questions thrown up by , the most frequently asked is, quite simply, what the hell does it mean? It remains the most frequently asked because no one, least of all Stanley Kubrick, has ever furnished a satisfactory answer. In consequence, the film invites personal interpretation perhaps more readily than any other in the history of cinema. One widely held theory is that it's about mankind's tenuous alliance with technology and how in freeing himself from enslavement to it, he is reborn to a higher plane of existence. And there is a thematic thread braided into the film's four chapters to support the idea.
2001: A Space Odyssey: Summary, Theme & Analysis
Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Log in or Sign up. Arthur C. Clarke published A Space Odyssey in The novel is based on 'The Sentinel,' a short story Clarke had previously published.
Even if you have not read Clarke's novel, you might be familiar with its premise because of Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name. Stanley Kubrick's film was not based on the book; the novel and the film were simultaneously developed as part of a collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Then Kubrick made the movie and Clarke wrote the novel. Clarke's most famous works, due in part to the film version's popularity, he was a prolific and influential science fiction writer.
He won many honors during his lifetime, including a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, and his work and ideas remain a significant influence on science fiction today. Even if you have seen the movie version of this science fiction novel, you might be confused while reading it. That is because the novel does not follow the movie exactly. While the movie and book were both developed from the same idea, Arthur C.
Clarke finished writing the book before he ever saw the full movie. The book is written in five sections which leap through time. A group of ape-like early human ancestors, led by a character named Moon-Watcher, sees the device.
After seeing the device, the group starts creating tools, which in turn gives them an advantage over the wild animals and other tribes.
The group's evolutionary leap in thinking the development of tools , which provides them with food and domination over the other tribes, is due to subliminal psychological influence from the alien monolith.
In , scientists call Dr. Heywood Floyd to a base on the moon to discuss the presence of a strange magnetic artifact found 40 feet below the surface in one of the moon's craters, which they have named TMA-1, after the crater they found it in Tycho and the device's magnetic ability which alerted them to its presence.
The artifact and its origin puzzle the scientists. Its dimensions are too precise to have been formed by nature, but the artifact predates humankind. During a trip to investigate the artifact, which the scientists consider evidence that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, Floyd and the scientists witness a startling event: the sun rises over the crater and, for the first time in three million years, the monolith is hit with sunlight. Activated by the sunlight, the monolith sends a signal toward one of the moons of Saturn.
After this burst of activity, the monolith loses its magnetic property. Once again, the novel leaps forward in time. It is now and a mission to Saturn has been organized. The mission, named Discovery One, consists of five men and an artificially intelligent computer named HAL Three of the men are in a suspended state during the book.
David Bowman and Dr. Francis Poole are awake and in charge of running the spaceship and fixing anything that goes wrong. One day, HAL informs the crew that they are in danger of losing communication with Earth because the device that points their antenna at Earth is broken.
Poole undergoes a risky procedure in an extravehicular pod to fix it, only for Bowman to discover that the original part was fine. When questioned about the mix-up, HAL denies that the fault is his. Earth, by this point, has realized that HAL is not behaving correctly.
Unfortunately, HAL scrambles the message and informs the crew that they have definitely lost contact with Earth. Poole dons his suit and goes out of the spaceship again to remove the supposedly broken part of the antenna. While outside, his external pod runs into him. It tears his suit and the rip results in his death. Bowman suspects HAL killed Poole.
He tries to wake the hibernating crew members. HAL retaliates by opening the airlocks. Bowman saves himself by donning an emergency spacesuit. He realizes that HAL is behind everything and shuts down his systems.
Once Hal is no longer a threat, Bowman contacts Earth and learns that they did not tell him the truth about his mission. They explain that he is supposed to explore one of Saturn's moons, not Saturn. The scientists on Earth hope he will be able to establish contact with whoever put the monolith on the Moon. The scientists claim that HAL's murderous behavior was just self-defense. He did not want to be disconnected. The earlier behavior, such as misreporting the status of equipment, was due to a malfunction after the scientists asked him to hide the true nature of the mission from Bowman and the rest of the crew.
Months pass before Discovery One reaches Iapetus, the Saturn moon the scientists pinpointed as the recipient of the moon monolith's signal. Bowman tries to fix up the spaceship, but it is obvious that the spaceship does not have enough oxygen to keep Bowman alive until a rescue spaceship arrives. As he draws closer to Iapetus, Bowman sees the monolith. It is bigger than the one on the moon.
Once he arrives, he takes one of the extravehicular pods and decides to explore it. When he gets closer to the monolith it opens, revealing itself to be a star gate. He observes other spaceships, planets, and species. Bowman winds up at a hotel suite. The hotel suite has been designed by the aliens based on knowledge they have gleaned from Earth.
It is a safe place where they can observe him and help him evolve. Bowman falls asleep. While he sleeps, his mind is wiped and he starts to become an entity known as the 'Star Child', an immortal being who can travel through space.
Bowman-as-Star Child returns to Earth, where he becomes a sort of guardian of humanity. They cannot see him, but he prevents a nuclear warhead from hitting its target. The ending implies that the Star Child, like the monolith, will observe and maybe even subtly interact with humankind during their next stage of evolution.
Evolution is a big theme in A Space Odyssey. In the beginning of the novel, the early ancestors of humans encounter the monolith on Earth. After they interact with the monolith, their intelligence, or at least their way of thinking, takes a leap. They begin to develop tools, which let them move up the food chain. They are no longer prey.
The tools allow them to become predators. Then the novel skips ahead to Humans have evolved considerably since the previous section. They now have advanced tools, such as spacecraft and scientific devices capable of detecting the magnetic monolith.
Furthermore, at the end of the novel, Bowman evolves and enters a higher plane of existence, where he is the Star Child, with the ability to travel through space and time. While evolution definitely exists and is well-explored in A Space Odyssey, the reader is left with one question: who or what is behind the evolution? Evolution is generally considered a scientific process that occurs naturally, but in A Space Odyssey , evolution seems to be both instigated and influenced by aliens and their technology.
Among the many tools that humankind develops in A Space Odyssey are those that assist with space exploration, such as artificial intelligence devices like HAL , spacecraft like Discovery One , and the technology the scientists use to analyze the destination of the TMA-1 signal. Clarke was a lifelong spokesperson for the idea of space travel. Neil Armstrong did not walk on the moon until Yet the second part of the book features a scientific base on the moon. Clarke had a lot of belief in what man was capable of in terms of space travel.
A significant portion of the novel is devoted to descriptions of the technology used on Discovery One. For Arthur C. Clarke, space exploration was not a question of how, but when.
As a result, the idea of exploring space is an inherent theme in the book. Although it was written in and based off of a collaboration project with Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke's novel was far-thinking. In it, he explores the themes of space exploration and evolution. Although alien technology, in the shape of monoliths, have subtle influences on humans and possibly assist human evolution, the book is primarily focused on the events of a fictional space mission that occurs in Discovery One is sent to explore the recipient of a signal beamed from a monolith discovered on Earth's moon in During the mission, HAL , the artificially intelligent computer, malfunctions and all of the crew is killed aside from Dr.
David Bowman. When Dr. Bowman arrives on one of Saturn's moons, he discovers another monolith, which turns out to be a portal to another galaxy. In this other galaxy, Bowman experiences the next step in evolution and becomes an immortal being called the Star Child who watches over Earth and prevents nuclear war.
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The basis of A Space Odyssey is that man has reached a point technologically with their tools that the next evolution step would be consciousness of. Read the Empire Movie review of EMPIRE ESSAY: A Space Odyssey. Whatever secret — if any — lies at the heart of , certain things are beyond.
I was a real space buff, partly because dad produced coverage of the space flights for ABC News. So I was totally blown away, and it became my favourite film for years; I made my own little Super-8 space movies with models on wires. Ten years later, in high school, I dropped acid to watch an anniversary screening.
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Pssst… we can write an original essay just for you. Clarke, is a tale of human evolution as guided by a higher intelligence, making it a landmark in literary achievement.
50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey – how Kubrick's sci-fi 'changed the very form of cinema'
Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Almost all students have seen , but virtually none understand its inheritance, its complexities, and certainly not its ironies.
The Themes Portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey
The film resonates with wonder, unparalleled before or since its release in , as opposed to a preoccupation with entertainment value or turns of the plot. Episodic in configuration, the film employs chapters marking what are commonly interpreted as significant developments in human intelligence, expanding from prehistory to the year , and then escalating beyond time and space. In determining how these individual chapters correlate to one another endures an omnipresent mystery and the basis of an ongoing fascination with the film. Some have argued that together the chapters put forward a quest to find God, or an allegory for the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth. After comprising his first cut, the director edited down the footage and removed explanatory narration from the opening sequence to instill doubt about the subsequent events. Conceived in partnership with Arthur C. No protagonist exists through which the audience can follow a traditional story arc, and what characters there are dissolve into their backdrops. Kubrick has ostensibly made a silent film that requires sensations to guide its implications. Those sensations imply that the spartan plot details the progression of human intelligence guided by a specific positioning of the stellar phenomenon, as well as another astral force, most likely extra-terrestrial, presented in the form of the iconic black rectangular Monolith. The first frames show the alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, and then fall upon our young planet where apelike creatures gather in clans and fight over a nearby watering hole.
The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke , and was inspired by Clarke's short story " The Sentinel " and other short stories by Clarke.
The film is set in the near future at a time when the moon is colonised and space travel, at least around the planetary system, is quite usual. Sometimes these images are transferred into an actual visual by the subsequent creation of films based upon these great works. Kubrick has done an astounding job at developing the original short story by combining music with visual images way. This stone monument transmits radio waves that end up expanding their IQ 's, teaching them weaponry and other tool uses to help them live, as they proceed to defeat a rival tribe.
A Review of 2001: a Space Odyssey Essay
However, Greek mythology often attributes strength as the ultimate virtue, and even current day movies do too. The attribute of being clever or cunning is seen during A Space Odyssey and The Odyssey seen by Odysseus and David Bowman as the dominate theme throughout both titles. Metis, the Greek word meaning. The gunpowder for a smashing evolutionary hit was amassing for a long time, but the necessary spark came from an outside help, which soon set the whole world ablaze. From this heated inferno, came the most proficient species ever to grace the planet. And now man has to be prepared for what comes next. Arthur C. Clarke skillfully proves the point that 'truth is stranger than fiction' in his remarkable book. The first change you see is that of a leader. In the beginning, each monkey did their own thing, and was not bound to any organization whatsoever. The monkeys did what they want when they wanted.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The essays in this collection, commissioned from a wide variety of scholars, examine in detail various possible readings of the film and its historical context. They also examine the film as a genre piece--as the summa of science fiction that simultaneously looks back on the science fiction conventions of the past Kubrick began thinking of making a science fiction film during the genre's heyday in the fifties , rethinks the convention in light of the time of the film's creation, and in turn changes the look and meaning of the genre that it revived--which now remains as prominent as it was almost four decades ago. Constructed out of its director's particular intellectual curiosity, his visual style, and his particular notions of the place of human agency in the world and, in this case, the universe, is, like all of his films, more than it appears, and it keeps revealing more the more it is seen. Though their backgrounds and disciplines differ, the authors of this essay collection are united by a talent for vigorous yet incisive writing that cleaves closely to the text--to the film itself, with its contextual and intrinsic complexities--granting readers privileged access to Kubrick's formidable, intricate classic work of science fiction. Kolker presents the most current "readings" of this timeless classic.
