2001: A Space Odyssey

[maxxy]

I don't get this movie. The ending continues to baffle me. I anyone has any ideas about meaning or an explanation to the last scene, please help...

The only thing I get out of it is that Hal 9000 reminds me of the Frankenstein monster and that whoever made that last scene must have been so high on acid that he couldn't even tell up from down. Trippin' BALLS, man...

[joannajewsom]

I watched this about two years ago. I remember keeping up with the story perfectly fine until about the last 30 minutes, and then being completely lost. I've read many different interpretations on the film, some which make some sense, some which make very little sense. I even watched the video on the Kubrick 2001 webstie. Kubrick wanted the ending to be ambiguous, and probably made it in a way in which it could never be completely decipherable. So anyone who claims to really get it, only has their own interpretation.

It's a film that takes several viewings, but given the little that I do understand, I'm not interested enough to explore it any further. Visually, it's probably the most beautiful film I've ever seen, though.

[NoCode0680]

The first time I saw it was with a friend who had read the book, so he kind of helped me understand the ending, although the film kind of gets off point from the book as far as I could tell. Let's face it, the whole movie kind of loses its plot at times when Kubrick goes off on a tangent with mixing classical music with breathtaking special effects (for their time at least).

From what I remember and could understand, the main character basically goes through some sort of time warp/wormhole type thing to a far away galaxy. In the film where he ends up is more of a state of mind rather than actual place, and is changed into some sort of super-natural being known as the star child. This is the fetus thing you see at the end of the movie, that is the main character in his new form. From what I remember from what I was told about the book he travels to Earth in his new form and destroys all of the nukes on Earth, thus saving the planet. However the film just ends with the star child arriving at Earth.

As for all of the weird things that happen after he arrives on the other side of the wormhole, I always understood the aging and eventual dying was just a metaphor to show that the main character was no longer himself, and that he had essentially died and had been re-incarnated as this new being.

I've never really liked the film too much really. I don't consider it so much a film with a plot, or an adaptation of a book, as much as Kubrick using the skeleton of a story to play some classical music, show off some special effects, cool camera work, then just leave a lot of people scratching their heads in the end.
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