Encyclopedia > Talk:2001: A Space Odyssey
Talk:2001: A Space Odyssey
- I seem to remember that in one of the increasingly silly sequels the one in Africa is found and placed in the UN. That makes it different than the one on the Moon.
The references to the Sentinal continue to be made. This misses the much stronger links to other stories, like Childhood's End, and most of Clarke's writing through the 1960s. There's certianly nothing about the greater evolution of man in the Sentinal!.
Was it Saturn?
No, the book's conclusion was set at a moon of Saturn, but the movie was set around Jupiter.
the psychological strain on HAL causes him to sabotage the ship's antenna control system, breaking the link to Earth; HAL's behavior becomes increasingly suspicious
First, this may be interpretation; I always thought HAL to be acting quite <borg>efficient</borg>, not strained. I can't remember one thing though: Why (in its own logic) had it severed the connection? Was it only a ruse to get Bowman and Poole into a vulnerable position?
Yes, perhaps I was interpreting HAL's actions a little too much - I was partly relying on the analysis of HAL's actions given in the novel 2010. If nobody else does it, I'll review this section.
Second, the second sentence doesn't quite follow up. After the 'destruction' of the AO unit, there was no reason to be only suspicious.
--Yooden
There was no explanation of HAL's actions in the film. Watching 2001 and not the others and not reading Clarke's fiction, it's not immediately clear why HAL is acting the way he is. --KQ
Interestingly, I've heard that HAL is malfunctioning from the beginning: in the chess game, it is not nessacerily mate in three - it's mate, but he could survive for four moves. Is this the beginning of HAL's problems?
And then there's the whole IBM - HAL thing... and the product placement! :D Dave McKee
Wikipedia contains spoilers While it is true that HALs actions are not explained in the movie 2001, HALs actions *are* explained in 2010 a space odyssey[?] (both the book, and the movie). Apparently HAL has the psyche of a young child. HAL is incapable of resolving the conflict in his orders. I somehow remeber a fragment of dialouge in 2001 about ground control explaining to Dave "We have been able to replicate the same problem in our own ground based computer...", and goes on to explain things. If someone could find a reference to this, that would be perfect! -- Kim Bruning[?]
Wikipedia contains spoilers I have not read the book of 2001, but I believe that it is also explained there. It is definitely not clear in the movie, but once you hear the explanation given in the book or in the movie 2010, it makes sense. Note that HAL reported the device failure immediately after conversing with Dave and Frank about the nature of the mission, asking them if they thought there was anything funny or odd about certain facets of it. They said no, they didn't think so. Right after that, he said, "Just one moment, just one moment", and reported the failure. Later in the movie, after Hal was dismantled, Dave saw a tape being played that they weren't supposed to see until they reached their destination, and the tape made it clear that Hal knew all along what the purpose of the mission was.
However, this is all a matter of piecing it together after the fact--after you've already heard the explanation of why HAL went crazy, and the explanation would not be clear to anyone watching the movie without that foreknowledge. -- Egern
- I couldn't disagree more with the claim that "once you hear the explanation given in the book or in the movie 2010, it makes sense". It makes no sense at all. The "explaination" in 2010 is that HAL is nothing more than a talking robot, and there was a bug is his programming that caused him to fail.
- This certainly isn't how 2001 (the movie) feels. The movie goes to length to suggest that HAL is a "real" thinking behinI always felt that HAL was entirely sentient; thinking, feeling, and making decisions. The "killing of HAL" scene is robbed of any emotion otherwise. HAL, for whatever reason, did what he did because he MADE a decision to do it.
- 2010 was employing a deux ex machina in order to avoid the problem of having him turned back on without having to worry about any lingering details. This theme continued in Clarke's later books, when even the monoliths are reduced to nothing more than robots, robbed entirely of their mystery. -- user:Maury Markowitz
I edited the article because it contained a number of mis-statements. It must be remembered that there is nothing in the Kubrick film itself to indicate the presence of beings from another planet - that's simply a hypothesis made by one of the characters.
- Not at all. The book and the film were created simulatenously, and the intent all along was that the monolith was planted there by aliens. The characters in the movie and the book both had the identical realization; it had to have been created by aliens. The ambiguity in the movie was not deliberate; they simply didn't have voice-overs for what the characters were thinking. Kubrick and Clarke thought that the audience would be able to undrestand this part easily. RK
Likewise, the "reasons" for HAL's behaviour listed in "2010" are not mentioned at all in 2001 (frankly, I find them somewhat insulting to the audience's intelligence). To accept what Clarke says about Kubrick's film is not appropriate. --Alex Kennedy
- I fail to understand what you find insulting. This explanation was implicit in the original book; HAL had two contradictory missions that HAL found increasingly impossible to carry out. HAL suffored a psychotic breakdown as a result. And you seem unaware of what the 2001 project was all about if you imagine that this was Kubrick's film. That's incorrect. Both the book and the movie were collaborative efforts all the way, and both Kubrick and Clarke were open about this. What you refer to is not to be Clarke's personal after-the-fact rationalization, but in fact was the actual intent. RK
This article says that HAL sabotaged the antenna system. I don't remember anything about that in the movie. Can someone refresh my memory? All I recall is that HAL incorrectly reported a failure, but that everything was actually working correctly.
- HAL falsely reported a failure of the 'AE35 unit', which was part of the antenna assembly.
- Exactly! So where was this sabotage that the article talks about? -- Egern
- After this event, HAL then deliberately burnt out the replacement part. RK
- I watched the movie (for the 20th time or so) this weekend. Nothing is wrong with the AE35, before, after, or at any point. -- :Maury Markowitz[?]
- But all the evidence points to the AE35 not being out of commission at all (although that is not established definitively, it appears that Hal was mistaken that there was anything wrong with it, and Hal decided to kill the astronauts after they had determined a plan to shut Hal down if the unit was not out of commision).
On another note--the monolith on the moon was "deliberately buried". If it was not aliens who were behind the monolith, what was behind it? I advocate restoring mention of the monolith as being alien unless someone can convince me of otherwise. -- Egern
- The monolith was deliberately buried by aliens. The idea of the monolith as an alien being itself was tossed around by Clarke and Kubrick, but the idea was eventually abandoned. The monolith was buried by aliens, and you can read the name of the alien who did it! Arthur Clarke wrote several scenes about how the aliens came to Earth; he also wrote scenes in which astronaut David Bowman, after going through the Monolith's Stargate, actually meets the aliens themselves. He and Kurbick decided to eliminate these scenes as they took away from the mystery and grandeur of the film. But these sections can still be found in the wonderful paperback "The Lost Worlds of 2001", which include many alternate scenes, earlier versions, and deleted material from the development of the book and movie. I can't reccomend it enough for fans of the film. RK
It might be worth mentioning that the opening caption of the film "The dawn of man" is usually taken to refer to the opening act set in prehistory. However, an interesting idea is that "The dawn of man" actually refers to the entire film, right up to the point of Bowman's transformation. -- Tarquin, Saturday, July 6, 2002
It seems to me that the film and book need to have separate articles, or at a bare minimum separate sections in the same article. The fact that they were developed together is interesting, and references to the book ought to be contained in the article on the film, and vice versa. But the film should and does stand on its own; people can and do see the movie without reading the book, and vice versa. Any movie must stand on its own, and must be evaluated on its own terms; and the article on the movie should only discuss the content that is in the film, without resorting to explanations that are contained in the book. Any film critic who reviews or discusses the film only refers (or at least ought to only refer) to just the film. soulpatch
Technical Note on the Technical Note:
In the original version of the Technical Note I said that that there was a theorem showing that strictly less than 1/3 of the nodes in a voting system could fail without compromising the system. I cannot find the relevant theorem, but I believe that that claim was slightly off and the actual logic is as follows. Assume you are one of n modules and you want to perform a sanity check on the state of the entire system by seeing how the other nodes vote. You do not count your own vote, because if you were confident that it was correct you would not be doing the sanity check to begin with. Thus the sanity check requires that your state be in agreement with a majority vote of the remaining n-1 modules. There will be a correct majority iff strictly less than (n-1)/2 modules have failed; otherwise there can be a tie or an incorrect majority. But when n=3, (n-2)/1=1, so strictly less than one node can fail without compromising the system. Thuse the three module system described for HAL does not protect against the failure of even a single node. (Someone please verify my logic!) -- B.Bryant
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