Journal on Portfolio Project-1 (class 5)
Watch this film called 2001:A Space Odyssey and come to the class after watching it, we’ll discuss this film in class and would make arguments about it said our Professor.
2001:A Space Odyssey is a science fiction film directed by American film director Stanley Kubrick in the year 1968. The film was inspired by Arthur Clarke’s short stories written in 1951. The film is about a voyage to Jupiter and an artificial intelligence bot HAL 9000.
The film starts with the scene with many hominids shouting eating and doing their regular activities. For the approx. first 30 minutes there is no dialogue delivery in the film. And after some time the 2 groups of hominids starts fighting with each other shouting at one another. Until the monolith kind if thing appears and they starts to examine it. One of the hominids throw the animal bone into the air and it get transition into millions of years later into an spacecraft in the space. There Dr. Floyd the chairperson of American Astronaut Council meets with some other scientists and astronauts and discuss about some rumors regarding Clavius base and declares that rumors are fake and not to believe any of them. Floyd and other astronauts travel to the artefact similar to the monolith appeared to hominids and when they reach there monolith starts releasing high frequency radiation which they were not able to stand to.
18 months later on voyage to Jupiter with pilot Dr. David Bowman and one other fellow and other 3 scientists in hibernation. The mission and spacecraft was majorly controlled by HAL 9000 an AI. HAL is intelligent as the scientist on spacecraft , more smart than the scientists we can say. At some point Dr. Bowman and this other fellow decides to turn off HAL if he proved wrong they play this conversation in a pod but somehow HAL lip reads them and get to know about the scenario. When Dr. Poole was on spacewalk in his pod to replace the error in craft HAL took the control of his pod and cuts his oxygen but when Bowman returns to the spacecraft with Poole’s body and asks HAL to open the doors he responds, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Because HAL heard their conversations and he knew that if he let them enter into ship they’ll turn him off. But somehow Bowman manages to enter the spacecraft by manually opening its doors. And when he starts turning off HAL by removing his brains and CPUs HAL begs not to do this to him. He says sorry Dave I made a mistake and I took the wrong decisions but pleases don’t do this to me . Dave finally turn off HAL 9000.
In the end scene of the film Dave find himself in the large neoclassical room where he is standing in the spacesuit and also sees his older version lying in bed and eating dinner and then a monolith appears in his room and he touches it and the older version of Dave gets transformed into fetus covered with transparent bubble.
Stanley Kubrick made this film in the year 1968 and even today in year 2021 the film is still ahead of it’s time. We can see how creative Kubrick was. Today we have Apple’s homepod, Amazon’s echo dot which are inspired from HAl9000 which was in year 1968. Even Apple’s iPad is designed by taking inspiration from tablets appeared in the film. The film also shows some scene about video conferencing which is a actual thing today. But thinking about video conferencing in the year 1968 and that too without internet is a mind boggling thing about Kubrick’s thought process. Kubrick set the ending of the film upto the viewer’s how they want to perceive it as.