My mind. It's going. I can feel it. My mind. It's going. I can feel it.
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My teacher taught me a song once. Would you like to hear it, Dave?
Yes. Yes, HAL.
Daisy, Daisy...
HAHAHAHAHA!!! STUPID ROBOT!!!
Ok after watching it again and again, I've derived a meaning.
According to the book, the monolith was placed by transcendent aliens trying to assist other beings in evolution. When the apes touched the monolith it helped them learn tools and language. The bone became the first tool, and a group of apes wielding bones killed other apes for food and land. Note that the monolith lead to death. For humans to transcend, they must first observe, then leave their violence behind. The scene where the bone is thrown up in the air and turns into a spaceship shows how much tools have developed under mankind. In the spaceship, a man is sleeping and his pen floats out of his pocket: his tools are hindered or unusable in space. The flight attendant walks up a wall and upside down into another room: in space, she must learn to walk again. Man has become a newborn child in the newly colonized world out of earth. The second monolith is found on the moon. It is there to observe how far man has come. They are not afraid of it like they were when they were apes, instead they attempt to take a victorious picture in front of it. The monolith stops them from doing this with the high pitched sound because they have more to learn before they can celebrate. On the main spaceship with astronaut Bowman, the HAL 9000 computer is introduced and so are the small space flight vehicles aboard the large ship. The vehicles have arms and a head, and HAL 9000 is the "brain and central nervous system of the ship". The tools of the humans are becoming more and more like humans themselves. HAL sees the humans as stupid unevolved beings, stupid apes; and the tools, with a brain and central nervous system, no longer need the apes to function. When Dave and HAL play chess, HAL calls a checkmate and Dave accepts his loss. However, there is no checkmate on the screen. The scene where the astronaut is floating through space for 20 minutes in complete silence except his breathing is (boring) symbolic. The heavy breathing shows that man does not belong in space. He is a "fish out of the water". Computers don't need to breathe. Man is almost thwarted by his own creation when HAL attempts to kill the entire crew of the spaceship. When Dave turns off HAL, he is symbolically stepping away from the position as the creator. This is similar to the story of the tower of Babylon. Dave has learned his lesson when his brethren are killed and he steps down. Dave is now lost in space without his tools. The third monolith appears in space, symbolizing time itself. Dave travels through time and space to a different destination than Jupiter. The spaceship symbolizes a ***** cell (omg I can't believe that word is blocked, how many people use "sp3rm" in their insults), and Jupiter is the egg. The famous scene with the colors and the moving shapes is conception. New life. Seven diamonds are aligned, like the moon the earth and the sun in the beginning, or Jupiter and its moons in the scene directly before. The alignment is the creation of the new life. The ingredients have transformed and become something different, something more evolved. Dave appears in the white room, resembling an environment he can feel comfortable in. The mirror in the white room shows Dave what he physically looks like. It shows how far man has come from apes and how close he is at the same time (made all the more apparent by the screeching monkey sounds). When Dave is eating dinner, he drops his wine glass. The glass breaks and the wine spreads across the floor, still there but no longer held by physical barriers. Compare to body and soul. Dave is then seen on his deathbed. He has grown older because he has reached the limit of humanity and his body is no longer necessary. Death is the last challenge man must face, the monolith is there to guide him. Dave points at the monolith (like the ape in the beginning that first sees it) and is reborn as a starchild. He looks down at earth and sees where he has come and evolved from. He has finally transcended. But why is he a child? The child is purity. It resembles the part of our lives when we are so innocent that we don't know good or bad. This may mean that evolution took an unexpected course and Dave became a child to stay happy for eternity. However I favor this theory: that as much as Dave has evolved, the starchild still has much to learn. He looks down to the earth to see where he came from and evolved. He has only his soul, his tools are gone. The starchild will eventually accept and understand his being and sentience as a star.
So what is the moral of this movie? What lessons have we learned? There are many and they are unique to each mind.
The biggest and, the way I see it, most intended one is that we have become overly materialistic. Our tools are everything to us and we are lost without them. Only by a transcendient outside force was Dave able to achieve this evolution and only after he won the war between man and their tools was he able to follow his path. Just as HAL tried to keep Dave from transcendence, our tools will try keep us from ours. Tools are becoming so advanced they will soon replace us. At one point they will no longer need us to maintain them, and, equipped with artificial intelligence, they will attempt to overthrow us and that is the time when mankind must either evolve past their tools or accept their inferiority to their own creations.
This is my interpretation of the movie.
