2001: A Space Odyssey Special edition with CGI — Page 2

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Originally posted by: Luke Skywalker
yippi..
im not alone

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Originally posted by: baby_jesus4u
in reply to GundarkHunter the DVD of blade runner i have is single sided that only has the directors cut on it (i'm in the UK though), but i couldn't find any original on amazon? or am i look in the wrong place. Also the recent film The Butterfly effect only has the directors cut on DVD here, does the region one have the original version as well?
Whilst looking i came across this
http://www.brmovie.com/BR_Special_Edition.htm
seems the directors cut is not the final version

But is my point about a directors cut/special edition replacing the original right?

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Originally posted by: Warbler
I see. I just prefer my movies to be more straight forward. I think without any explaination their are going to be some who will derive no meaning out of the ending to 2001. They will just think its a convoluted mess. (that what I thought when I 1st saw it)

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Originally posted by: Luke Skywalker
actually i think it would be cool to have Pink Floyd's Echoes play during the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite...
some of you already know what im talking about...

man does that song ever fit that part of the movie... to a T i tells ya!!

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Originally posted by: Warbler

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Originally posted by: Regicidal_Maniac

Attempting to explain the last scenes of 2001 is fruitless as Clarke said that anyone who says thay understand what it means is wrong because neither he nor Kubrick were really sure. I believe that it means what it says it means and that Dave has entered the transfinite. But what do I know?

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but how could Clarke not know? He wrote the thing! Are telling me he wrote somthing that he couldn't understand? That does not make sense (IMHO).

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"2001 reflects about ninety percent on the imagination of Kubrick, about five percent on the genius of the special effects people, and perhaps five percent on my contribution.” Clarke, Report on Planet Three, p. 224.

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"Soon after the movie was released, and the first cries of bafflement were being heard in the land, I made a remark that horrified the M-G-M top brass. "If you understand 2001 on the first viewing," I stated,"we will have failed." I still stand by this remark, which does not mean that one can't enjoy the movie completely the first time around. What I meant was, of course, that because we were dealing with the mystery of the Universe, and with powers and forces greater than man's comprehension, then by definition they could not be totally understandable. Yet there is at least one logical structure--and sometimes more than one--behind everything that happens on the screen in 2001, and the ending does not consist of random enigmas, some simple-minded critics to the contrary. (You will find my interpretation in the novel; it is not necessarily Kubrick's. Nor is his necessarily the "right" one--whatever that means.) " Written by Arthur C. Clarke, excerpted from an excerpt from Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations, ©1972 Harper and Row.

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Did you deliberately try for ambiguity as opposed to a specific meaning for any scene or image?

No, I didn't have to try for ambiguity; it was inevitable. And I think in a film like 2001, where each viewer brings his own emotions and perceptions to bear on the subject matter, a certain degree of ambiguity is valuable, because it allows the audience to "fill in" the visual experience themselves. In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting -- you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to "explain" them. "Explaining" them contributes nothing but a superficial "cultural" value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. Reactions to art are always different because they are always deeply personal.

The final scenes of the film seemed more metaphorical than realistic. Will you discuss them -- or would that be part of the "road map" you're trying to avoid?

No, I don't mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny.

That is what happens on the film's simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.

What are those areas of meaning?

They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.

Why does 2001 seem so affirmative and religious a film? What has happened to the tough, disillusioned, cynical director of The Killing, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, and Lolita, and the sardonic black humorist of Dr. Strangelove?

The God concept is at the heart of this film. It's unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution -- chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.

Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization -- a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man's distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.

Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial in