50th anniversary of "Space Odyssey"

[Rev. Rye]

I always wondered if the book was any better.

And what was up with the ending?

I strongly suspect people might not get as much out of the film if they didn't see it in a 70mm print or aren't already huge Kubrick nerds (which I am; my favourite film is his follow-up). Honestly, I think this is one of his weaker works.

For the record, the book explains why HAL went haywire: he was told to keep the purpose of the mission a secret from the crew, but also was told to not keep secrets. Therefore, he assumes that the communication module is malfunctioning. When diagnoistics are run and the module seems to be fine, he attributes it to human error (which is technically true; the people did not program it properly). When Dave and Frank discuss deactivating HAL, he tries to kill the crew out of self-preservation. This is probably really fucking hard to put into film, so Kubrick left out HAL's inner turmoil (which seems to be why, as soon as HAL stops speaking, a voice announces why the mission is happening).

The thing is, the ending is incomprehensible because Kubrick and Clarke made a point of refusing to fall back on typical depictions of aliens, so they decided to not show them, since they would probably not even deign to speak to us, even to explain what the fuck they're even doing. Apparently, they don't even have physical forms. In the end, space is an immense and hostile place and we humans are insignificant. Imagine what the city of Chicago would be like to a worker ant. That's what the universe is to us humans, and that's really the point of the whole film.