WTF is was that ending?

>>79727791
not even going to bother calling you a pleb. I'll just tell you to watch it at least 3 more times, at 5 year intervals, and maybe you'll get a glimpse at it's brilliance. If you live that long

>>79727791

I just go SO hyped to watch it

Dave was suffering from hypoxia, it was all a hallucination.

>>79727791
You have to watch it on acid to understand it

>>79727791
They drove the big space sperm into the round space ovum and made a giant space baby.

>>79727791
it makes a change from stale old tropes that we usually see.
actually, i think 2001 aso is the most original film ever made.
but i guess if you are a movie goer that prefers familiar emotions, sights and scenarios, 2001 aso isnt for you.

>>79727791

The OP is not a still from the film; the font of the title, although close to that of real title screen, is in this case a bit more "cute", and has more of a 1920's look.

Dave is being transported through a portal that he does not understand, to another place, where the alien beings associated with the monoliths (if not the monoliths themselves) will raise him to a new state of being, to become the Star Child; Dave Bowman is like the monkey from the first part of the film, which touched the monolith, and thereby gained the intelligence to use tools, which spurred human evolution. Dave is quite terrified upon travelling through the portal; imagine a caveman being strapped down into the back seat of a car which then speeds 100mph. - this is Dave at the moment. The monoliths, and the entities that inhabit/fabricated them, intervene in the development of other animal species throughout the universe, in order to "grow" the universe as they see fit. In this respect, the engineers of Prometheus are a bit like the monoliths, so that the Prometheus idea can be thought of has having been cribbed from 2001, a bit. This trope plays elsewhere in culture; a popular idea is that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians to build the pyramids. same thing.

Dave was physically/psychologically placed in what the aliens extrapolated as surroundings that would be somewhat comfortable for him, while his metamorphosis would take place in stages. Entering a new state of being is a delicate and highly strange process; this is why Dave seems to see himself, and to take on progressively different apperances. His humanity ends (signalled by the rapid aging of his human forms); and at the liminal point of the evolutionary leap, he is born anew, yet still essentially Dave in some relevant sense.

Dave is thus become something like the Nietzschean Ubermensch, above both ape and man. This 1-2-3 progression of beings is expressly suggested by the rising pitches of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra", which plays during the opening titles, of which the OP is only an approximation, and not an actual still. The theme is reinforced by the alignment of three bodies, sun, moon, earth. The monolith(s) is also reported in the book (and in the movie sequel) as having the perfect proportions 1:4:9, the first three positive square numbers, which would seem to reinforce this concept of progressive, increasingly rapid improvement. The movies don't seem to always get the proportions exactly right, but the one that "old" Dave sees on his deathbed is pretty faithful to the 4:9 aspect, as you'd expect of Kubrick. Monoliths depicted in both films have always looked a bit "thin" to me on the short edge; this is more obvious in the sequel, where the creatives would probably have been less autistic about actually checking such stuff, despite Roy Scheider expressly indicating the dimensions in a line.

The old "brave human traveller going through a spooky wormhole to finally meet the aliums" reaches its apotheosis with this sequence; it has been later approximated in Jodie Foster's Contact, and of course in Interstellar (which itself is, putting it uncharitably, a ripoff of 2001, and also quite derivative of Contact, down to the importance of the father-daughter relationship, and shared love of science and exploration). Although some of the latter derivative themes can be attributed to the closeness of collaborators: Kip Thorne (IIRC) worked on Interstellar, and he is a contemporary of Carl Sagan's IIRC, so it makes sense that two nerds who want to spin fictional stories along the same lines would draw on similar themes.

>>79729390

Just to wrap up the autism, I saw it in the theater about a year ago. When "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" started going, I made a point of sitting front-row-center, where no one else was.

One thing that really sticks out on repeated viewings is a brief, impressionistic still of what appears to be Dave howling in his space suit; he does not know what the fuck is going on and is scared shitless, thus my caveman comparison. It is achieved more artfully in this case, than in a Jodie Foster zipping round the galaxy "gotta go fast" style.

>>79727791
Wow, 16 years ago we were supposed to have a moon base and be on our way to Jupiter.

>>79730211

We actually set foot on the moon a year after release (and a few times since), and we've sent multiple probes to Jupiter, one of which is a star at the moment, and AI is chugging along, so we're not doing too badly.

>>79728941
That makes sense.