Here is my reaction the sequel 2010 The Year We Make Contact! https://youtu.be/l__nq_mlYGs?si=UivlWeIAd5IUjfCr

Cami: "I'm gonna need some serious answers by the end of this movie."
Everyone watching: "Heh…"

People had longer attention spans in 1968 than today. Kubrick and Clarke wanted people to think.

The primary short story by Arthur C. Clarke that inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey is "The Sentinel," written in 1948, which introduced the mysterious alien monolith that guides humanity's evolution.  The 1968 book of the film was developed by Clarke and Kubrick during their collaboration on the screenplay and the actual shooting of the film which started in 1965

Some super-advanced aliens took pity on Dave and leveled him up. He's not just a baby; he's a super baby.

The ending ? Higher intelligence - those that made the monolith - keep him in a zoo-like environment , then he is reborn as a higher entity .

The fact that this movie came out a full year before we landed on the moon is amazing.😊

I saw this movie with a few fellow graduate students in California, when it was first released. We were impressed, but we didn’t think it was ahead of its time. We thought it was exactly of our time and just what we were expecting. I’ve always liked the idea that the three ascending notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra at the beginning signal the three stages the film depicts: 1) Biological development of the human species, 2) Human culture, technology, & the venture into space, 3) Cosmic consciousness or transcendence. The monolith, possibly associated with alien influence, marks and inspires each stage.

FUN FACT about 2001
The little girl on the video phone is actually Stanley Kubrick's daughter

This is not a "movie" in the conventional sense...it is however a work of art, a masterpiece of expression but the story is secondary...and in 1968 it was truly mind boggling

Yaa, THIS flick came almost a whole decade before Star Wars. It's the flick that pretty much pioneered and revolutionized screen visuals of THIS kind. SW just applied them to a more action adventure type story. The effects artist later did effects for Close Encounters of the Third kind and also directed some flicks of his own (Silent Running and Brainstorm).

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

I'm 78.  First saw this in a Cinerama theater.  On my way out, two guys behind me were talking...1st guy: "Did you understand the ending?"   2nd guy: "Hell, I''m still trying to understand how that monkey threw the bone up in the air and turned into a spaceship!!"

@iblard
The Monolith doesn't create life, it only encourages intelligence evolution.

Cami, there are a lot of things to explain here so I'll just explain the first part.  At the very start of the film the apes were evolving intelligence but had a very hard life.  For example, they were surrounded by animals they could eat, such as the pigs, but had no effective way to kill them.  They didn't have clubs, or knives, or even the concept of tools.  They were also prey to every predator as seen when one of the apes was killed by a leopard.

Super-advanced aliens became aware of the apes' existence and situation and decided to give them a little push in the right direction.  They sent a machine, the monolith to Earth.  The most obvious thing it did was to put the idea in the back of their minds that objects of a certain size and shape could be used as clubs, to extend the force and reach of their arms.  Almost immediately, one of them discovers the club, using a bone.  You then see a pig being killed and in the very next scene you see them stuffing their faces with meat instead of rooting around in the local plants to get food.  They also chase the other tribe away from the watering hole.  Now that they are using clubs, the apes now also have the concept of tools.

The aliens themselves don't stick around.  They leave the monolith to help the apes, but they also bury one on the Moon so that when it is someday dug up, they will know that the apes descendants have developed enough technology to reach their own Moon and that phase 2 can begin.

The monolith wasn't so much as creating life but aiding - if not driving - evolution, and at the end, Bowman was "reborn" and became the next evoutiionary step, a being that could exist in space itself.

2001 doesn’t follow the standard movie narrative, it’s a moving work of art! With a warning about future technology. Good and bad.

If you at all enjoyed this movie or still have lingering thoughts and questions, then 2010 is a must. It does a great job of following up.

This is what Kubrick said in a radio interview....
"The idea is that Bowman is taken by a Godlike entity/creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what you could describe as a human zoo to study him and his whole life passes from that point in that room and he has no sense of time. They choose this room which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture. Deliberately inaccurate because one was suggesting they weren't quite sure what to give him in his natural environment.
When finished with the astronaut, he is sent back to earth as a super being. It's up to the audience to think what happens next."

9:23 they did in fact know how to back then.  Such a shot was used in the first Star Trek pilot “The Cage” in November and December 1964, approximately four years before this movie came out.