Stanley Kubrick
2001 Odissea Nello Spazio

"What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is conceivable."

Kubrick's photographic past is well represented by the almost static images of the infinite journey towards the unknown of the Discovery, giving us a sense of anguish, emptiness, and boredom that must be typical of long interstellar crossings, in short, the same boredom one feels on the third day of a cruise.

The black Monolith is always present, it is God, it is the Root of Being, the Number, the Consciousness, the Tablet of the Law, and the First Brick of the Universe.

We are catapulted into the future after our ancestors, having reached intellect and the awareness of existence, waste it all by inventing weapons for defense but above all for offense, and so the bone thrown into the sky by the ape-man transforms into a spaceship that takes part in an incredible ballet, gliding gently towards the lunar station. Special mention should also be made of the choice of Strauss' The Blue Danube as the soundtrack for these slow and evocative minutes of film.

On the moon, the monolith is a radio beacon pointed at Jupiter, and it is from here that the adventure begins, but this is not really an adventure or science fiction film, we delve deeper into human feelings. When David decides to dismantle Hal 9000, the supercomputer guilty of murder, he puts the machine into subjection to man again, here the director decides not to show us a man busy disconnecting contacts on a machine but just a hypnotic red eye, while Hal regresses to infancy singing a nursery rhyme before shutting down.

Hal's death is the film's most dramatic part, as if a man had died, as if a PC had feelings. In 1976 Asimov will write one of his best short stories on robots, "The Bicentennial Man", where a robot will try to have feelings, just like Hal, in this film. When, at the end of the film, David wanders dazed in the Louis XVI-style house prepared for him by the superior intelligence, he still has to understand what is and what he must do, and the image of the Star Child with his own eyes should enlighten him, but he still does not know, like his ancestor in the Cenozoic he still does not know but imagines that something will come to mind.

Then I too understand, I understand the Finnish Kalevala, Hamlet's Mill grinding under the Maelstrom (the great whirlpool), the ash tree passing through the center and getting lost at the Zenith. And then they are all the living men and all the billions of deceased of the past, they are Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh, Osiris, Isis, Thor, Kronos, Saturn, Zeus, and Christ. I ford the Styx, the Nile, or the Milky Way, holding this world in my hands, and I understand.

(it was 1968, the following year an emotional Tito Stagno will narrate live via satellite, the first dusty human steps on the moon)

Man does not give up. When he discovers millions and millions of remote galaxies, and then the quasi-stellar radio sources billions of light-years away that overwhelm his mind, he is happy to be able to plumb such depths. But he pays a very high price for his achievements.

The parts in italics are not mine.

They helped me for this "review":

Albert Einstein

Giovanni Grazzini, corriere della sera 13-12-1968

Pietro Bianchi, il giorno 13-12-1968

Alberto Moravia, l'espresso 29-12-1968

Mario Monti, preface to the Italian edition of: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Longanesi & c 1972 (the pages yellowed are now crumbling)

Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (essay on myth and the structure of time) Adelphi 1983

Isaac Asimov.

Arthur C. Clarke

Especially my wife who still puts up with me.