Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason
Actually you may have missed a point or two. The dialogue is supposed to be banal. The human characters are supposed to be less likeable, and somehow less human than HAL is. The Discovery is supposed to be colorless, sterile, and impersonal (read as boring by some viewers).
Part of the central permise (and it's clearer in the book than it is in the movie) is that the apes in the opening scene were dying out. They had gone as far as they could with what evolution had given them, and had to be kick-started by the monolith before they could make the jump to actual tool-use and further evolution. They were starving to death among all the pigs they could eat because they couldn't grasp the idea of eating them and how to go about it. If the monolith hadn't shown up the apes would have all died out rather than evolved into humans.
By 2001 the human race is again as far as they can go on their own. The banality of Floyd, Poole, and Bowman's relationships and their colorless world are illustrations of this. The drive of earlier ages has been lost for a sort of placid mediocrity. The human race is on the verge of destroying itself with its tools, and is unable to make the jump to the next stage by itself. Humanity has to have another kick-start in order to survive, and the monolith again supplies this.
Dave Bowman at the end of the movie successfully moves to the next stage, and in a way that must be largely incomprehensible to us, because if it weren't then we could do it without the assistance of the people of the monolith. The star child is as much a mystery to us as the tool-using ape is to his opponents at the water hole.
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Eh, actually, having read
2063 and
3001, that ain't the case.
Bowman was absorbed to help the monolith overcome a logical impasse it was having over whether to ignite Jupiter to give the Europans a chance in the Sun, or to leave the Europans to die in ice in favor of preserving the very primitive life in Jupiter's atmosphere that would never have an opportunity to achieve tool using sentience because of the nature of its environment.
The monolith, for all its complexity, was just a big stinking computer, it couldn't make the subjective judgement call to pick one form of life over another, because it was originally designed to see all life as worthwhile. Bowman gave it the impetus needed to decide that the limitations of jovian lifeforms in existance were worth sacrificing to give Europan life a better shot at achieving tool using sentience in a terrestrial environment.
Afterall, why would the monolith go through all that trouble to uplift a single human multimillion miles from home, and then not do anything else on Earth, but nine years later detonate a gas giant knowing it only had about a thousand years to get the Europans up and running before the report the Tycho monolith (yup, kids, that big signal it launched in 1999 wasn't for big papa in orbit around Jupiter, it was calling home to big boss, subject to all the limitations of sub-speed of light signaling) sent to an overseer monolith 450 light years away condemned humans as unsalvagably barbaric and warranting termination (the order which was received sometime around 3005 or so).
Humans were a write off, Europa was the last chance the monoliths gave the Solar System, and that was a failure because of damage to the monolith there received in 2063.