Continuity mistake: The view of the front of the moon buggy shows the sunlight coming from the right side of the screen(Pilot's left shoulder) But when we see his view out the window, the sunlight casts shadows as if the sun was behind them.
Suggested correction: Dave rearranges the trays between receiving them from the slot and eating from them.
You posted the correction on the wrong entry. Must try harder.
Question: Maybe I need to read the book, but can someone explain the whole ending sequence to me. Why all the flashy over dramatized pictures? It's artistic but is there some other meaning to it?
Chosen answer: All the flashing images are supposed to represent Bowman travelling past far and distant galaxies, this is what happens in the book, where he travels to that white house place.
Answer: At the end, in the Arthur C. Clarke's story, both Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (who survived) went to a moon of Saturn to investigate the second Monolith. Dave Bowman tried to touch the Monolith with his space pod and was sucked into a wormhole that transported him to a star on the other side of the universe - at which point, Dave's last transmission is "My God, it's full of stars!" All of the "slit-scan" visual effects by Doug Trumbull (based on effects created by John Whitney years earlier) represent an almost instant voyage to the other side of the universe. Whether this is supposed to be a quantum-jump is not explained, but it's millions of times faster than anything ever depicted in Star Trek or other space fantasy knockoffs.
Frank does not survive in the book; he is killed by HAL just as in the film.
Corrected entry: When Dave Bowman is attempting to enter Discovery through the emergency airlock we see the smoke from the detonation of the explosive bolts on the door of the pod but where does the door go? The force of the explosion should have fired the pod door into the airlock along with Dave Bowman! An amazing feat and pure luck that Dave Bowman once in the airlock managed to close the airlock door with his eyes closed (not that you could use your eyes in a vacuum because the water on the surface of your eyes would boil off in an airless environment!) and he bounced off the back wall of said airlock and ended up near enough to the airlock door close lever to pull it.
Correction: The door slams sideways into the cavity in the double wall designed to hold it. Hinged doors don't make much sense when you're in a cramped spacecraft. As for eyes being useless in a vacuum, tell that to Jim Leblanc, a NASA technician who was accidentally exposed to vacuum for 27 seconds during a space suit test in 1966. He reported a slight earache, a loss of his sense of taste, but no problems with his eyesight. In fact screenwriters Kubrick and Clarke based this scene on reports of a series of experiments on chimpanzees and dogs that proved that short term survival in a vacuum such as that experienced by Bowman is possible. As for him being lucky and bouncing back to a position where he could access the airlock door, yes, that was lucky. It wasn't a film mistake.
Explosive bolts are not used on sliding hatches. The force of the explosives would instantly deform the hatch, and it would no longer slide into its pocket, just block the doorway.
Revealing mistake: When Dave Bowman attempts to re-enter Discovery One via the emergency airlock after blowing the explosive bolts on the pod door, where does said pod door go? And also, because of Newton's law of motion, the sudden rush of cabin air during decompression inside said pod after the bolts had blown the door off would have resulted in the pod being pushed in the opposite direction (in effect, that rapid escaping air would have acted like a rocket motor, propelling the pod like a cannonball from a gun!).
Suggested correction: Did you watch the film? The pod bay door doesn't come into it. Bowman enters via the emergency entrance, not a pod bay. The door of the pod and the door of the emergency exit slide sideways into cavities that are there for that purpose - hinged doors don't make any sense in a cramped spacecraft. We see the emergency entrance doorway slide back into position when Bowman activates it.
I think you confused the pod bay door with the door on the pod itself. In the explosive bolt sequence, the pod door does disappear. There is an expanding cloud from the pod door, but no flying door or evidence of it in the emergency airlock. Just an open hole in the pod.
In the scene just before HAL reads the astronauts' lips in the pod, we see that the pod door does slide sideways into the pod hull. The explosive bolts, marked by small red patches, are located in a pattern all around the edge of the door. This indicates that the explosive bolts would blow that section of the door outward rather than sideways into the hull storage pocket.
Bowman programmes the bolts on one side of the door only to detonate, blowing it sideways.
Sure, that might work, but how about this? Bowman knows that the door is constructed of a special composite material that instantly vaporises if it is compressed in just the right way. So, he reprograms the charges to set up a harmonic series of shock wave fronts that destabilises the composite of the door structure, tuning it into the large cloud of smoke we see in the scene.
Corrected entry: Early in the movie, when the Aries moon shuttle touches down on the covered/shielded landing platform, a considerable amount of dust is kicked up by the engines. But with no atmosphere to blow dust around, it couldn't have blown in from the moon's surface and since this is seemingly the only landing site at the base, it wasn't caused by other landers. Nice effect, though.
Correction: Watch the scene again - that's not dust. It is rocket exhaust from the Aries moon shuttle itself.
You may be correct! I'll have to withhold judgement till I see the movie again.
Question: Why is there is such an absence of love in this film? Two birthdays are observed. Dr. Haywood Floyd calls his little 5-year-old daughter on Earth, wishes her happy birthday, but never once says "I love you," which seems only a natural thing for a father to tell his child. Later, astronaut Frank Poole's parents wish him happy birthday, but never once say "I love you"; rather, his father says, "Give our love to Dave (Bowman). " Nobody ever says "I love you," despite the dire circumstances.
Answer: I love this question, and I think the answer will vary, perhaps wildly, depending on who answers it. Here's mine: one of the themes of the film is that, despite these amazing leaps in technology, colonising the moon, and manned travel to distant planets, humanity has gradually become more and more like the machines we create: cold, emotionless, unfeeling. In other words, we've lost our capacity for human connection. This is why Kubrick shoots these scenes you mention in such a cold, distant way. It asks us to consider the cost that comes with technological advances that outpace our emotional development.
Good reply. Yeah, all the human dialogue in this film seems purely information-driven, if not outright expository. Cold, humorless, oddly devoid of emotion. Especially the dialogue and character of Frank Poole (played by Gary Lockwood); he shows no emotion or affection for his parents, as if only just tolerating their birthday greetings. For me, this made it difficult to feel any sense of loss when Frank Poole was later murdered by HAL. Maybe most oddly, the computer HAL seems to speak with the most emotion (desperation and fear) when Dave Bowman finally disconnects HAL's higher brain functions. I mean, that's the most poignant dialogue in the film, when the computer pleads for its life.
Corrected entry: When Frank goes to retrieve the failing AE-35, he stops the pod hundreds of yards from the ship and floats his way to the ship. If I were doing this, I would park 10 feet from where I needed to go to avoid the possibility of missing my target and getting lost in space.
Correction: This isn't a mistake - it is you second guessing the film. What you would have done in Poole's place is irrelevant. We have no idea about the logistics of a maintenance mission carried out on a fictional space craft on its way to Jupiter - it has never happened and it is very likely it never will. Not knowing the reasons for Poole parking the pod where he did doesn't mean there isn't one.
I'm not second guessing the film, just the logistical decision Pool made. Makes no practical sense, filmmaking not withstanding.
Corrected entry: As the Pan-Am shuttle is approaching the spinning space station there as a shot of it from within the hub based dock. The star filled background is spinning as it ought to, but the shuttle, which is not yet centered on the dock, is seen swinging across the sky independent of the background. To do this the craft would be tracing a spiral through space.
Correction: We see it comes from one side, swinging across to the other as it tries to line up directly in front of the target. This is like driving a car from across three lanes of traffic to tailgate a truck - you will likely swerve a little too far and have to correct your position once or twice. In 3 dimensions, plus a 4th dimension of moving space as they orbit the moon, this becomes triply difficult to do. So yes, they'd be tracing a spiral, but take a soda can and spin it while flipping it end-over-end, and visualize how the opening tab moves through space - a 3-D spiral.
The shuttle would be tracing the spiral from the point of view of the station's docking bay, with the eccentricity of the spiral declining as it got closer until it were aligned with the docking bay. The point in the original post is not that the ship wouldn't be in a spiral from the POV of the station, it's that in order to appear flying in a straight line independent of the background from the station POV, the ship would have to be flying in an erratic corkscrew flight path that precisely matched the rotation of the backdrop of the stars. This is unlikely. The shuttle would simply need to rotate along its central axis to match the station's rotation until it docked. In the truck analogy, from the POV of the truck the swerving car would appear to be driving erratically, not in the straight line that would be analogous to the shuttle's approach.
Corrected entry: In the scene where we see the Moonbus landing at the Tycho Excavation Base, its descent engines raise dust that billows rather than falling in an arc straight back to the ground as would normally be the case in a vacuum. (00:50:35)
Correction: Previously posted and corrected. This is an accepted film technique, not a mistake. You cannot film in a vacuum.
Vacuum chambers certainly existed at the time. NASA tested Apollo spacecraft in them. It may have been difficult, but it certainly would have been feasible to film models in a vacuum at the time. Further, why should an "accepted film technique" forgive an obvious mistake in physics. If anything, it would be an intentional mistake if there was no way to simulate the effect of dust in a vacuum.
Correction: Dust particles will billow out in the manner we see if they have gas molecules to bounce off. Normally on the moon they have no such thing but in this case they do - the exhaust plume of the landing spacecraft. Until it slowly dissipates it will react with the dust molecules just like an atmosphere does.
Corrected entry: Poole takes a pod out to replace AE35. We see this pod spinning off into space. Bowman takes pod 2 out to retrieve Poole. He eventually blows the door to get back inside Discovery. There is no indication that he bothers retrieving this pod: He is occupied with HAL. Bowman takes pod 3 to check out Stargate. He and the pod are sucked in. So where did pod 4 come from in the movie 2010?
Correction: Since you refer to the sequel "2010", Let me point out that in that movie they allude to the fact that Dave Bowman Also jettisoned the bodies of the three dead crew members who were in hibernation (which we never saw him do...) They go on to say that he continued on with his mission to Jupiter after he disconnected HAL's higher brain functions. So since we know all this, isn't it plausible that he retrieved the pod after taking care of HAL?
Why would he take the time to retrieve a damaged pod? There would have been no reason for him to repair the pod (assuming that he could) since he was the only remaining crewmember and had one other operational pod.
Other mistake: There is something drastically wrong with the design of the spherical 'Aries' moon shuttle. Some seats and many fixtures are 'upside down' relative to the up-down orientation of the shuttle itself, and we see loose food trays and equipment about the place as if this is routine. But - the shuttle is designed to land on the moon. What happens then? The moon has gravity, remember? There are going to be quite a few very disgruntled people dangling upside down like spiders, and there will be loose gear (and perhaps a stewardess or two) bouncing about all over the place. It is not a matter of stowing loose gear or lying flat on landing - some parts of the shuttle are upside down relative to others, which is why the stewardess has to do that famous 180 degree upside down walk. Whichever way you look at it the shuttle is going to encounter serious problems when it reaches a gravity well, which will occur whenever the engines are fired up, never mind landing on the moon.
Suggested correction: The shuttle lands "on its back" with legs extending beyond the engines. As in most traditional sci-fi, and ALL actual, space flights to date, the launch (and landing) orientation for humans is to be on one's back. This minimizes blood being sucked down to your feet if you were sitting upright at launch - you could pass out. So we see this when the shuttle lands on the moon - the cockpit (red window) faces up (pilots on their backs, facing out the window). When we presume that the passenger cabin was 180 degrees spun around from the cockpit seating, they're still on their backs. Any loose objects would have been stowed before landing - the airlines don't lock down your bags, newspapers and coffee cups, right? They're loose in the cabin during flight, but put away on takeoff and landing.
Airliners do not fly upside down. The Orion shuttle cannot possibly operate the way it does if it lands in a gravity environment - some rooms are upside down relative to others - why else would the stewardess do the 180 degree vertical walk? It is an idiotic design flaw, and the posting is 100% correct.
The Aries passengers sit and stand with their feet down towards the moon. The pilots sit with their back down to the moon, as conventional astronauts do on Earth. But the attendant's 180-degree walk is completely wrong to the orientation of the shuttle's interior: it should have been only 90° if you look at the Aries exterior. One assumes that Kubrick preferred a longer, more cinematic shot, over a technically accurate shot. But nobody was upside-down to the moon.
Corrected entry: Early in this chapter of the film, we see Discovery has three EVA Pods (from HAL's view, left to right they are C-pod, B-pod and A-pod). When Poole is killed, we see he was using the center pod. Bowman then goes after Poole with A-pod. This leaves behind the C-pod. Bowman gets back aboard Discovery by blowing explosive bolts to release his pod's door. After Bowman deactivates HAL, we can presume he recovers the now-damaged A-pod he ejected from. It can only be placed in either the right or center pod locations, and as we learn in 2010, it is found sitting in its original right-side location. So to leave Discovery for the last time, Bowman must use the C-pod which is on the left, yet is shown emerging from the center doorway B-pod originally launched from. (01:32:50 - 01:59:45)
Correction: Bowman must have made an EVA during the time he was alone on board, and opened the middle door on returning to the podbay. Mistakes are definite mistakes, not ones for which there is a reasonable explanation.
I believe that the last pod departure in the movie from the "wrong door", the center one, was not a mistake but one of Kubrick's subtle visual clues. My interpretation is that it meant the whole end of the movie was Bowman's dream before dying when he was stranded at Jupiter.
Question: I don't understand the significance of the monolith or the starbaby. Can someone explain it to me?
Answer: As author Arthur C. Clarke explained it, the first Monolith (the one seen at the beginning of the film and then buried on the Moon) was a space probe from an incomprehensibly more advanced alien intelligence that resided inside a star elsewhere in the cosmos. The Monolith's objective was to seek out lifeforms that had potential and "tweak" their neural evolution, causing them to evolve toward intelligence. In the case of Mankind on Earth, once the modification was made, the Monolith probe retreated to the Moon and waited 4 million years for Mankind to reach it. When Mankind reached the Moon, the Monolith sent a signal to the next phase of the experiment, which was another Monolith in orbit of Jupiter. When Mankind reached the Jupiter Monolith in a matter of months, the Monolith acted as an interdimensional portal to the other side of the universe, transporting the evolved human specimen to its creator (that resided within a star). The creator intelligence found the specimen (Dave Bowman) to be of acceptable quality and rapidly evolved him to the next level, a Star Child. The Star Child is a "godly" evolution of Mankind. The Star Child chooses to instantaneously return to its home planet (Earth), where it stops a nuclear war.
Answer: The monolith is a monitor placed by the aliens to track the progress of developing civilizations. When humanity found the monolith on the Moon, that signaled a certain level of technological advancement. The starbaby is the evolution of the astronaut, as the symbol of humanity, from "Earth-bound" to a true child of the universe, turning his back on the Earth and looking toward the stars.
In both the Arthur C. Clarke story and in the movie, the Star Child does not "turn his back on Earth"; quite the contrary, as soon as Bowman transforms into the Star Child, his first impulse is to instantaneously return to Earth, which he does just in time to stop a nuclear war. In essence, Bowman becomes the guardian of Earth.
Answer: In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Clarke makes clear what many already suspected: The Monolith was malfunctioning by the time it tweaked human evolution. It increased human aggression in order to assure human survival, but this was a hasty move, which saddled humanity with a never ending series of destructive conflicts. Kubrick also hinted at this in a later movie. The Monolith appears in Full Metal Jacket, presumably inspiring the soldiers in the Vietnamese War to solve their problems by killing, just as it had inspired the fighting hominids millions of years before.
The monolith from 2001 does not appear in Full Metal Jacket. There is a tall burning building in the background during Cowboy's death scene but it takes a hell of a stretch of the imagination to see it as a monolith. It's just a ruined building. Kubrick himself confirmed this in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine - it's combination of coincidence and wishful thinking.
Corrected entry: The transmission from Earth says that Discovery left three weeks previously, that transmissions take seven minutes and that the journey will take the better part of a year. The speed of light is 186,282 miles/sec. In seven minutes, light travels 78,238,440 miles so the movie statement that Discovery is 80,000,000 miles away from Earth is reasonable. To cover that distance in three weeks, the speed would be around 158,000 mph. To travel half a billion miles at that speed would take a mere nineteen weeks, not the better part of a year. (00:58:35)
Correction: It is absolutely clear from the reporter's intonation that he is asking Poole to speculate about what it is going to be like living with Bowman, HAL, etc. for a year - the travel to Jupiter and their lengthy mission time once they get there, and the time spent on the return leg.
To me it is not absolutely clear that the reporter is talking about the full mission but I agree that if the full mission is for one year than the statement is feasible. In my original post I estimate the speed of the spaceship Discovery to be about 158,000 mph which is 6.4 times the maximum speed of Apollo. The improvement of the drive engines of 6.4 times in 40 years is reaching a bit in my opinion. However the one year estimate could be feasible at 20 weeks to Jupiter and back and 12 weeks at Jupiter.
