Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Gary Lockwood, Keir Dullea, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
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.
Revealing mistake: During the "Dawn of Man" sequence, the ape-man scenes were shot on an indoor stage with projected background images on a huge screen behind the stage. The screen itself was a highly reflective cloth. In most shots, it is quite convincing, but in several (especially when facing the aggressive, victorious group during the first fight, then again when facing the tool-using group in the last fight), the rear screen appears to be a patchwork of smaller pieces of cloth as very obvious puzzle-like shapes of varying reflectivity appear in the sky. Once you notice them, it's incredibly distracting. It was originally parallel strips, but they were VERY visible as vertical lines so they were torn into a patchwork to make lines less obvious. (00:08:35 - 00:18:00)
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
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.
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