Arthur C Clarke is one of the greatest sci fi authors of all time and wrote the book in conjunction with the movie with Stanley Kubrick. They are meant to be consumed together. Read the book and the movie makes a lot more sense. There is virtually zero ambiguity if you read the book.
Came here to say this. The book is fantastic in itself too and I view the movie more as a "visualization of the parts that Kubrick found the most interesting". I see those two as slightly different art pieces and love them both. The second book was also great but I think it lost a bit of what made 2001 special by the 3rd and 4th books.
The books are actually quite easy to read and as much as I adore the movie of 2001, I think the book's ending is even more visually spectacular. Highly highly recommended.
I believe the ending had more abstract inverted color visuals, as special effects at the time we're not capable of depicting what Clarke described. I agree, I would have loved to see the scenes in the book.
He made it all the way to Jupiter, and figured he might as well check out the monolith despite the disaster of the mission so far. He took the pod to check it out. He was then taken through a portal in the monolith to the home system of the aliens that created the monolith. There, he was put in a simulation as best as could be created based on TV signals from earth. The simulation was of a hotel room in a particular TV show. The alien machinery then downloaded his mind, hence the aging sequence. He was then inserted into the substrate of spacetime, allowing him to move around the galaxy like an omnipotent god. He decided to go back to earth to help out humanity, but he was still very new to this upgrade, so he was like a baby, hence the fetus over earth, which was just metaphorical. His upgrade was the next step for humanity, just as the upgrade for the man-apes was, giving them the ability to use tools.
This was all explained in very plain English in the book.
Thanks for bringing this up. Arthur C. Clarke was devastated at how the movie removed most of the explanations of what was going on, and walked out of the movie during the intermission:
"Without consulting or confronting his co-creator, Kubrick cut a huge amount of Arthur’s voice-over explanation during the final edit... As it turned out, Arthur did not get to see the completed film until the US private premiere. He was shocked by the transformation. Almost every element of explanation had been removed. Reams of voice-over narration had been cut. Far from being a pseudo-documentary, the film was now elusive, ambiguous and thoroughly unclear. Close to tears, he left at the intermission..."
I'm honestly glad Kubrick didn't go with Clarke's narration. Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke was a writer. While abstract and nearly impossible to understand without the book, the movie and book work amazingly well together as a unit. With concrete first order explanation at the end the sense of profundity wouldn't have been there. The aliens and their machines are vastly beyond human comprehension, and the arc of man's evolution was absolutely poetic. It would have been dated and corny with direct visual and vocal explication. The movie drew me to book, not the other way around.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Probably you could tell from the tone of my comment, but I don't like the movie the way it is. I agree with you that the movie and the book work well together but I wish the movie worked as a standalone piece of art.
I think Kubrick and Clarke could have perhaps found a compromise. For example, I remember liking the ending part of the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" by Spielberg which had a similar situation to the last sequence in 2001. I don't recall if that movie had any explicit explanation of what the beings at the end were but it was pretty clear who they were and what they were doing from the way the movie handled things.
Yeah I'm not hard headed about it and get that it's not for everyone. I'd be open to other possibilities for how the ending was handled. I definitely don't think direct narration would have worked though. The voiceovers in the theatrical cut of Blade Runner are almost universally disliked. Some less subtle hints like you say could have worked.
I thought Spielberg ruined AI btw. But that's a different topic. I thought the final scene was the only good one in the movie. The imagery and implications stuck with me for decades.
I agree with everything in your comment, including about AI. The last 30 minutes of that movie amazed me but I didn't like much of what came before that.
I've always felt the movie conveyed at least the essence of this very well. I basically got it on my first watch as a highschooler.
If you make the connection that "monolith = jump in tech" then the ending, for all it's surreal imagery, follows as a jump so massive that of course a normal person couldn't understand, and it's all visualized in a super creative manner.
I wouldn't have guessed it was literally the aliens downloading his brain or whatever and that he'd chosen to go back and help earth, but the general gist is more than there. And i love the idea that it basically conveys what you need to understand, while also conveying what it would be like for a human to crash into something so phenomenally beyond what we've ever understood or experienced.
