This is the third part and final part of the talk and analysis of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, "2001, a Space Odyssey" that Philippe May presented at Aurofilm, Auroville, April 30, 2023.
Stanley Kubrick used chess moves from a real game. Hamburg 1910. Roesch vs. Willi Schlage. I discovered this by digging deeply into an ABC series called FlashForward in 2009. David S. Goyer (the show runner then) also used the same game in the beginning episodes. The series had chess themes embedded in it as well as using Alice in Wonderland (Through the Looking Glass). I found it extremely interesting but the series wasn’t renewed.
At 12:07 the NASA advisors seem to have failed their job. It is fun and not important, but an astronaut would never do such a large space jump without any security like a rope or a hand steering unit like mobile thrusters. And it‘s of course completely useless to park the vehicle this far away, but it was necessary to create this beautiful shot and give a sense of vastness and danger.
The ambiguity of the „lying“ or „miscalculating“ computer is never revealed in the film but is also an ambiguity between Stanley, who never would trust a machine, and Clarke, whose rather naive attitude towards technology was legendary. Only in ACC’s second novel „2010“ he tried to explain HAL‘s neurosis, which, of course for Clarke, was human error or human lack of character in defense of his technological marvel….
