MonsterHunter

Depending on who you talk to, this is either an overblown, self-important, boring piece of hippie junk or a landmark, thought-provoking work of art that contemplates where man has been and what his ultimate destiny is. I guess it all comes down to what you want this film to be. There are those that can’t (or don’t) want to get past the trappings of its sci-fi origins with its spaceships and apes and psycho computer. Of course if you paid any attention to the movie at all, you would realize that that’s all those things were - mere trappings.

The film is about the exploration of the human frontier as much as the final frontier. Man’s relentless desire to see what is out there is mirrored by his basic need to find out what is inside of himself. If you’re in the market for junk and don’t feel like thinking, then you’re probably better off on bogus sci-fi fare like Star Wars and its progeny. I’ve always been disappointed that the science fiction film took the path offered by Star Wars (and more often, Alien) then the one offered by 2001. You basically have either westerns or horror movies set in space as opposed to anything resembling science-fiction.

The movie opens fittingly enough at The Dawn of Man. Now, you have to understand that at this point in time, when we say man, we mean guys in ape suits. See, we are in Africa and these ape-like primates share the veldt or whatever with creatures such as tapirs, zebras, and lions. One day they see a monolith made of polished black material and gather round it in awe. Shortly thereafter one of the apes figures out that he can use the bone of a dead animal as a weapon and soon they’re thumping all the other animals in sight. Then the ape throws the bone in the air and it turns into a space ship and the movie shifts to the present time.

I’ll bet everyone was scratching their head when they sat through all that the first time. “Uh, the movie poster had a spaceship on it, why are we watching monkeys fight?” Because those monkeys were us! That’s what we were, where we came from and the monoliths appear (we can later puzzle this out) at various important times in human history. This time it was to kick us in the ass, tell us to quit playing with our hairy selves and start evolving and dominating this here planet.

Back in the present, Dr. Heywood Floyd, a big wig with some kind of space agency, heads up to the base on the moon where a second monolith has been discovered. It turns out this thing has some strong type of magnetic field that drew the attention of the surveyors up there so they went and dug it up. The really scary part is that it was deliberately buried by someone.

I suppose if you’re the mysterious force behind these monoliths, you bury it up there figuring that by the time us apes finally get to the moon and dig it up (and they know we will, we’re such curious buggers) we’ll be ready for the next step in the grand plan. Heywood hops into his space threads and goes out to the site to look at this thing. Someone reaches out and touches it, then everyone gathers in front of it to have their picture taken. As they do this an ear-splitting sound pierces the silence and everyone grabs their head and goes “owie.”

Eighteen months later, astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole are aboard the Discovery I along with three other spacemen in suspended animation. Dave and Frank also have another passenger. His name is the HAL-9000 and he is the bestest gosh darn computer that they could ever create way back in the 1990s in Urbana, IL. HAL is one of those computers who is never wrong and never shy about telling you all about it either. As it turns out, HAL is also one of those computers that goes crazy in the inky depths of space and single-handedly wastes all the crew but one.

The film anticipates some of the problems if and when artificial life attains sentience. Something happens to HAL and he seems to be making errors, reporting a failure of an antenna being imminent when no such screw up is evident. In fact, HAL’s counterpart on Earth indicates that HAL is in error, but HAL chalks that up as being the result of “human error” and not his own.

Frank and Dave kind of go “riiiiight” and sneak off to backstab HAL in one of the pods that they take joyrides into space in. They pretty much form a “We Think HAL’s Got Cooties Club” and decide that maybe they should shut the big guy down before he starts doing really crazy stuff like wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants. The only problem is that Frank and Dave didn’t thoroughly read the HAL instruction book that came with him or they would have known that HAL can read lips. Since HAL is pretty much “alive” at this point, he also has a desire to survive.

Frank goes outside of the ship (ohh, good try, we have some lovely parting gifts) to replace the antenna and HAL “accidently” (oops!) has the pod’s mechanical arm cut Frank’s oxygen line sending him hurling into space. Dave notices Frank fly by the windshield of the spaceship and thinks, “huh, now why is that dang Frank floating off into space without any oxygen? That don’t seem like Frank.” So Dave hops in a pod and goes out to get him. Meanwhile HAL decides that the three dudes sleeping are just meatbags taking up space and cuts off their life support. Once Dave retrieves Frank, HAL won’t let him back into the ship.

Dave figures out how to get back into the ship and hauls ass off to the circuit breaker box to unplug HAL. These are very effective scenes with the only noise being Dave’s breathing and HAL’s pleading not to shut him down. As Dave pulls out circuit after circuit, HAL feels his mind start to go, gets scared and generally dies before our eyes. His voice slows down to a crawl and he regresses to the very beginning of his program, singing a simple song that his programmers taught him when he was just a little styke of a maniac- computer.

Then just like in that cruddy Star Wars trash, a secret pre-recorded message pops up. It’s not Princess Leia whining to Obi-Wan to save her rump, it’s the dudes from mission control and they’re spilling the beans about the real purpose of the mission. It turns out that eighteen months ago that high pitched squeal from the monolith on the moon was it sending a radio transmission to some point in space out near Jupiter and the Discovery I was sent to find out what it all meant.

The film enters it final act entitled “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” at this point. What follows is difficult to explain. Dave encounters a monolith floating in space and then he’s subjected to a series of swirling colors and flashing lights. I know it’s been said a million times before (even on some of the movie posters themselves), but this experience resembles nothing so much as some hophead on a “trip” as the kids would say. As with most bad trips, it ends with Dave meeting himself and turning into a spaceborne fetus.

What does it all mean? What do you want it to mean? It’s obvious that the film is about life, and evolving and rebirth. The film itself is structured that way, with the dawn of man in its animal-like infancy to the time on the moon when we’ve advanced enough that we’re ready to make the next leap in our evolutionary phase, to the ultimate transformation when space and time no longer can confine us and we become something more than physical beings.

What about HAL? There’s another instance of a being evolving. As the ship approached Jupiter, HAL begin to acquire the distinctly human trait of plotting against and killing those he perceived as threats. Did the monolith exert the same type of influence over HAL as it did when it inspired the ape-men to pick up the first weapon and use it to achieve dominion over the rest of the species? That of course is never answered, but the fact that HAL was shut down illustrates that not all species are going to survive the evolution of all things.

The movie itself is still gorgeous to look at, its clean, shiny look a welcome respite from all the Bladerunner-inspired movies where set design consists of being wet, dirty, and dark. The special effects are still amazing and the music by Strauss gives things that epic feel that one must surely experience when gazing off into the infinity of deep space. Admittedly, things are fairly slow going in the first hour, but once you’re on board the Discovery with HAL and Dave things move right along, and the ending is well worth the time invested.

What’s truly great about this film is that it shows our traveling to the stars as being something that can be wondrous, beneficial, and spiritual. Did Dave run into God out there? Who can say, but the fact of the matter is that no one knows what is out there. It doesn’t all have to be flesh-eating aliens, Stormtroopers, and Klingons. It might be something great and beautiful; something able to show us how to achieve our full potential.

The film was right not to wrap it all up and explain everything. It shouldn’t have been explained. There are some things we can only understand by experiencing them, the possibilities of communicating such things are limited. Besides who says our movies have to be all paint-by-number hero/villain variations of tales that have existed for thousands of years? It’s like somebody once said (and I’m sure I’ll screw up the quote, so bear with me). The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. I don’t think that’s something to fear, I think it is something to look forward to.

© 2007 MonsterHunter