Quote:
Originally Posted by Chula Vista
You're on the right track except you're overlooking one key component - weapons. The aliens planted the concept of using the bone (tool) as a weapon (via the monolith) to Moonwalker as a means to stave off the extinction of his tribe.
And when he tosses the bone in the air and we get that great jump cut to the ship thousands of years into the future what's not clear is that the ship is an orbiting nuclear "weapon". Look real closely as they show the various ships and you'll notice that each has the emblem of a different countries' flag. The earth is at a stalemate with all sides being capable of wiping the other out via their tools.
Why did the aliens bury the other monolith beneath the surface of the moon?
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I think you're confusing "having a different interpretation" with "overlooking". I mentioned that I noticed all of the commentaries on tools, weapons, and life, even if we both took the message differently.
Anyway, there will always be people who focus on the monolith rather than the effect (those who mostly take the movie literally, and believe it's about physical items left by aliens, and that the intelligence given by the items is just a symbol for higher guidance), and those who focus on the effect rather than the monolith (those who mostly take the movie metaphorically, and believe it's about the development of intelligent beings, with the monoliths simply being a symbol of the defining moments that a species can eventually go through).
It's actually kind of an interesting idea that helps to explain the dual concepts of religion and atheism. Even though all humans live in the same existence, different people can look at that existence and see something entirely different than someone else (i.e. some people begin to believe in a higher power, and others see only chaos) when confronted with the same evidence (or watching the same movie
). But in this movie, I think Kubrick is trying to point out that it doesn't really matter either way. Religion and Science both serve the same purpose (to shed light on the nature of existence), and eventually lead to the same conclusion: whether the cosmos runs according to a series of laws, or by the hands of some mysterious puppeteer, the ultimate intellectual destination is the realization that life is transient, and locked endlessly with a concept of death that need not be feared (whether because of the comfort that comes from the belief in an afterlife, or because of the comfort that comes from the belief that life and death are simply apart of a beautiful and endless cycle that can't be contained or understood by the concepts of a "beginning" and an "end").