The only human in the film is HAL 9000, the super-computer that runs the ship and exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and Poole. The script development is, again, linear: the accepted relationship of man using machine is presented initially, then discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two (HAL, for example, asks Bowman to show him some sketches, then comments on them). This equilibrium where men and machine perversely share characteristics shatters only when HAL mistakenly detects a fault in the communications system. The HAL computers cannot make mistakes and a confirmation of the error would necessitate disconnection. At this point the balance shifts again: Bowman asks HAL to explain his mistake and HAL denies it, attributing it to "human error"; we are reminded of the maxim, "a bad workman blames his tools," and realize HAL is acting from a distinctly human point-of-view in trying to cover up his error.

AS THE only human in the film HAL proves a greater murderer than any of the men. Returning 2001 to the theme of inherent destruction in social and technological progress, Kubrick's chilling last-shot-before-the-intermission (a shot from HAL's point-of-view, lip-reading a conversation of Bowman and Poole deciding to dismantle him if the mistake is confirmed) suggests the potential of machine to control man, the ultimate reversal of roles in a situation where man makes machines in his own image. HAL's success is partial; he murders Poole, then three doctors on the ship in a state of induced hibernation. The murder of the sleeping doctors is filmed almost entirely as close-ups of electronically controlled charts, a pulsating coordination of respiration regulators, cardiographs, and encephalographs. HAL shuts his power off gradually and we experience the ultimate dehumanization of watching men die not in their bed-coffins but in the diminished activity of the lines on the charts.

In attempting to re-enter the ship from the pod he has used to retrieve Poole's corpse, Bowman must improvise for the first time, ad-lib emergency procedures to break-in against HAL's wishes. His determination is perhaps motivated by the first anger he has shown, and is certainly indicative of a crucial re-assertion of man over machine, again shifting the film's balance concerning the relationship between man and tool. In a brilliant and indescribable sequence, preceded by some stunning low-angle camera gyrations as Bowman makes his way toward HAL's controls, the man performs a lobotomy on the computer, dismantling all but its mechanical functions. Symbolically, it is the murder of an equal, and HAL's "death" becomes the only empathy-evoking scene in 2001. Unlike any of the humans, HAL dies a natural human death at Bowman's hand, slowing down into senility and second childhood, until he remembers only his first programmed memory, the song Daisy, which he sings until his final expiration.

Bowman's complex act parallels that of the australopithicus: his use of the pod ejector to re-enter the craft was improvisational, the mechanism undoubtedly designed for a different purpose--this referring to the use of bone as weapon-tool. Finally in committing murder, Bowman has essentially lost his dehumanization and become an archetypal new being: one worthy of the transcendental experience that follows. For the last part of the film, we must assume Bowman an individual by virtue of his improvised triumph over the complex computer.

LEFT alone in the space ship, Bowman sees the monolith slab floating in space in Jupiter's atmosphere and takes off in a pod to follow it; knowing by now the properties of the pod, we can conjure images of the mechanical arms controlled by Bowman reaching to touch the monolith as did the australopithicines and the humans. The nine moons of Jupiter are in orbital conjunction (a near-impossible astronomical occurrance) and the monolith floats into that orbit and disappears. Bowman follows it and enters what Clarke calls the time-space warp, a zone "beyond the infinite" conceived cinematically as a five-minute three-part light show, and intercut with frozen details of Bowman's reactions.

If the monolith has previously guided man to major evolutionary and technological progression, it leads Bowman now into a realm of perception man cannot conceive, an experience unbearable for him to endure while simultaneously marking a new level in his progress. The frozen shots intercut with the light sequences show, debatably, Bowman's horror in terms of perception and physical ordeal, and his physical death: the last of many multi-colored solarized close-ups of his eye appears entirely flesh-colored and, if we are justified in creating a color metaphor, the eye is totally wasted, almost subsumed into a pallid flesh. When man journeys far enough into time and space, Kubrick and Clarke are saying, man will find things he has no right to see.

But this is not, as Clarke suggests in Life, the end of an Ahab-like quest on the part of men driven to seek the outer reaches of the universe. Bowman is led into the time warp by the monolith. The moon monolith's radio signals directed toward Jupiter were not indicative of life as we know it on Jupiter, but were a roadmap, in effect, to show Bowman how to find his way to the monolith that guides him toward transcedent experience.

At the end, Bowman, probably dead (if we are to interpret make-up in conventional terms) finds himself in a room decorated with Louis XVI period furniture with fluorescent-light floors. He sees himself at different stages of old age and physical decay. Perhaps he is seeing representative stages of what is life would have been had he not been drawn into the infinite. As a bed-ridden dying man, the monolith appears before him and he reaches out to it. He is replaced by a glowing embryo on the bed and, presumably, reborn or transfigured into an embryo-baby enclosed in a sphere in our own solar system, watching Earth. He has plainly become an integral part of the cosmos, perhaps as Life suggests, as a "star-child" or, as Penelope Gilliatt suggests, as the first of a species of mutant that will inhabit the Earth and begin to grow. What seemed a linear progression may ultimately be cyclical, in that the final effect of the monolith on man can be interpreted as a progress ending in the beginning of a new revolutionary cycle on a vastly higher plane. But the intrinsic suggestiveness of the final image is such that any consistent theory about the nature of 2001 can be extended to apply to the last shot: there are no clear answers.

SEVERAL less-than-affirmative ideas can be advanced. The monolith is a representation of an extraterrestrial force which keeps mankind (and finally Bowman) under observation, and manipulates it at will. Man's progress is not of his own making, but a function of the monolith--man cannot predict, therefore, the ensuing stages of his own evolution. That the initiation of man into higher stages of development involves murder casts ambiguity as to the nature of the monolith force. In its statement that man cannot control his destiny, 2001 is anti-humanistic--this also in the concept that what we consider humanity is actually a finite set of traits reproducible by machines.

The final appearance of the Louis XVI room suggests that Bowman was, in fact, being observed as if he were a rat in a maze, perhaps to test his readiness for a further progression, this time a transcendence. The decor of the room is probably not significant, and is either an arbitrary choice made by the observers, or else a projection of Bowman's own personality (the floor and the food are specifically within Bowman's immediate frame of reference).

If Kubrick's superb film has a problem, it may simply be that great philosophical-metaphysical films about human progress and man's relationship to the cosmos have one strike against them when they attempt to be literally just that. Rossellini's radiant religious films or Bresson's meditative ascetiscism ultimately say far more, I think, than Kubrick's far-more-ambitious attempt at synthesizing genre and meaning.

Nevertheless, 2001: A Space Odyssey cannot be easily judged if only because of its dazzling technical perfection. To be able to see beyond that may take a few years. When we have grown used to beautiful strange machines, and the wonder of Kubrick's special effects wears off by duplication in other Hollywood films, then we can probe confidently beyond 2001's initial fascination and decide what kind of a film it really is