Kubrick's explanation

To complement matters, due to the cinema world's unbelief in most of this movie, and taking their sheer in enjoyment from its visual attributes, Kubrick recently (end of June) made a world wide press statement from New York in Newsday, explaining the film.

Kubrick: "Here's where you get into what you might call the bonus area of ambiguity. Because there is a very simple literal explanation on the lowest possible plot level. An artifact is left on earth by extraterrestial explorers 5 million years ago.

"Another artifact is left on the moon so that it can signal man's first step into the universe. Another is placed in orbit around Jupiter, as a relay. When he gets to Jupiter, the astronaut is swept into a force field which takes him into another dimension of time and space in another part of the galaxy. He's put into the equivalent of a human zoo, so that he can be studied. His life passes in this room, and to him it seems like moments. He may either be spending his entire natural life there or it may be telescoped or it may be compressed into minutes.

"He dies and he's reborn in some enhanced way. He comes back to earth as an angel or as a superman or in some other way transfigured. On the simplest level, that's what 'happens'. Now the fact that you're not using words and the thing does have resonating implications beyond that, I think is good. On other levels, it means anything anybody is feeling about it. I don't feel I should speculate beyond the lowest possible storyline of the plot. Obviously any feeling that you have about it that doesn't contain contradiction, is valid. If it stirs your emotions, your subconscious, our mythological yearnings, then it has succeeded."

One of the most extraordinary sequences in the film is towards the end when astronaut Keir Dullea hurtles through cosmic human experience in his space pod to Jupiter. To satiate intelligentsia, and evoke curiosity of this unbelievable finale, we quote from the best.

John Coleman (New Statesman) There follows the sort of visual experience one has had intimations of in dreams, hardly to be described. We rush down encroaching walls of brilliant, shifting colours, which abruptly become oppressive ceilings and floors. Sometimes we are going headlong into the heart of something, a flaring white sun; sometimes beautiful, baleful whorls of pigments float up. Then there are fantastic landscapes, swept over, precipices and ravines in alarmingly wrong tints (like irridescent Niteglo ink) until the last cool descent."

Time: "An avalanche ol eerie, kinetic effects attacks the eye and bends the mind. Kubrick turns the screen into a planetarium gone mad and provides the viewer with the closest equivalent to psychedelic experience this side of hallucinogens . . . Some of the most dazzling visual happenings and technical achievements in the history of the motion picture."

Youngblood: "And then comes the incredible denouement, the wordless final half-hour of the film which becomes a tour-de-force display of abstract cinema and surrealistic imagery as powerful and inventive as any I've seen in the so-called "underground" or anywhere."