Its science fiction, not mystery. If the film-maker tells the story in such a way to necessitate someone explaining it to the audience later, then the film is a failure at best. At worst, such a film is a pretentious wank. Which is what we have here, not just a dismal failure, that would be forgivable, but a deliberately obscurant rendering of the story.
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I wasn't around when the movie was released and came to it after almost two decades of interpretation was available. Plus, by the time I did see it, I'd already read quite a lot of Clarke and so, was familiar with the old man's themes.
Which might explain why 2001 was as clear as day to me from the beginning. It can be summed up in a few words: human intelligence was guided by extraterrestrial intervention at two key moments: the proto-human stage and the era we achieved a foothold in space. By the atomic age, and the age of spaceflight, our mostly hands-off cosmic nursemaids reappeared in the form of an artifact, presenting us with a choice between continuing quasi-monkeyhood or movement to something else. Something fit for the opportunities and terrors of interstellar space.
The story is so simple (at least from my point of view) that I've always been perplexed by people who complain about its indecipherability.
There's a monolith on a prehistoric plain, teaching our pre-human ancestors critical survival skills, including how to kill. Eons later, a matching monolith, dubbed Tycho Monolith Anomaly 1 or TMA1 for short, is found on the moon. Long ago the clever aliens buried the second object deep beneath the lunar surface supposing that if the screaming hominids they first observed reached the point where travel to and manipulation of the nearest off-world planetary body was possible (along with the ability to detect deeply shielded electromagnetic sources), the next level of their instruction could begin. The next level was important because even though, in many ways, we'd moved far beyond the screaming ape stage, in many other ways we were still poo flinging jackasses. Only, the 'poo' was nuclear tipped and could end the human story.
Even the drama within a drama about HAL 9000 isn't that tough to figure out. The machine possessed intelligence and a large degree of free will but lacked guile. It couldn't handle maintaining a secret: the secret of the Discovery's true mission, kept from even the astronauts (who were told they were conducting a survey of the Jovian system -- a story they only half bought since robots, like the ones we're currently deploying to the outer planets, could more cheaply do that job).
Unable to resolve the contradictions, HAL applied rigorously logical illogic to the situation and decided to kill the crew.
Let's quote Bill again:
Its science fiction, not mystery.
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What an astoundingly odd thing to say.
The best science fiction writers often mix genres and experiment with narrative to achieve new effects. Who says you need to avoid difficulty and asking your audience to do some work? Stanislaw Lem, in "Golem XIV", presented a (quite good) philosophical treatise on the limits of human intelligence, our place in nature and other concerns in the form of a science fiction story [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV>].
Phillip K. Dick's "Through a Scanner Darkly" is best understood as, to quote Rudy Rucker, a "transcendental autobiography". William Gibson summoned the shade of Raymond Chandler as he sat down to write his Sprawl series of novels. Frank Herbert's "Dune" is, among other things, an attempt to map the intertwining of economics, technology and ecology. Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" novels -- particularly "The Shadow of the Torturer" owe a great deal to Melville.
Turning back to film, Danny Boyle's "Sunshine" is a remarkable meditation on the fragility of sanity (or rather, on how sanity is contingent upon spatio-temporal placement). Well, at least the first two-thirds of the movie are that. The last third could be titled 'Sins of A Solar Herakles'.
You're a smart guy Bill but I've noticed the way you tend to get foot stompingly annoyed by concepts, themes and ideas which you don't get at first go. It was hilarious to read your reaction to Deleuze: gibberish! You shouted. I imagined you throwing a shoe at a lecturer.
.d.