> > I'm all for open ended movies that don't tie everything neatly together, but WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON? I was with the movie right up to when Dave gets to Jupiter.
> >
> > Any help?
>
> My memory is clouded, so please forgive me, those of you more familiar with 2001 than I, if I make any mistakes. But the basic idea is this.
>
> A long time ago, aliens planted the first monolith on Earth where we would find it. In the opening sequence, accompanied by Also Sprach Zarathustra, we find prehistoric ape people discovering the monolith. They touch it; it enlights them. It teaches them something completely new and foreign to them, namely the use of tools. Suddenly we see the ape people using bones to crush stuff up.
>
> Fast forward many years into the future. Human technology has progressed from that defining moment -- learning how to use tools -- to its logical end: the building of space craft that can break free of Earth's gravity and travel through space without great peril to its occupants, unless, of course, the space craft happens to be operated by HAL.
>
> At the end, Dave lands on Jupiter and encounters the second monolith, also left by these unseen aliens for us to find when the arc of human learning triggered by finding the first monolith progressed to the point where we could find it. When Dave finds the second monolith, he is presumably raised to a new level of understanding about the universe -- some level of enlightenment as foreign to us as using tools is to terrestrial animals or pre-monolith ape people.
>
> Perhaps as a demonstration of this new kind of learning, the aliens set up something to welcome Jupiter's first human visitor and make him feel at home. The aliens had scanned a room at random, and it happened to be, fortunately for Dave, a rather luxurious hotel suite. But that replication is accomplished by whatever means the second monolith can enlighten us to, and so it sort of defies human explanation. Some mechanism was put into place that makes things that break disappear -- like the glass that is knocked from the table. All that business with Dave seeing himself, but not quite -- presumably these are all evidences of the utilization of whatever the second monolith teaches. It's a "pure" base element of knowledge, however -- like the use of tools, one that doesn't build upon previous knowledge -- and therefore we aren't actually *meant* to know how or why everything works in that makeshift hotel room.
>
> But even then, that's a heck of a lot more of an explanation than the movie ever gives.
>
> Now the people that actually remember the book can correct my errors.

I read the book and saw the movie when they were fairly new stuff. I didn't understand either. I think I saw the movie hoping for some explanation.
That was no help! No comprendo nada.
Howard