2001: A Space Odyssey

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'm watching the film right now. It struck me, why does Frank die so quickly?

When HAL directs the pod to disconnect the air hose on Frank's suit, Frank immediately starts thrashing about, and quickly expires. But the suit's existing air supply should have sustained him for at least a few minutes.

I mean, it's not like the air could have leaked out; the suit is otherwise undamaged, and the air isn't leaking out through the hose itself (otherwise it would have acted like a mini-thruster and sent Frank's body off in the opposite direction).

So is there any particular reason why Frank dies so fast? He should have at least been able to call for help, although I guess HAL could have blocked any such attempt. In any case, Frank should have lived long enough to activate his suit's thrusters and get himself back to the Discovery.

But then we wouldn't have much of a movie left, would we?

 

[publiusr]

I imagine the suits air went out of the hose as well.

Deleted scenes
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/lunar-hilton-late-1960s.40593/#post-567627

 

[CorporalCaptain]

We don't see what exactly the pod does to Frank. We know the air hose gets disconnected or severed. We don't know whether that is all that happened. Dave released Frank's body and never examined his suit to see everything that had been done to it.

It's a good question, though.

 

[Ithekro]

Since the pod is also tumbling away (from what I recall), maybe HAL smacked Frank with the pod arms hard enough to cause blunt force trauma as well as the broken hose.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Since the pod is also tumbling away (from what I recall), maybe HAL smacked Frank with the pod arms hard enough to cause blunt force trauma as well as the broken hose.

Yes, the pod is tumbling, which would seem most unlikely, if all that happened was that Frank's hose got clipped.

 

[Tosk]

So is there any particular reason why Frank dies so fast?

The same reason why so many characters die almost immediately from a neck wound...that is to say...

I dunno?

 

[publiusr]

I’m thinking the pod accelerated and right before impact…did a burn to spin hoping one of the claw connected. Not a cut—-but a snag and a stunning blow.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Since the pod is also tumbling away (from what I recall), maybe HAL smacked Frank with the pod arms hard enough to cause blunt force trauma as well as the broken hose.

Frank had enough presence of mind to thrash around and try to reconnect the suit hose, which I think would be unlikely if he'd sustained severe head trauma.

And as I said, the suit appeared to have sustained no other damage. if the pod had hit Frank hard enough to kill him, the suit's head would have been smashed.

 

[David cgc]

It could just be simple time compression because it's a movie, and the whole process of Dave reaching Frank's body took longer than was depicted.

 

[Shaka Zulu]

I saw the movie for the fourth time overall (but the first in a theater) in August of 2018 at the Cinesphere at Ontario Place here in Toronto; of course, seeing it like this (presented in the original roadshow theater format, on an IMAX screen) was amazing-I felt like I was seeing it in Cinerama as it would've been shown in 1968. Seeing it at Cinesphere also felt like I was in the future (well, the future as if it had actually happened according to the movie) watching a contemporary movie set and filmed in space (for an explanation of what I mean, I'll show this picture of it):

And this one:

There was also one time one year when CITY TV showed 2001 on New Year's Day after the stroke of midnight which was after the station's annual New Year's Eve party that happens in the Nathan Phillips Square section of Toronto's famous City Hall (known to everybody here for it being featured in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation) as if it were predicting the future.

And then, there's this....

 

[publiusr]

Ha!

I don’t know why…but seeing the trees made me think…they’re going TWIN PEAKS!”

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

You know, it just hit me:

In the Dawn of Man sequence, how the did they do that bit where one of the apes is attacked by a leopard?

The leopard (I think it's a leopard, anyway) is obviously not an actor in a suit like the apes all were. So it must have been real. Are they telling us that the poor soul in the ape costume actually had to go out there and almost get eaten by a fucking leopard? Was the guy some kind of specially trained stuntman, particularly schooled in the art of getting his ass kicked by an animal?

At first I thought the APE in that scene was fake, but it didn't look like it. The ape was thrashing about like, well, anyone getting eaten by a leopard would be.

 

[Nightowl1701]

Terry Duggan (the stuntman in the ape suit) had trained with the leopard for almost a year before shooting that scene, and had a thick army jacket on under his fur. It took two takes because on the first one the leopard almost went after another 'ape' on the set, and Duggan had to intercept and wrestle the beast down. (The other 'apes' refused to be anywhere near the animal, and had to be shot separately and composited into the scene later. Kubrick wisely directed the scene while safely inside a lion cage.)

 

[Mojochi]

Almost nothing in that movie is as it appears to be... except that leopard shit. Just a ballsy dude wrestling a nasty big ass cat there. They'd lock you in an asylum for just suggesting that shit nowadays.

 

[Redfern]

On the opposite end of the behavioral spectrum, we have this...

https://www.youtube.com/c/Lunathepantera/videos

Luna, a black leopard, raised from a cub by humans and lives in a residence like a freakin' house cat!

Please, don't assume I'm either condoning or condemning. I'm merely amazed by the circumstances and find the creature beautiful, but fully aware that a moment of confusion or stress for the animal could lead to horrible injury for her caregivers (or others), even if it's purely through accident and not deliberate malice.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I know all of the adult apes in the film were played by actors in suits, but I suspect that at least two or three real apes were used:

- two of them are seen playing with a bone
- in the sequence right before the monolith first appears, a young ape is seen curling up with his parents (and Moonwatcher is looking around furtively).

Those apes all look way too young to be played by actors. Were they real baby apes?

 

[Redfern]

Yeah, they were actual chimps, and young ones at that. Not really a "revelation" and it's rather obvious.

 

[Mojochi]

I still wonder if the narrative is suggesting that the encounter with the monolith somehow triggered the change in evolutionary cognition, that led to the use of tools, even if that it merely sparked curiosity, & broadened their thinking, or is it meant as purely a bystander or marker that was placed to reflect that change, which was going to naturally occur at that time anyhow?

The finding of one beneath the moon's surface, seems to not have had any such impact on the hominids who discovered that one there. The signal it emits sends them in the direction of the one near Jupiter, & therein Dave journeys into a new evolution of man himself, but the act of finding the moon's monolith itself didn't seem to immediately impact them all like it did the earlier hominids. It just seems to be in a place at a time when the hominids were going to begin the next step.

How does it generally get interpreted by other viewers? Is it more a milestone, or a catalyst?

 

[Redfern]

The movie let's audiences draw their own conclusions, but Clarke's novelization is more concrete. In the book, the Monolith sees the potential in the early bipeds and decides to give a little "push", tweaking neurons and fiddling with some gene strands. A couple of the man-apes drop dead from the editing.

As for the Monolith on, or rather a bit under, the Moon, that was effectively a test for the Humans. If they had to capability to dig out the slab, it would then send a signal to the outer gas planets (Jupiter in the film, Saturn in the original novel and Jupiter in both the novel and the movie "2010"), informing the Stargate capable Monolith that humans were ready to "meet the makers" (provided Humans decide to follow the signal).

One potential flaw with the Lunar test, in my probably flawed opinion, the Monolith could have been accidentally exposed by a natural asteroid strike without the direct interactions by humans. In Clarke's original short story that inspired the movie and novel, the artifact (I think was a pyramid or tetrahedron) was surrounded by a "field" that could only be disrupted by a nuclear induced detonation, something less likely to occur through natural causes. Like the film and full length novel, once exposed, the object transmits a signal...and the story ends with humans wondering, "Uh, I think we just signaled the creators! What do we do?"

 

[diankra]

I still wonder if the narrative is suggesting that the encounter with the monolith somehow triggered the change in evolutionary cognition, that led to the use of tools, even if that it merely sparked curiosity, & broadened their thinking, or is it meant as purely a bystander or marker that was placed to reflect that change, which was going to naturally occur at that time anyhow?

The finding of one beneath the moon's surface, seems to not have had any such impact on the hominids who discovered that one there. The signal it emits sends them in the direction of the one near Jupiter, & therein Dave journeys into a new evolution of man himself, but the act of finding the moon's monolith itself didn't seem to immediately impact them all like it did the earlier hominids. It just seems to be in a place at a time when the hominids were going to begin the next step.

How does it generally get interpreted by other viewers? Is it more a milestone, or a catalyst?

The book makes a lot clear. Kubrick cut explanatory dialogue so that visuals did the storytelling, and left mystery.
Edit, like Redfern says.