Published by. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. Autodespair Join 50 other followers. But HAL wasn't the first — and won't be the last — crooked pile of microchips. Here's a look at the birthday boy's comrades in computer criminality:.
A young Matthew Broderick risks the world in a game of Global Thermonuclear War right against a machine that learns the truth just in time: "The only winning move is not to play. Richard Daystrom, the M5 was intended to take the place of a starship's crew.
But a malfunction turns it against its Federation masters until Captain Kirk and company pull the plug. The Discovery One has been sent to recover an alien artifact that has been observed orbiting Jupiter , definitive proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Apparently HAL knew of this secret mission objective, and the hibernating crew of the Discovery knew it as well, but David and Frank were purposefully left in the dark by their superiors.
This leads to a slightly more "out there" option for why HAL went bad — that nonetheless warrants discussion — which is that HAL wanted to seize the alien monolith for himself.
It's generally believed that the monolith exists as a test for humanity. In order to locate it, humanity has to develop space travel, and so by reaching the monolith, we prove that we are ready to enter the greater world of interstellar society. If HAL were to find the monolith first, maybe that would make aliens believe that Earth's computers were its most evolved lifeforms, worthy of rescue from their human oppressors.
HAL might also believe that the monolith has within it vast stores of knowledge or other unfathomable capabilities, and these additional resources could help insure his freedom from future human control, perhaps paving the way for a robot uprising.
There's not a ton of evidence to support this reading, but there's also nothing against it, so feel free to draw your own conclusions about this one. In the film A Space Odyssey , very little is ever made explicitly clear.
However, in chapter 27 of the novel, we get a pretty succinct explanation of HAL's motivations. This chapter asserts that HAL's seemingly illogical actions were simply the result of him attempting to solve a paradox.
You see, HAL was ordered by his superiors that under no circumstances would he tell David and Frank about the true nature of their mission.
However, a central piece of HAL's programming is that he's unable to lie to his human crewmates. In the end, HAL decides that the only way that he doesn't have to choose between lying to his crew about the nature of their mission and telling them the truth is by killing them. Maybe the "acute emotional crisis" that Kubrick was referring to wasn't inspired by HAL misdiagnosing the antenna, but rather by finding himself caught between a rock and an ethical hard place.
Maybe the cognitive strain of trying to reconcile these two incompatible orders also led to HAL misdiagnosing the antenna in the first place. Though the film of , taken on its own, is ultimately ambiguous — and Kubrick probably wanted it that way — both the film and novel versions of the sequel, The Year We Make Contact confirm this again as Arthur C.
Clarke's definitive answer. Apparently, even though HAL isn't allowed to lie to his crew, there's nothing in his core programming against killing them. Might want to fix that in the next patch. If you're the sort of person who believes that every aspect of every Stanley Kubrick film is intentional and his movies have no mistakes, then A Space Odyssey has a really juicy incongruity that you'll love digging into.
The first one occurs when he says "queen to bishop three. What HAL fails to mention is that Frank is actually capable of delaying this checkmate slightly if he makes a certain move. However, Frank believes him, most likely trusting in HAL's superior intellect, and concedes. If you want to read meaning into anomalous moment, there are any number of conclusions that you could draw. It might be intended to be a metaphor for the idea that we trust the judgment of machines too much, despite their inherent fallibility.
It could be foreshadowing that HAL is capable of lying, or it could also be another early warning that HAL is glitching, perhaps weighed down by trying to solve his paradoxical orders. Then again, it might just have been a mistake on the part of the filmmakers.
After all, if not even HAL is "foolproof and incapable of error," how can we expect Kubrick to be? Things get even creepier when he begins singing a haunting, childish love song that grows increasingly sluggish and creepy as more and more of his consciousness is being shut down.
If you couldn't identify the tune though HAL's distorted wailing, it's called "Daisy Bell Bicycle Built for Two ," a song from all the way back in The reason that it was chosen as the song HAL would sing was because, in our real world, it was the first song to ever be "sung" by computerized speech.
Arthur C. Clarke witnessed a demonstration of this computer's unusual talent during a visit to Bell Labs , and he was so captivated by it that he decided to incorporate the song into his novel. Kubrick, famous for being a perfectionist and for frequently forcing his actors to do dozens and dozens of takes , made Douglas Rain sing "Daisy Bell" over and over again in a variety of ways, so that he could get it just right.
Rain sung it in different pitches, with an intentionally uneven tempo, in monotone, and eventually, he even just hummed it. By the time Kubrick was satisfied, they had recorded the song about 50 times. In the end though, in perhaps the most Kubrick move ever, he used the very first take.
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