The ending of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey appears to many viewers to be too obscure and even to have little to do with the film as a whole, but this is a misreading of what takes place. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a film that may appear to lack a cohesive literary structure and to be instead a series of barely related incidents at different time periods, with different characters and somewhat obscure situations. The protracted journey through the starscape near the end of the film and the peculiar imagery that succeeds it, all occurring without external comment or explanation, can add to the sense that there is a lack of cohesion and purpose to the film. In truth, though, the structure of this film is carefully wrought and coheres around thematic concerns, recurring images, and a central issue that carries the plot to a logical if tentative conclusion. There is meaning in the ending, and to ascertain this meaning it is necessary to consider the structure of the entire film and the manner in which the filmmaker carries meaning through imagery and through relationships between different images and ideas across many thousands of years of time.
Consider first the title. The use of the word "odyssey" is carefully calculated to evoke an image of the great literary epic The Odyssey in which the central character of Ulysses takes an extended journey because he has offended Poseidon. Ulysses takes thirty years to return from the siege of Troy, and during that time he encounters a variety of wonders, proves his worth as a leader, and returns home a changed man. The last portion of the film 2001 is entitled "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," and it takes the character of Dave Bowman on a journey longer and more distant than any human being has ever taken before. The film has an epic scope not unlike that of the Homeric poems and has a certain degree of allegorical meaning related to the new mythology it creates, a mythology...