10 More Movie Answers Given YEARS Later

Never one to adhere to or conform to the rules of filmmaking, an attitude that has allowed him to produce some of the most influential movies of an entire generation, Stanley Kubrick's finest and strangest hour may have come with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As far as not following the norms goes, the 1968 picture was way ahead of its time in a number of different aspects, including the ending. After investigating a mysterious monolith that was orbiting Jupiter, Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) was sucked into a vortex of some kind, and almost reborn as a foetus floating in space. Absolutely no explanation or context was given.

While Kubrick had previously gone on record as not wanting to confirm exactly what the final scenes meant, footage of an interview for an ultimately unproduced documentary that was discovered in 2020 shows the director doing exactly that. A real explanation as to what happened at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When Bowman is pulled into the vortex, the idea was that he had been abducted by god-like creatures without form for study. They put him in a room that didn't follow the rules of time  and so when he flies through his lifetime, seeing himself as an old man, this is really happening to him while outside the natural laws of the universe.

Finally, upon the completion of their studies, the gods saw him reborn as a Superman of sorts and sent him back to Earth. Though Kubrick stopped short of explaining what happened when he returned home, this gives more context than ever to one of the most ambiguous movie endings of all time.