What I know going in
I have seen the film once before, and enjoyed it. However, this will be my first time seeing it on the big screen, so I expect my opinion of the film to be slightly more ecstatic this time around.
Immediate reaction
I find the “If you haven’t seen the film on the big screen, you haven’t really seen it!” opinion a lot of film critics like to tout a little annoying. For one, it strikes me as a bit elitist. If you don’t leave in or near a big city, it’s doubtful that any theater near you will have repertory screenings. I am extremely lucky in that even though I live in a crappy small town with three multiplexes that all play the same movies, I live an hour away from Champaign, which, for some inexplicable reason, has two theaters, The Art and The Virginia, that regularly play arthouse and classic films. To continue my main point, I could understand that opinion in the VHS era (curse you pan-and-scan!) and even during the first few years of DVD, but in the age of HD streaming and Blu-ray, any classic film with a decent transfer should retain its impact when viewed at home. All that being said, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey must be seen on the big screen. I don’t mean that in a condescending. Just that the pure awe-inspiring spectacle of the thing is so much clearer in a theater that it is completely and totally worth whatever you have to do to see it. If you learn of a repertory screening of 2001, drive the hours it takes, take off work if you have to do, cancel your plans, date, engagement, marriage, whatever, because 2001 is worth it.
I am now going to repeat the basic structure of my first paragraph. I find the whole “They don’t make em’ like they use to!” thing nostalgia at its absolute worst. If you say that, you are fetishizing the specific aspects of a certain era way too much at best (probably due to fuzzy childhood or adolescent memories) or actively ignoring the good art that gets produced today at worst. Again, that being said, they don’t make movies like 2001 anymore! That is not a judgment on the quality of today’s science fiction it is simply a statement of fact. There are two things that make 2001 unique. The first is that it is a science fiction film that isn’t driven by action or horror, isn’t based on a previously-established property, and is content to let things happen without exposition. The second is that 2001 was always expected to be a hit. It was made through the studio system, with state of the art special effects, and a decent budget ($10 mil in 1968, $70 mil today). In addition, the film was the high grossing film that year. It is the combination of those characteristics, an experimental narrative and studio back with a decent budget, for why 2001 is special. Today there are challenging sci-fi films like Moon, Primer, and Coherence, but they are all independent films. There are big-budget sci-fi films like The Matrix, Inception, and Gravity, but they all have relatively straightforward narratives. The two have stopped coming together like they did with 2001. The last film I can think of that embodied both characteristics is Blade Runner, and that was made 32 years ago and was a huge flop when it initially came out. 2001 today would be too expensive to be made independently (unless a Megan Ellison-style billionaire wanted it made) and its script would not get through a studio without a beginning voiceover narration where someone whispers “Earth”, an awkward explanation of The Monolith, and HAL being turned into helpful comic relief.
All that being said (third time!), I think the challenging, and trippy nature of 2001 has been overstated over the years. What I am about to say has become a bit of a theme of this series, but I think it’s worth repeating. 2001, like a lot of the “challenging” films on the BFI list, can be enjoyed on a very visceral, spectacle-based level. It is fun to watch the special effects Kubrick and his crack team came up with. From the ape costumes, to the twirling space stations and sterile, rotating, blinking ships, and beyond, 2001’s effects feel so real, look so detailed, and have such a great physical presence, that it surpasses anything the CGI age has offered up so far. At times, 2001 feels less like a film and more like a vision of the future, sent backwards in time, and beamed directly into the brain.
The film is infamous for people dropping acid and vibing out to it when it was first screened. That bit of info, which honestly sounds like something that happened once and was magnified through gossip, rather than an actual phenomenon, has given 2001 a false reputation. The film as a whole really isn’t that hallucinatory. The whole middle section, the majority of the film, is basically one long survival mission. The “Dawn of Man” beginning is definitely a bold way to start a science fiction film, it isn’t that far-out. Really, only the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence lives up to the LSD-induced hype, and that sequence is so overwhelming and crazy on the big screen that I honestly don’t know how the Timothy Leary acolytes survived it. Seriously, I am not being hyperbolic here. When the stargate first opened up, there was a split second where I started having a panic-attack/freak-out.
I feel like I’m reneging on everything I said in the first paragraph, but even 2001’s narrative isn’t all that complicated. Sure its background and implications are never explicitly stated, but the basic story, what actually happens within the film, can be summed up in two sentences, which I will do right now: “In 2001, humans at various stages in time encounter an artifact that pushes them to new heights of knowledge. In the future, a group of astronauts are sent to Jupiter and must fight back against a rogue AI.” See? That description isn’t too complicated right?
Finally, since I’ve dispelled some of the preconceived notions about the film. I want to talk about how it treats humans. 2001 has regularly been called cold, sterile, and inhuman. I don’t consider that a negative. If the film had terrible dialogue like “Man is the machine now!” that would be a valid critique, but it doesn’t. 2001, like all great films, gets across all of its ideas visually. First is the relation between violence and technology. This is demonstrated in perhaps the single, most famous edit in the history of cinema. I am of course talking about the match cut between the ape’s bone flying up in the air, to a futuristic space station. Kubrick links the ape’s brand new knowledge of weaponry to all of scientific progress, identifying the inherent danger of new technology and the sometimes destructive motivation behind its advancement. Shortly after, the film reveals its post-human nature by intercutting spinning space stations, ironically scored to balletic classical music, a stewardess awkwardly stumbling through a passenger ship, and a man snoozing in zero g. The basic message being that machine movement has become more graceful than human movement. The film also has a lot fun pointing out the incongruous habits of everyone on board the space station. The stewardess looks she stepped off a Pan Am flight from the 60’s, Dr. Floyd has an everyday conversation with his daughter while the fucking Earth is spinning right outside the window, and the little bits of chatter between him and his colleagues could be straight out of a suburb from the 50’s.
Finally, I can’t talk about 2001 without talking about HAL. Some have said that HAL is more human than the actual humans on board the Discovery One. My interpretation of the film doesn’t go that far. I agree that the conversations between HAL, Bowman, and Poole, are hilariously deadpan. However, I think it is impossible to know HAL’s true intentions. In the film, he is nothing but a red dot. So much of human communication is about reading facial cues, body language, and subtle vocal inflections, that how human HAL really is, is impossible for anyone to determine. The important thing to note though, is that HAL does not attack Bowman and Poole until they make it clear they are going to shut him down, and care for your own well-being is an essential part of being human. It is also very interesting that only through responding to HAL’s murderous attempts does Bowman show any kind of emotion. He doesn’t feel real until he is in that red-tinted control room, breathing and sweating like a madman. Strangely, you could boil two significant parts of the film, separated by thousands of years of progress, to two entities trying to kill each other.
Further thoughts
I was very surprised to learn that 2001 was such a big hit. The immediate wave of sci-fi hits that came after 2001 (Alien, Star Wars, and The Terminator) all cannibalize elements from Kubrick’s film, but all are driven by horror or action, which is the mode that most sci-fi films fall in today, except for the occasional indie release. Apparently the film landscape for sci-fi films before 2001 was a bit of wasteland, with sci-fi usually being relegated to cheap b-movies. Kubrick and Arther C. Clark even commented on this by stating that one of their goals with 2001 was to make “the proverbial good science fiction film.” As I understand it, audiences had never before been given the level of insane space spectacle that 2001 offered, which to me seems like the main reason it became hit, even though it doesn’t have the clearest narrative or strong characters.
I also think that 2001 managed to capture all of the complex feelings people had about the space exploration and advanced technology at the time. 2001 was made at the end of the space age, with man landing on the moon for the first time merely a year after its release. Plenty of films have explored different elements of 2001. Star Wars wedded the excitement of old serials and pulp stories to a sci-fi setting and managed to perfectly capture the wonder of space. Alien, with its terrifying bio-mechanical sexual imagery, managed to capture the sheer terror of encountering the unknown. Blade Runner explored the hazy line between man and machine. The Terminator used a simple thriller narrative to bring up the fear of humanity being wiped out by technology. Finally, Wall-E used a simple kids-movie story about a cute robot to portray how humans might be rendered dull and complacent by an overreliance on technology. All of those movies have their merits, and I personally like all of them, but none of them topple 2001 as the granddaddy of science fiction films. It perfectly captures the range of complex reactions humans have always had about space and technology and weds them to an epic narrative about the cycle of human evolution.
Side note: this is the most fun I’ve had reading about a film for this marathon. Every piece I read offered up a new and personal take on the film. I read a few simple recountings of various peoples’ experiences with the film, and even those were joy to read. I also enjoyed learning about how the film was made, something I usually don’t care about. However, the crazy level of detail Kubrick demanded made it worthwhile. I will list a few of my favorite examples:
- Doing away with rear projection because it looked to fake, and using the more complicated process of front projection where an actor performs in front of a reflective background and an image is projected on top of him.
- That, in order to show Bowman walking in a circle toward Poole, Gary Lockwood was strapped to the top of a giant centrifuge, which was then rotated as Keir Dullea walked in place towards a stationary camera
- To show Bowman being sucked into the airlock from his pod, the camera was placed at the bottom of huge cylinder and Dullea bungie-jumped toward it.
You would think learning these details would lessen the impact of the film’s visuals, but you would be wrong. 2001’s effects have held up so well that you never for a second think that you are watching well. The rational part of me knows that if the camera moved even a few millimeters left, right, up or down, that the sets of 2001 would be exposed. However, the film is simultaneously so grand and steeped in minutiae, that it is one of the few films whose world seems to exists beyond the frame of the camera.
Why is the film on this list?
Do I really need to say anything else? 2001 is one of the few films that is so awesome in its scope and so brimming with ideas that you could be satisfied by it by turning off your brain or picking apart every frame.
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