Barker’s Classic Movies #11: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY *****
(This is an updated, expanded version of a review first posted in the fall of 2001)
“I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to ‘explain’ a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation.”
– Stanley Kubrick, (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, US-UK)
running time: 2 hr., 19 m. / original studio: MGM / original MPAA rating: G
directed & produced by Stanley Kubrick; screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke; director of photography, Geoffrey Unsworth; edited by Ray Lovejoy
with: Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman), Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole), William Sylvester (Dr. Heywood Floyd), Douglas Rain (voice of HAL 9000)
Stanley Kubrick’s greatest achievement (Dr. Strangelove notwithstanding), 2001: A Space Odyssey comes closer to “pure cinema” than any other feature film I know. An ideal (and idealized) approach to film storytelling, using abstract imagery to provoke ideas and emotion in the viewer, pure cinema had been discussed prior to 2001 by moviemakers everywhere, and it still is, but this time Stanley Kubrick stopped talking and actually did it. It’s not his most entertaining film, arguably, nor his most beautiful, but it is his most beautifully made, his most ambitious, difficult and fully realized, an epic tone poem of imagery and music with a minimum of dialogue, and a gloriously entertaining film for people who want more from their movies than the usual canned answers to life’s Big Questions.
2001 is the rarest of American rarities, a movie that dares to shadowbox with the Great Nameless Unanswerable, the mother of all elephants in the room, the eternal problem of humankind’s place in the universe. Of course, it’s true that the film’s philosophical content is light as a feather, as its detractors still monotonously insist, but so what? Simplicity is vastly underrated by people who seek and demand the Big Answers (I know, I’ve done my share of seeking and demanding). Part of the film’s challenge is that it makes us aware of words and their limitations, their inability to fulfill all of our communication needs in the face of cosmic events. 2001’s most stylized aspect, its inadequate and evasive dialogue, is also its most misread “problem”: modern conversational language is already so truncated and repressed it can’t even support a good, honest simile, never mind a penetrating idea. “Nothing worth knowing,” Woody Allen once said, “can be understood with the mind…everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening.” It’s a joke, a come on, but not without relevance.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie, not a philosophy course. It’s obsessively concerned with a handful of things that are understood by science, and with a great many more things that no one understands, the paradoxes that infuse our lives. It makes no claims for resolving those paradoxes but, instead, takes us on a beginner’s tour, turning its own contradictions into a virtue: it’s a gigantic movie, set in a disreputable genre and bankrolled by a major Hollywood studio, with the cheek to be a work of audio-visual art, filled with sumptuous, sometimes terrifying music and the cinematic equivalent of metaphor. For these reasons alone, it’s one of the most important and influential films of all-time.
Although I usually avoid synopses in my reviews, I think 2001: A Space Odyssey makes it necessary because so many viewers find the film obscure and/or difficult to comprehend. In fact, children and adolescents often respond more positively to it than adults, their minds as yet uncluttered with rules and regulations about how story, plot and character are supposed to work, never mind dogma about other stuff like human origins, consciousness and destiny. So, there may be spoilers ahead, but there are also handy guideposts for first time viewers, and anyway, this is only my interpretation, considerably abbreviated, of a film designed to be an open-ended experience.
2001 is structured in three clearly labeled sections. The first, called “The Dawn of Man,” begins with the daily struggle for survival on Earth four million years ago. The audience is introduced to the man-ape Moonwatcher (never actually named in the film, though he is in the script), the smartest member of a tribe that is contacted one morning by an extraterrestrial intelligence, appearing in the form of a mysterious, frightening Monolith. An eleven-foot tall, geometrically perfect object, the Monolith fills the air with a sound very much like Gregorian chanting, though the disembodied voices are disturbing rather than comforting, like screams trapped in a vortex, beckoning toward forbidden knowledge (the wondrously creepy music of György Ligeti). In the sky directly above the Monolith, the Sun and Moon are seen in alignment.
After contact with this apparition, Moonwatcher begins to get ideas — weapon-making ideas — and he changes the fortunes of his tribe, teaching them how to kill their enemies and protect their resources. Then, in the most startling match cut in modern film history, Moonwatcher triumphantly flings his new weapon, a bone, into the sky and snap, it turns into an orbiting spacecraft in the year 2001, Kubrick boldly summing up all of history in the wink of an eye, aligning the concepts of human nature, violence and progress in controversial parallels.
It’s worth noting that Kubrick doesn’t offer a new label now, for the next section of movie. Despite the passage of four million years, he considers the movement of humankind into space to be just another step in “The Dawn of Man.”
Next we follow Dr. Heywood Floyd, upper middle class Everyman, as he travels to the Moon on a diplomatic mission to view a top secret find at the American base: a mysterious Monolith, which “seems to have been deliberately buried.” When Floyd visits the excavation site, he and his space-suited colleagues behave like tourists, posing for souvenir pictures in front of their strange object, but Floyd is at least sophisticated enough to gaze upon it with something like mystified wonder. He reaches out, gingerly touching the Monolith, recalling Moonwatcher’s responses at the object’s first appearance, Kubrick once again drawing parallels with the present and the ancient past. Like a piece of classical music reiterating its basic themes in ever more developed passages, 2001 unfolds with several kinds of images — gestures, objects, movement, arrangements, shapes — that repeat in new variations as its story moves outward.
Without warning, the Monolith emits a high frequency signal blanketing all communications. In the sky directly above, the Sun and Earth are seen in perfect alignment.
In part two of the film, called “Jupiter Mission: 18 Months Later,” Kubrick outlines the conditions of life on board a large (and, uh, vaguely bone-shaped) spacecraft named Discovery, with mission commander Dave Bowman, his partner Frank Poole, and the ubiquitous HAL 9000, a supercomputer with the personality of an unctuous HR manager. Dave, Frank and HAL are running the mission while the rest of the crew is in hibernation, a decidedly unglamorous life of rote exercise, time-filling chess games and systems checks in artificial gravity, with the occasional perilous space walk to repair technical glitches.
Unfortunately HAL, the only entity on board who knows the actual purpose of the mission (to make first contact with another species), develops a touch of paranoid psychosis and tries to kill the entire crew, man’s sometimes deadly technology, a projection of his primal self, turning on him at last. Because Dave is a biped, and therefore mobile, he has the advantage in this struggle and is able to outwit HAL.
In the film’s final sequence, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” Dave reaches his destination and makes contact with the godlike aliens, who still represent themselves as a perfect Monolith, appearing in conjunction with the alignment of several Jovian moons. At this point, Dave’s spacecraft falls into a “Star Gate” (unexplained, of course), which pulls him across space and time toward complete dissolution and rebirth. Like Moonwatcher before him, Dave is transformed, probably — hopefully — to the betterment of his tribe.
There is much more going on in 2001 for the engaged viewer who is willing to look below the surface of things. The film has a powerful mythic resonance with many ideas in western literature and culture, and a special kinship with Homer, not just in the title but in its epic sweep, audio-visual poetry and matter-of-fact structure around an enlightening journey outward that finally ends in home. All of this is subtext to 2001’s realism, one of its core differences from all previous “sci-fi” movies, a depiction of life’s difficulties in outer space so far ahead of its time, moviemakers still, purposely, make scientific gaffes which 2001 momentarily corrects: there is no sound in a vacuum (which Kubrick brilliantly circumvents with music and the sound of breathing inside a space helmet), gravity must be manufactured, and actual faster-than-light travel is impossible, if E really does equal MC². Wherever we go out there, it will be at a crawl.
Perhaps most frustrating to the average viewer, who doesn’t give a hoot about science or reality or species self-reflection, 2001 continually suggests metaphysical and philosophical questions without even naming them, refusing to let a single character ruminate out loud about what is “really” going on, leaving the film’s ultimate meaning (if there is one) strictly up to the audience. 2001 exposes our deep enculturation as movie consumers: We don’t really want movies that leave it up to us, in spite of frequent protests to the contrary, and we especially don’t want them from moviemakers who have stepped so far beyond the bounds of romance and ideology.
But 2001 insists, in every artfully composed shot, that we look beyond all that, the clichés and the expectations we didn’t know we were carrying around and the comfort zones of human chauvinism, to consider — just consider, mind you — the possibility we may not know everything yet; the possibility that, car payments and partisan politics and tuition and next week’s presentation aside, the universe, of which we are a part, may yet hold mysteries beyond comprehension.
(click for larger view)
Stanley Kubrick specialized in controversial films, provoking his audience whenever possible by challenging modern complacency on a variety of issues — the unacknowledged criminality of warfare, the roots of social violence, the amorality of relationships — but I think 2001 remains his most contested and misunderstood film because of its obsessive realism in the service of an ethereal plot, a plot that spans millions of years and treats all of humanity as a single protagonist. There’s not a rule of pop storytelling that the film doesn’t break.
When it premiered in 1968, many critics, rival filmmakers, studio heads and audience members scattered and squawked and advanced and retreated, not unlike Moonwatcher and his freaked-out friends at the Monolith’s first appearance. Their most consistent refrain was “Who does Kubrick think he is?,” and one or two critics never did forgive him. He had spared no expense in creating a believable vision of future space travel, and in so doing he forever upped the ante on audience expectations, but what else had he given us? A lot of transcendental malarky and wish-fulfillment fantasy.
So everyone, even Kubrick to some extent, was baffled by the box-office success of 2001, which fell somewhere between modest hit and runaway success, the film taking in $25.5 million in 1968 dollars (roughly $200 million now, your average break-even blockbuster). It would not, could not happen today, for many reasons. One of the most significant is 2001’s release pattern, in the days before home video and media-hyped weekend grosses. Originally a roadshow attraction, 2001 may have opened to empty houses in May, but it was doing fairly well by midsummer and was still playing the same theatres in December. Its first run lasted for three years and it eventually became the third highest grossing film in MGM history.
The popular explanation for its success, developed later by critics and studio chiefs to cover their own asses, fell back on the Summer of Love Theory: mindless, stoned hippies were seeing the film for its psychedelic finale and returning with their mindless, stoned friends to see it again. This explanation has some validity, if we can dig through its acres of denial, but in the end it can be dismissed as irrelevant, along with all the recent sniffing about whether or not the movie’s “predictions” have come true. Science fiction is not about predicting what will happen in the future; it’s a dream of the present moment, a speculation on some trend we already know about, or an extrapolation upon a “What if…?” premise. A good science fiction yarn always winds up being a metaphor for its time and place, once the weight of its particular moment has passed.
Aside from being released into the right culture at the right time, 2001 was such a success and continues to be so because it touches primal fears and desires — our cosmic loneliness, our bottomless curiosity about our reasons for being, our ceaseless yearning for definition — and it does so on a non-verbal level, on a plane that undercuts reason. All arguments against the film are grounded in stubborn, skeptical reason, which certainly has its place (I try to use it all the time and I wish more people would), and which is pointedly encouraged by the film’s austere, careful design, but again, that tension is part of Kubrick’s aim, his free admission that being brilliant — being right all the time about everything — is not always possible or even desirable.
2001: A Space Odyssey is not a film for the reasonable at heart, and indeed, most films aren’t. It’s a strictly right-brain movie, a grand sensual experience, undistracted by the need to pander to mainstream notions about anything, and meant to be seen on a great curved Cinerama screen where it can sweep us away with its sensations of light, color, limitless space and heightened emotion. You want reasonable, there’s always Immanuel Kant.
NOTES:
WHO RUINED WHAT?: The film is not based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, as is widely assumed. Both film and novel were created and released together, Kubrick and Clarke collaborating on the screenplay for a year, then going off to their separate corners, Clarke to write the book while Kubrick was in production.
The Monolith was inspired by Clarke’s 1948 short story “The Sentinel,” an eerie near-future tale of humans finding an alien artifact buried on the moon, but the film greatly expands on this premise. The “Star Gate” sequence of the finale obeys Clarke’s Third Law, perhaps his most famous single idea: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (from Profiles of the Future, 1962). The novel is a good reference for those who are curious about unexplained details in the film, as is the Kubrick-Clarke screenplay (see also RESOURCES below).
ILLUSIONS: Kubrick approached the special effects of 2001 as if he was an Old World craftsman, gathering a team of thirty effects technicians from around the world, then making superhuman demands on their expertise and patience. Postproduction on 2001 took a year and in the end went so far beyond what conventional minds thought was possible, some of Kubrick’s analog techniques were never reproduced again.
The stunning clarity of the visual effects was achieved by revamping time-honored procedures for optical printing, the technique filmmakers used to blend multiple effects shots into a single image before the advent of CGI. Kubrick discarded optical procedures that had been in use for fifty years, while he broke others down into additional, sometimes repeating steps, demanding a single generation look for every composite shot. Some effects elements went through as many as 12,000 steps from conception to finished product.
His live-action effects were no less exacting. The entire Moonwatcher sequence was filmed on a soundstage using a front projection process to create the backgrounds, rather than the traditional, cheaper rear projection of a thousand Hollywood films. The results have a remarkable depth and realism, though they were only marginally more intricate to produce. The Centrifuge, where Dave and Frank live and work, was the size of a Ferris wheel and a lot heavier, forty feet in diameter with a top rotating speed of 3 mph, costing one-tenth of the film’s eventual $10.5 million budget. Kubrick directed the actors inside using closed-circuit video cameras and an intercom.
MUSIC: Kubrick commissioned Alex North (Spartacus) to write an original symphonic score for the film, but decided to stay with the classical music he’d been using on the set to create the mood, and again in the editing room for his temp tracks. The choice revolutionized music in film, making it an equal partner with the image for the first time since the orchestras of the silent era. Kubrick never made a film with a conventional score again.
Composers Kubrick used in 2001: Johann Strauss, II (1825-1899); Richard Strauss (1864-1949); Aram Khatchaturian (1903-1978); György Ligeti (1923-2006).
THE INDEPENDENT: Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was a gifted, driven independent filmmaker who became one of the great artists of his century. The son of a doctor, born and raised in the Bronx, he was a freelance photographer for Look magazine (the People of its day) by the age of 16, a successful documentary filmmaker at 24, and a controversial art house phenomenon at 29 with his second feature Paths of Glory (1957), one of the greatest war films ever made.
Though all of his films are excellent — a complete education in the purpose and uses of iconoclasm — Kubrick made a quartet of indispensable movies in the middle of his career that transformed western cinema and are essential viewing for anyone interested in film: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975). Beginning with Clockwork, he had an exclusive contract with Warner Brothers Pictures that made him the most powerful and autonomous director-producer in film history. Whatever Stanley decided to make, Warners financed and distributed it, while he retained control of every aspect of the process, right down to promotional design and theatre approval.
With this autonomy, however, Kubrick’s perfectionism deepened and the intervals between his films grew longer and longer. He only made three more films in the final two decades of his life, The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The twelve year gap between his last two films was due to research and writing on two projects he eventually abandoned: Wartime Lies, which was to be a Holocaust drama from the novel by Louis Begley, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was finished by Steven Spielberg in 2001, at Kubrick’s request.
Though the media labeled Kubrick a reclusive crackpot, it was mostly because he refused to talk to them, keeping his private life private. To his many friends and colleagues he was known for his warm hospitality and his challenging, encyclopedic intellect. Kubrick rarely slept more than four or five hours a night; it’s probable he worked himself to death, suffering a fatal heart attack while trying to complete his final film. It is my contention that he did not, in fact, complete the movie, in spite of studio claims, and likely would have cut it down another twenty minutes or so before its official release.
Michel Ciment’s Kubrick (“Definitive Edition,” Faber and Faber, 2003) is, in my opinion the finest single volume study of his films. The best, and best-written, memoir of the man himself is Michael Herr’s 96-page essay, also titled Kubrick (Grove Press, 2000), a moving portrait by the co-screenwriter of Full Metal Jacket and author of Dispatches, a seminal piece of journalism on the Vietnam war.
RESOURCES: The Making of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, selected by Stephanie Schwam (Modern Library, 2000) is a very good recent anthology of articles and essays on the film’s meaning and cultural impact. See also hard to find books that are nevertheless worth the search on Amazon: The Making of Kubrick’s ‘2001’, the original work on the subject, by Jerome Agel (New American Library, 1970); Arthur C. Clarke’s Lost Worlds of ‘2001’ (1972), a memoir of making the film; and Filmguide to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ by Carolyn Geduld (Indiana University Press, 1973).
The Kubrick Site may be the smartest and most thorough of its kind on the Web, a storehouse of Kubrick memorabilia including scripts, interviews, historical writing on the director (both the marvelous and the fiercely wrongheaded), and amusements like the full text of 2001’s zero gravity toilet directions.
I also recommend taking a look at The 2001 Internet Resource Archive, which offers several interpretations of the film.
THE DVD: Of course, it must be repeated: The only way to truly appreciate 2001 is in a movie theatre with a genuinely big screen and superior projection and sound quality. On the other hand, 2001 isn’t released to theatres very often; the last time was 2001-2. Find the best home theatre set-up you can.
The film is owned by Turner Entertainment, acquired when they purchased the MGM library, and they are partnered with Warner Home Video. Warners puts out an economical edition in a snap case with, I guess, a mostly adequate transfer. Though it received glowing reviews, my copy has the occasional compression artifact in high contrast shots, which would be impossibly distracting on a large screen TV. Besides an interesting re-release trailer, the film is all you get. Stanley Kubrick didn’t do commentaries, ever, but he especially would have forbidden one on this film, by himself or anyone else. It’s $13.95 at DVD Planet.
There’s also a “Limited Edition Collector’s Set,” which includes a CD of the original soundtrack, a collector’s booklet” and a 70mm frame from the film. It’s still around for an exorbitant $32+ at Amazon and Second Spin.com.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID — DETRACTORS:
“In some ways it’s the biggest amateur movie of them all, complete even to the amateur movie obligatory scene — the director’s little daughter (in curls) telling daddy what kind of present she wants…It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie.” — Pauline Kael, Harper’s (1968)
“… a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story.” — John Simon, The New Leader (1968)
“…so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” — Renata Adler, The New York Times (1968)
“The ridiculous labor of 2001, the cavernous sets, and the special lenses, ride upon a half-baked notion of the origins and purpose of life that a first-year student ought to have been ashamed of. But this message in a bottle lasts over three hours [sic], and the movie has long sequences of directorial self-indulgence.” — David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994)
“At this distance, within two years of the title’s prediction, 2001 looks dated and bloated; watching the flight attendants on the moon shuttle, I only wish that Kubrick had had the courage to call it 1968: A Bad Year for Hats.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker (1999)
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID — SUPPORTERS:
“…cinema is, more than any other art form, that which Plato claimed art in general to be: a dream for waking minds…A Space Odyssey, that film of ‘special effects’ in which ‘nothing happens,’ is simply one which, in its extremity of stylistic formal coherence and richness, its totally reinvented environment, quite dissolves the very notion of ‘special effect.’ They disappear.” — Annette Michelson, Artforum (1969)
“Predictable complaints that it is boring mingle with inevitable gushes that it is gorgeous. One senses, through it all, that something important has happened to the cinema.” — Max Kozloff, Film Culture (1970)
“This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, 2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.” — Roger Ebert, The Great Movies (1997)
“I first saw 2001 as a 9-year-old in the year it was released. Somehow I assumed that this was what all movies ought to be: treasures for moral and aesthetic contemplation that did not provide all their answers on first contact. Today’s Hollywood not only would never make 2001, it has forgotten even how to aspire to such a movie.” — Scott Rosenberg, Salon.com (1997)
“When I first saw 2001, I didn’t like it…three or four months later…I went to see it again, and I liked it a lot more the second time…Then a couple of years later I saw it again and I thought, ‘Gee, this is really a sensational movie,’ and it was one of the few times in my life that I realized the artist was much ahead of me.” — Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (film interview, 2001)
Clarke at left, Kubrick right, on the set.
Here is your
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CLASSIC MOVIE THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH:
“All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
Barker’s Classic Movies #10 was Rio Bravo
