Yup, the special effect were advanced, but that’s like raving about a film because it has great costume design.
If you notice the special effects, then, at some level, they have failed. And in 2001, they are just a cop out to hide the fact that Kubrick didn’t really have anything to say.
I just took it as another part of the attention to detail that the director seemed to have in all his films. I always got that vibe from his films, there was something complete and detached about them, as if he didn’t really care about the audience ever seeing them.
My biggest objection has always been the plot incoherence – or, rather, that there are two more or less coherent and essentially unrelated plots stitched together – one about a Higher Power guiding human evolution, the other about an AI driven homicidally mad by its own programming. Should’ve been two separate movies.
That’s bugged me too and I never realised quite why. The whole thing is almost like an episode of Star Trek with it’s A and B plots, coming together at the end with the minor and major threads twisting together again.
Only if that’s what you take from it. As **Avumede **said, this movie is about big ideas, but *which *big ideas seem to be up to the viewer. It’s a Rorscharch movie!
I see it (sometimes) as a movie about tools, too, in the old “nothing is good or bad, only the use makes it so.” Both the femur and the supercomputer are tools, but each one can be put to good (defense of the watering hole, maintenance of spaceflight) uses or ill (murder, and, uh…murder); each can cause humanity great grief. So I can tie the first two thirds together without a problem. The part I have trouble with is the final third. While I understand the monolith appears to the ape-people, I don’t really grok why, or what the whole last third is about. Aliens? Gods? Super-evolved humans? Giant space babies? Whatever, man. That’s the point at which I just hang on and enjoy the ride.
I also have a paper around here somewhere written for film class about how *2001 *is all a gigantically scaled sex manual, from the opening shot of the Jupiterean breast to the phallic spaceship ejaculating the white spermatic pod to the inevitable conception of the Giant Space Baby. I swear, I wasn’t on drugs at the time. And I got an A.
You really really need to see it on a big screen so you can completely immerse yourself in the experience. No other movie conveys the vastness and loneliness of space. I find the effects to be awesome and trippy in a way a lot of action oriented SF movies fail at.
I’ve always loved this movie, but it’s something I have to be in the mood to watch. Not fluff I can watch on a whim. I save Tom Hanks movies for that.
It was and is a science-fiction classic, with amazing visuals for its day, and the ideas couldn’t be bigger: aliens help apes achieve higher intelligence and set up a “fire alarm” for when humanity eventually reaches the Moon? Cold War rivalries threaten First Contact? An all-powerful shipboard computer goes nuts? Awesome, but dear God it is slowwwwwwwwwwwwww. That’s what Kubrick wanted and it serves his vision of the story, but let’s face it, it’s an acquired taste. It also should not, IMHO, be necessary for you to read the novelization and making-of books of the movie in order to fully understand it, and you really have to with Odyssey.
I didn’t see them as unrelated at all.
Different interactions between creators and creations of conciousness. The aliens (whoever they were) created us as much as we (humans) created HAL. Their whole set-up was in a way designed to prevent the sort of confrontation between Dave and HAL occurring between us and them … whenever you enable true conciousness, you enable the possibility of madness, anger, suspicion, self-defence.
I never thought of it that way. That actually makes sense.
I also noticed the irony that the only death in the film that really contains any emotion is the “death” of HAL. When the humans die it’s always in a cold, silent manner. The only death the viewer (well, at least THIS viewer) ever feels connected with is the death of a machine.
Count me among the detractors. I like the middle part with HAL but the rest of the film is a bloated and pretentious mess. A pity because if they expanded the middle section into a full movie and drop the bits about Destiny and Consciousness, 2001 could have been a really terrific space thriller. What kills the actual movie isn’t so much the absence of plot but a lack of characters. This is why Solaris, which is equally slow but has genuine characters, is a better film.
Love this movie, and don’t find it boring at all.
The interesting part of the “through the monolith” sequence toward the end is not the special effects, but all the cuts to Bowman’s face as he tries to absorb it. Those reactions are what make the sequence interesting (to me).
Heh, never thought of that. Interesting point.
That’s an interesting take on it, but I think the real reason had to do with the front projection technology they used. The backgrounds were big slides taken in Africa, and moving the camera around would have messed up the illusion.
Actually, they hang together quite well. The first part was about how Moonwatcher and crew became human due to the invention of tools. The second part was about how Bowman became more than human after triumphing over his tools - HAL being a tool so sophisticated that it became self aware.
Quite right. The hominids were facing death from physical starvation, the humans in 2001 are facing death from emotional starvation. Consider Poole’s emotionless reaction to his parents’ birthday message. Bowman only starts to feel after HAL kills Poole. He starts to shout, he makes a gamble, and he extracts revenge. The most emotional we see him is him screaming (silently) during the trip through the stargate.
I mentioned them because of the “ho hum, we’ve seen better” post. Good sf (the kind Clarke wrote) sets up a believable world, and that was what 2001 did. A cosmonaut told Clarke that 2001 really got the experience of being in space, which is quite a compliment.
Kubrick doesn’t just do movies, he does art also. A lot of Barry Lyndon could be turned into paintings that would seem to come from the era. 2001 can be turned into sf art. That’s not the major reason I love it, though.
You must never have read Childhood’s End. Or The Sentinel. The theme and plot are pure Clarke, even if the expression of them is pure Kubrick. It is certainly true that a cowboy and ETs plot is simpler to grasp than this one, especially considering that it came out before an entire generation learned basic sf principles through Star Trek. 2001 is more purely visual than most movies, and doesn’t hit you over the head with the meaning, or have characters explain it to each other. But that you didn’t hear Kubrick doesn’t mean that he wasn’t talking.
Here’s why I downgrade the movie, although it is overall one of my favorites. The original premise, which was derived from a short story called The Sentinel, proposed that a civilization much more advanced than us once visited our planet. Maybe they even seeded it, but in any case, they saw the potential for life to evolve and theorized that one fine day waaaay in the future it would evolve enough to be in their class.
So the aliens would know when that day arrived, they put an object on the Moon which, when accessed by the Earth civilization, would send a signal to the originators. In 2001, this was the monolith which sent out the “We’re here!” signal when it was uncovered.
The story progresses to the point where mankind is able to start exploring the Solar System, then gets sidetracked with a little computer jealousy.
So far, so good. Nothing up to now seems impossible – no radically new technology is needed to get to this stage, just an extension of 1950’s levels. Even a fear of computers taking over has been a common SciFi thread. And the possibility of aliens visiting us and setting up an alarm trigger, while fascinating, doesn’t strike me as all that unlikely.
But starting at the light show and moving to the white room, time speeding up, etc. requires my mind to leap beyond likelihood into the total spiritual fantasy. Is it happening in Borman’s mind, in real life, or what? Obviously you can’t spiral into Jupiter and land unharmed in a 20th Century style house eating breakfast all alone then grow old. Even if it’s a mind trip as he is being torn apart by gravity, what is the reason or meaning?
So when 2001 goes into pure fantasy, it changes gears from reasonable science fiction to ridiculous SciFi. Not my cup of tea. Makes no sense to me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
(I’m not fond of Star Trek, either, much for the same reasons. So sue me.)
BTW, you do know that the original story had the star child press a button to trigger a ring of nuclear bombs to blow up our planet at the end, don’t you?