Kubrick almost single-handedly killed “fins” on “rockets” in movie SF.
And good-stinking-riddance!
(What always killed me about dumb rockets in dumb sf…the rocket is going from right to left…but the smoke from the tailpipe is going up! The producers couldn’t even figure out how to rotate the camera and the prop, so the smoke would go straight “back” from the rocket. They cared that little!)
ETA: I think Kubrick’s Moon-Bus, from Clavius to Kepler, was a mistake. They wouldn’t have wasted all the fuel to do a ground-hugging course, but would have done a suborbital jump instead. Vastly less fuel wasted. The image was pretty, but doesn’t really work. Even Homer nods!
That’s an astute observation that resonates perfectly with the first time I saw 2001. I understood little of the story but was entranced by the poetry. My friend was exasperated by the story and didn’t get the poetry. “What the hell’s going on?”, he kept saying, and I kept replying, “I don’t know, but shut up, you’re ruining it.”
A few random notes…
The Academy voters didn’t think the apes were real. That was a sarcastic comment by Clarke after 2001 failed to win the Oscar for make-up. I guess it has morphed over the years into “stupid Academy”.
Those who don’t like the slow pace will take little comfort in the fact that Kubrick cut 20 or 30 minutes from the original after a preview screening because of complaints that it was too long and boring.
On the night of the gala premiere attended by Kubrick and his wife, a lot of people still walked out on the shortened version, including several movie executives. Kubrick went to bed that night depressed, thinking he’d made a turkey. In the morning, his wife woke him up to show him the glowing reviews in the morning papers.
The banality of the humans and their conversations was deliberate. If that makes the whole movie boring for you, with everything you could see around them, you missed the point. (I’m not saying that to knock anyone. I apparently missed the point of Eyes Wide Shut.)
The references throughout the film to physical necessities like eating and sleeping and, yes, going to the bathroom, pointed out the restrictions of a physical body. We kill other life because we have to eat, and because we eat, we have to take a dump. In the stargate sequence, shapes that are suggestive of internal organs slowly transform like they’re melting out of existence (that’s my take on them, anyway; I don’t know if that was Kubrick’s intention). In the end, without a physical body, Bowman no longer needs to eat, and thus to kill. And take a dump.
Unless you are going for a whoosh, the 1 to 4 to 9 thing is the first three integers squared. And in the novel I seem to remember something about primes, though 1 isn’t prime…
1^2=1
2^2=4
3^2=9
The ending of the film was a little confusing to me, I guess. I did not even realize that Bowman had been transformed. I thought the “light show” meant that Bowman had somehow entered some kind of wormhole or time warp. (Either that, or that his brain just could not fundamentally understand what was happening around him. Or that his brain was starved for oxygen.)
When he appeared in the all-white hotel room as an old man, I thought that meant that Bowman’s mind was stuck somewhere he couldn’t escape, like a dream that can not end. (Marooned for all eternity. Buried alive… in bed quilts.)
I couldn’t figure out what the embryo in space was.
I knew that the monolith was an alien tool, but I wasn’t certain what the aliens intent was. To stimulate intelligence in humans? Or merely an alien early warning system? (“Warning! This system has been quarantined by order of the Galactic Senate.”) I favored the first interpretation, but doubts nagged. (Why bother uplifting a species so far behind in evolution or science, that it would be like comparing insects to gods?)
The pace is slow, but I thought that was intentional. The film is trying to give you time to digest the imagery, in the tradition of “show, not tell”.
P.S.: I put that tldr stuff up there in case my “here’s what I thought, and I was unaffected by any supplemental material” anecdote is of any value to the conversation.
That’s true, but an even bigger mistake is forcing the Orion shuttle to spin to match the rotation of the dock in the space station. It would be quite easy to have the docking part stand still while the rest of the station rotated - he shows the technology in the Aries moon craft and in Discovery after all. Or even better have the shuttle dock outside the space station. Having this partly fueled spacecraft in the heart of your delicate station is asking for trouble. Having the massive lift in Tycho base is not so smart either.
But it sure looked good.
The #1 most boring movie ever made is, of course, Citizen Kane.
Really. I tried watching it with a girlfriend once. We had to do it in increments over several days, because we got so bored that we kept ending up having sex instead.
Actually, you’re wrong about 2001. Not so much as a hand under the blouse during that one.
Huh. I think I have just invented a new benchmark for boring movies.
It’s a stargate, which brought the pod to some other part of the galaxy. Bowman transformed into the starchild used a similar one through the monolith at the very end to return himself to Earth.
Time is distorted in the room, and so is space. Bowman sees himself at a different stage of development, and then disappears. At the end he is dying, but pointing to the monolith shows he understands what happened to him, and he is transformed to the next stage of man. Thus Spake Zarathustra, which plays, is Strauss’ setting of Nietzsche is about man becoming superman, and the starchild is “superman” in that sense. Clarke has him appear as a baby since he is so new to his new life. The model, by the way, has Keir Dullea’s eyes.
You’re right. The aliens do that because it is their purpose in life. In 2010 they ignite Jupiter to give warmth to Europa for the same reason.
The book describes the aliens as being far less advanced in the dawn of man section than they are at the end - after all they have had millions of years to develop. You can’t tell from the movie.
Exactly the same as me. For days after I saw 2001, I raved about it to everyone. When they asked what it was about, all I could answer was, “Uh…well, I don’t know. But it’s awesome!” I wouldn’t understand the story and appreciate its sophistication till later. It was the experience of the movie that grabbed me initially.
True that the star baby was meant to look like Dullea.
I’m rereading my copy of the Making of 2001, and boy, some things never change.
The critics loved it, the critics hated it. It was as polarizing then as it is now, which is interesting, considering it’s nearly 50 years old.
One thing’s for sure, though: Kubrick rarely set out to make a move that was clear, and easy to understand. I can’t say all of his films (only 13?!) were full of symbolism, but he sure as hell didn’t make a child’s connect the dots picture of a balloon. His films were much more complicated than that.
I’d like to know if you see it the same way. Like I said, that’s my impression, but from what I’ve learned of Kubrick, every shot had a purpose and meaning.
Reading the reviews in that book was interesting, because movie critics in 1968 had no background in good science fiction. They weren’t scornful, not of Kubrick, they just didn’t get it.
Contrast that to the Ebert and later generation who had the concepts down pat, and could watch Star Wars (admittedly less deep) and understand exactly what was going on and Lucas’ influences.
I felt this way too. I actually owe a lot of my eventual appreciation for the film to my older brother. Neither of us were old enough to have seen it in the theater, but he was a voracious reader of scifi (Clarke in particular) so he knew the whole deal with the story and explained it to me.
I could be wrong, but I also felt that they didn’t imply the 1/6 gravity of the Moon enough in that scene on the moon bus either. The guy even pours coffee at the very end of the scene and it all looks & sounds too normal. Compare it to the Clavius scene itself. Using no special effects at all, but merely by having the actors move around carefully, the lower gravity of the Moon is (IMO) successfully conveyed. The way the guy holding the big camera moves it by rotating it around its axis really helps sell the low gravity look. Especially remembering that even though in 1968 the way walking around on the Moon in low gravity would look was essentially completely unknown to people, even now long after Apollo got us used to it that scene still holds up pretty well*!*
My brother also had that book. In regards to the ape makeup, I remember reading an embarrassing paragraph which stated that a member of the pre-production staff actually was going to hire all african-american performers to play the proto-human apes because he felt ‘they were closer to them’! :eek: …Even decades before political correctness that’s pretty harsh. He was fired of course.
Here’s a really cool Cracked article that makes a very good claim for the whole HAL is IBM legend. Or rather, a very good claim that Kubrick’s genius was greater than we even thought*!*
Agreed. Also in the Clavius conference room scene: when Floyd walks around the room to stand at the podium, the gravity is clearly not diminished. It would have taken some complicated wire-work to reduce his weight, but, as you say, he could have given the effect by walking slowly and carefully.
And, yes, definitely, I agree that the Clavius excavation site scene did successfully convey the illusion of lower gravity.
You’re lucky. I had to learn it on the street. That is, in the library and the book store, particularly from Jerome Agel’s book that’s been mentioned. And in the movie theater, of course. I saw 2001 as often as I could.
I never paid much heed to the IBM thing. If it’s true, it doesn’t give any meaning to the story. Kubrick got an unusual amount of freedom from the studios but he was still under pressure to produce. I suspect his creative efforts went more into making an intelligent film on his own terms rather than hiding meaningless easter eggs.
Very few movies do I re-watch. But I have seen 2001 over 20 times! Read everything I could find about it. Watched the sequels. And it remains my favorite movie. Maybe because 70% of it is without dialog. It is stunning and brilliant. Pure entertainment! Plus very cerebral.
