Well, it’s playing at the Castro theater in SF again (it cycles through regularly) so I’m going tonight. It is the film I most dislike seeing on the small screen and never will watch it on TV, except if there’s a #TCMParty* taking place. The sound design in particular has a completely different impact on the big screen, especially Kubrick’s use of complete silence–almost unheard of in a theatrical setting, though on TV, it’s like having the mute on. Not the same. Ditto the brilliance of perhaps the greatest jump cut in movie history–the way the bone falls in & out of frame as it descends. That composition and transition has so much less power on the small screen.
Heh… Thanks Voyager, but I understand most of the ending now, but only after reading other peoples thoughts online. If the internet was never invented/developed, I would still be with the film’s ending.
I also don’t know music well enough (in general, let alone Strauss) to link clues with the visuals. A lot of background music in film seems to be used to merely evoke a mood, and not much more deeper than that.
Some movies you just have to appreciate for what they are.
Take David Lynch’s Dune. I liked it as a kid simply because it was really weird. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Upon re-watching it just last week, I still felt exactly the same way; on its own merits it makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s still really weird in a very pleasant and satisfying way.
Something that just occurred to me is the enormous size of the Discovery. Not only is it impractical for interplanetary travel, it probably would have been impossible to build in that time frame. Clarke and Kubrick must have thought of that but chose to disregard it for dramatic purposes.
I’m giving you the literal Clarke meaning. I don’t think Kubrick ever explained his take on the ending. Now, it encourage people to go see the movie again (back before DVDs) so that might be his reason, or he might have a more spiritual type meaning in mind. But when you throw a modern man into a situation driven by beings a million years more evolved, he is not going to understand it.
Think of a smart Roman tossed into the modern world all of a sudden. Hell, a person from when I was born brought into today will understand cars and trains and planes, but not the computer stuff and not half of what people say.
“I Googled some restaurants and then looked them up on Yelp, so I’ll load one into my GPS and we can try it. I hope they have WiFi.” Huh?
The music works fine by itself. The Strauss piece is “Dawn” which it clearly is in the movie - the extra stuff is interesting, but I went for decades not making the connection and being no better off.
The worst thing about 2001 is the number of commercials it inspired. “The future of feminine protection is now- dumm… Dumm… DA DUMM!” and a starkly lghted tampon slowly rotates into view. There were a million of these commercials.
The Discovery had already been constructed for a science mission, and the ship was “repurposed” to investigate the TMA 1 signal.
far from being impractical, the ship eliminates some of the problems with long duration voyages. The centrifuge really would be a nice thing to have. Plus, all that room!
The ship is so big because the reactor is put as far from the crew as practical. The part of the ship between the reactor and the crew is fuel tanks (and radiators, which were omitted in the movie model).
In terms of the reality of it compared to today, I’m pretty sure it would have been impossible to build something like that by the year 2001. One of the features of the movie, and something that Kubrick paid a lot of attention to, is its realistic portrayal of life in space in the near future, extrapolating from what we knew in the 1960s. A spaceship that big was not realistic, IMHO.
It doesn’t take anything away from the story–it is science fiction, after all–but it’s something I’ll have to suspend my disbelief for the next time I see the movie.
In our universe, you are correct. But building Discovery would be trivial compared to the effort required to build the base at Clavius. I’ve never seen an analysis, but I suspect it would be feasible if the percent GDP used for Apollo kept on being spent, and instead of cutting back we went full bore into space exploration after Apollo XX was done.
There is clearly a really efficient heavy lift vehicle somewhere in the 2001 universe, though we don’t see it.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was really responding to a few posts in this thread about some non-realistic parts of the movie, one about commercial rides to the moon not being realized yet, and about the moon bus flying at low level instead of taking a sub-orbital trajectory, things like that. But in the context of a science fiction story, the size of Discovery shouldn’t be an issue, so I take it back. If it was more like an Apollo capsule, there wouldn’t be a story.
Chase Econometrics did a study back in the Seventies and found that aerospace is the most economically effective, job-creating place to spend Uncle Sam’s money - considerably better than military spending. A sustained U.S. manned space program from 1961 to 2001 could pretty easily have built Discovery and all the other cool stuff we saw in the movie.
The complaint about the Moon Bus is a complaint within the established setting of the movie and the tech depicted.
i.e., even if you had a Moon Bus exactly like the one you see in the movie…you wouldn’t fly it the way they did in the movie.
Complaints about the tech itself are slightly different. It’s sadly true that we couldn’t have built the Clavius base, or the space station, or the Discovery, or even the Pan Am space clipper by 2001, given the state of the art in 1968.
(And HAL is flat out impossible. We won’t have anything that cool in the next fifty years. Doggone it.)
It’s kinda like the difference between “Han Solo shot first!” and “Why don’t light-sabers extend to be fifty feet long?” The first is a complaint within the established world, and the second is a gripe about the established world.
Oh, I get that, Trinopus. I was including it all under the broad umbrella of “realism”, whether it was predictions that didn’t happen, unrealistic technology, or misapplied use of the technology.
I should have put it as a question: “Is Discovery too big?”, rather than asserting that it was. Lesson learned, for the time being anyway, knowing me.
Personally, I guess that I’ve never really thought of boring as bad. I mean, it can be bad. But it doesn’t have to be.
Some of my favorite movies are boring as heck, or difficult to understand, or hard to follow. Of course, the same goes for a lot of movies that I hate. Conversely, some of my favorite movies are snappy and action-packed. And, again, so are a lot of movies that I hate.
I only care about whether the movie is *good *or not. Boring doesn’t matter as much to me. It’s more a neutral term.
(And, as I mentioned above, if a movie is boring, it can have the benefit of getting you laid.)
The best part of the flick was the earth-space station interception-though why the pilots were wearing WWI-style uniforms and boots was a bit strange. And yes, looking at those 1950s Chesley Bonestall paintings of space ships (with the gigantic fins) made me nostalgic for the “old” way space travel was portrayed.
Yes, and Ii miss Pan Am too.
with the film’s ending. 
