The plot derived from the short story The Sentinel occupies only about the middle third of the movie: the discovery of the monolith buried in the moon crater. There’s nothing about the apes on the African veldt, there’s nothing about the voyage to Jupiter.
I’m afraid that any remake that followed Arthur C. Clarke’s novel more closely would fall into Clarke’s flaw of being too literal. He hasn’t got Kubrick’s knack for the mystical, as 2010 unfortunately showed. The image of Bowman reborn as the Star Child at the end of the movie was a potent metaphor for everything from Buddhist ideas of rebirth to the millenial idea of mankind reduced to infancy by contact with a vastly superior technology. However, in the novel, it’s literally a giant baby floating in space above earth!
That may be correct, but even so I wonder why they took so different approaches, near the end. Mmmm… perhaps because one it’s a cult filmmaker and the other is a cult s/f writer.
In the novel there is a description of a vast intergalactic net of wormholes that Bowman sees in his awesome tour. I missed that in the movie. Well, it was a post-missing, I saw the movie first!
Although Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on the screenplay, you can see the tension in it – Clarke was pul;ling for a more rational story, while Kubrick was going for visuals and mystical. It’s not just an excuse to show off the movie technology (although Kubrick and crew did invent new techniques for the film – in that way, it’s like King Kong, which introduced many tech innovations.) . A film that was a literal remake of Clarke’s novel (where Clarke was able to force things more towards his vision) wouldn’t really be a remake of the film.
And I think that the special effects still stand up quite well. The great model work and the use of color-separated hand-drawn mattes gives great detail and texture to the scenes. Nobody’s done it since – it’s too expensive.
And 2001 doesn’t rely on its newness for its appeal. Kubrick’s use of classical music in space, the way he frames the shots, his use of the astronaut’s breathing as the only sound in several scenes, even the use of absolute silence all contribute to this. 2001 is still one of the very few films in which spaceflight is depicted accurately – the stars don’t move inb the background; there is no artificial gravity (except for the centrifugal cage); there is nio sound at all in vacuum; spaceships don’t “bank” when they turn, but rotate about their center of mass. It’s interesting that one of the few other films to show this accuracy – Destination Moon – is also called “dull” by some people. Reality seems dull nexrt to Fantasy.
why dont they try and have a bash at 2060?
its the third book isnt it? (fears incoming flame from someone whos bound to know more about this)
remaking 2001 would be a bad idea, but like so many other things hollywood does, if it makes cash money, so be it.
you only have to look at the original 2001 and the first star wars trilogy for the superiority in using models over CGI IMHO. i even prefer stop motion animation to a lot of the stuff they do now, especially using animals/humans/monsters. ILM have started to suck big time, and you can guarantee its them they’ll use if its big budget. models just seem more honest to me, but perhaps thats growing up on those films that were preCGI.
Don’t forget that it would be directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, written by Joe Eszterhas, and featuring new songs by 50-cent and Ja Rule.
Please don’t be upset, Walloon. It was late, and I was confusing the short story, which I read years ago, with the novelization. Clarke added much more to the novel, and the space baby blowing up an orbital nuke platform was much different from the Kubrick mystery ending.
I’m agreeing with your assessment, adding again that 2001 cannot be made after 2003 and still be 2001.
Incidentally, Heinlein was satisfied with the end result of Destination Moon, but the process of getting it right was so painfully difficult that he gave up on movies. Whenever Hollywood comes out with some new bastardization of one Heinlein’s works, I always get the urge to watch Destination Moon.
And 2001 the book was a bit slow and plodding, but the movie was the pinnacle of its genre. Any “updating” could only be for the worse.
It’s the most accurate science fiction movie I’ve ever seen, and it’s the effort that should be commended. Obviously some sacrifices had to be made, for the benefit of the viewer (e.g. seeing what’s going on), but sans the necessities required by a movie, the film was quite accurate, as one would expect from a Clarke production.
Every movie has errors/mistakes/whatnot, but it doesn’t undermine the effort put into the production values. .On the whole, in comparison to other movies (especially sci-fi), 2001 is in a league of its own as far as accuracy is concerned.
Kubrick had trouble getting the studio to let him use the music he’d picked out for the soundtrack. Specifically, The Blue Danube. The studio heads felt that most people would associate the music with player pianos (since it was a common roll for them). Kubric told the studio heads that once anyone saw the film, they never would associate the music with player pianos again. Personally, I never associate the music used in the movie with anything else.
Why would they remake 2001? It doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you’d need to do over. Tuckerfan: It’s so weird you would say that. Blue Danube was running through my head as I read this thread, and I didn’t know why. Weird, eh?
“Without adding more story elements”???
