In the series of books, all the wacky shiznit that happens in 2001 leads up to lots of interesting philosophical, theological, and xenobiological business.
Is there a point to the movie other than freaking out stoners?
The books make people ask questions about life. The movie makes people ask questions about the movie.
I know the book and movie were developed simultaneously. Did Clarke have the whole series planned when he started writing and not let Kubrick in on the joke?
However much of an artsy fartsy portrayal of alien contact the movie’s ending depicted, the overall quality of special effects, the fabulous score and the accuracy of the modeling and stunts allows this film to persist as one of the all time classics. Few, if any, handmade films can hold a candle to the production values of 2001. To this day it remains a pinnacle example of the cinematographer’s art.
Well, that’s one big part of it. My sister and her friends (stoners) found out that if you play Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” over the scene with all the psychadelic colors, it matches perfectly.
I thought it was a pretty neat movie, and it got me a good grade on my book report 
I’ll second Zenster’s comment on special effects. For the time it was made, what Kubrick does is unbelievable. For example, when the camera viewpoint passes through the rotating space station…Wow!!! And all the weightlessness effects. Today these things are child’s play using computer animation, but in 1968 the FX alone make it a masterpiece.
I disagree with the OP about the questions the movie does/doesn’t raise:
Does the difference between humans and animals require a “greater power” to explain? Where does that difference come from?
Is there a difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence? Is HAL “evil”? Can such a concept apply to a machine?
If we ever met another intelligence, what would such a meeting be like? Would we even begin to understand the other?
IMO, the books provided too many pat answers. The movie left much more open for speculation, and so was more interesting than the books.
Almost certainly not. I’ve never heard Clarke on this subject, but I have heard (or read, I can’t remember) him say he never intended to write a sequel to Rendezvous with Rama, despite that book’s being much more suited to a sequel. 2001: A Space Odyssey was originally written as a piece, and is best enjoyed that way IMHO. Like Rama, the sequels get worse as they go on.
As to justifying it’s existence, I think the film and the book do a fine job of filling in each others’ gaps. Watching the movie gives you the spectacle that Clarke does not excel at presenting with his writing, reading the book gives you the philosophical subtext which is absent from Kubrick’s movie.
Well, not quite, but it is a fun experience. Of course this only works with the original version, not the 16-minute re-edit on the new CD ECHOES, THE BEST OF PINK FLOYD.
By the way, 2001 does need any of us to justify its existence; the movie is its own justification.
As for the books, they’re a pretty ho-hum attempt to provide a nice neat explanation for those who don’t want to ponder things for themselves. As Kubrick said (referring to the second film but applicable here as well), “When you explain everything, it means nothing.”
steve biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
I’ll second KneadToKnow’s call on this one. It would seem a vastly overelaborate deception to write an entire book, The Lost Worlds of 2001, about the difficulty they had in deciding upon an ending. It’s also inconsistent with Clarke’s position that the novel is only one possible interpretation of the ending of the film. As I recall, he was also fairly clear in his epilogue to 2010 about how that belatedly came about.
While one uses Raphael (Eyes Wide Open, Orion 1999) reluctantly, he quotes Kubrick on the sequel as follows (and this was presumably what ScriptAnalyst was thinking of): “Know what they did? They explained everything. They told you what everything meant. Killed it. You tell people what things mean, they don’t mean anything any more.”
Plus, that shot of the leopard laying on the zebra, man? It’s sooo cool when you’re stoned.
When I want to feel awed and inspired, I sometimes pull out my copy of 2001 at 11 pm, turn off all the lights, and crank up the volume. Its unexplainable, but I feel mystical when I watch it. That soundtrack is just plain eerie.
I can think of things on my own on my own. The point of a philosophical work of art is to explain your position to others so they can decide how they feel about it. I didn’t wholeheartedly accept what the books said, but I used it to think about and advance my own beliefs.
Unless, of course, you just want to get people thinking about things they aren’t thinking about. I don’t know what the average person was thinking about back then, so I’ll assume this movie did that nicely. Yay.
I saw them out of sequence, 2010 before 2001. Maybe seeing them in that order skewed my perception, but I think that, if I had seen 2001 with out the knowledge of what came after, it would be a huge cliff hanger. There is no real resolution to the movie. IMHO
I saw them in reverse sequence too. I saw 2010 as a 15 year old wanting to watch a sci-fi movie. I saw 2001 as a 31 year old wanting to watch an art movie. A world of difference. The end of 2001 had me scratching my head for days. I really, really liked it. I reached the conclusion that I couldn’t comprehend the ending because I was not at the next stage of evolution myself.
This is one of my all-time favourite movies, precisely because it’s so open to interpretation. Most films wrap everything up in a neat little bundle and give you all the answers in neat little bite-size pieces. 2001 doesn’t. The viewer is free to speculate, imagine, theorise, whatever. This isn’t necessarily asking questions about the movie, it’s asking questions about themes raised therein.
Special effects, big deal. PLOT DOES MATTER
I would place it somewhere behind Journey to the Far Side of the Sun and in front of Nightfall in the back bin of the Esoteric & Cult Sci-Fi Geek Films section.
And btw, Kubrick loses 830 lifetime achievement points for illustrating* Also Sprach Zarathustra* with images of one person beating another’s brains out.
About every three months or so a thread shows up along the lines of “2001: what’s the freakin’ big deal?”
Before getting to the general structure of the movie, here are justifications for 2001 being a big deal, filmwise:
–it remains one of the very few movies to more or less accurately show the physics and technical requirements of long-distance space flight
–it manages to convey a coherent story (IMO) whilst covering a time span of many millions of years
–the effects broke new ground in realism, and remain relatively believable more than thirty years later
–it has one of the greatest soundtracks ever made for a film.
A lot of folks that hate this movie seem to take issue with its ponderous pace, a criticism which is not entirely unwarranted, and its supposed ‘lack of a plot’. In fact there’s plot out the wazoo, but the thing that seems to annoy people is that the story is not told in a conventional manner.
The film is really structured more along the lines of a symphonic musical piece, and is made up of four major movements, which are linked thematically but could just as easily stand alone. The images, music and ambient sounds do most of work of moving the main story along, rather than the dialogue. In fact the dialogue in the two middle sections does reveal major plot points, but these are deliberately buried in conversations that were designed to sound banal and trivial.
The stories within each movement are not necessarily directly aligned with the overall plot (the astronauts’ battle with HAL being a prime example) but serve as variations on the main theme, which seems simply to be our struggle to understand what it means to be ‘human’ and how ‘human’ life came to be.
I can understand if some viewers are annoyed over the fact that at some points Kubrick seems to deliberately try to alienate the audience, but the film can be highly rewarding if one makes a bit of effort to understand what Kubrick and Clarke were trying to accomplish.
Re: the question concerning the sequels, I don’t think Clarke has ever claimed that he had the entire story line mapped out before the film was made, or even during the creation of the first novel, which was developed out of the screenplay. I could be wrong on that.
I have to say, evilyam, you made a first impression on me with this thread’s title, and you seem to be reinforcing it. Whenever I hear someone suggest that a work of art’s very existence has to be “justified,” I suspect I’m dealing with someone who ultimately is going to come around to the point that things that don’t fit their preconceived notions shouldn’t exist because they’re wrong.
Here’s a possibility for you to consider: maybe it’s existence is justified merely in the fact that it doesn’t agree with your point of view. AHunter3 insists that “plot does matter.” True. But so do characterization, theme, setting; and it is the artist’s decision as to what ratio to use in combining those elements to convey their message. It just so happens that 2001 is heavier on theme and setting than you may be comfortable with. So be it. Why does that then proceed in your mind to the notion that it should not exist?
I love 2001. Not all of it, but a lot of it. It vies in my mind with Forbidden Planet as the best science fiction movie ever made. Certainly it was (and, I think, still is) the most adult science fiction movie ever.
Film is supposed to do a lot of things. At the risk of the collective ire of many Dopers, I have to admit that telling a coherent story is not necessarily one of them. (And I’m one of those types that really likes coherent sories, I have to point out.) If the imagery compels you to watch it and to contemplate the beauty and maybe to think as well, then it has accomplished its purpose. This idea has been used to justify a lot of crap movies, but it is manifestly true of something like 2001.
I once explained film to my father by saying that every frame of it was like a fully executed painting.(He was wondering why I’d want to watch the same film over and over). It’s not really true, but it gives you a new way of looking at film – a good director tries to compose his shots for visual effect as well as for advancing the story. Then there are the layers of meaning in the story. If you can get all that to pull together into a coherent whole you’ve really got something.
2001 actually does a pretty good job.
Some things to admire about 2001:
– Made at the height of the US effort to the Moon, it really does look like a real effort at space travel. The last time a Space Travel movie looked this real was Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond.
– No absurd rushing through space. The stars appear fixed in the background. Even though the ships are moving at high velocity, they often appear frozen in space. Yet it looks convincing.
– One of the very few times spaceships actually obeyed the laws of celestial dynamics. They rotate about centers of mass. They don’t bank when they turn.
– In space, no one can hear you scream. Kubrick got a lot of dramatic tension out of the astronaut’s breathing, and the sudden silence of vacuum when your oxygen lines are cut, or when you get blown out of your pod.
– Superb zero-g effects, especially the centrifuge on the Discovery.
– Painstaking special effects. Much has been made about the color separation and use of hand-drawn mattes. Kubrick cares about the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking, in pursuit of the Perfect Image (look at the special ultra-low f/number lenses for Barry Lyndon’s candle-lit scenes), and he’s supposed to have designed a lot of these shots. More proof (if you needed it) that you have to look at this as a pre-eminently visual experience.
–Kubrick’s now-trademark use of Classical Music. “It’s as far from the cliche of space music as you can get”, he’s supposed to have said. One critic said that “The Blue Danube” had already been used in a film as music over a carousel – as if that closed it off from anyone else using it.
2001’s vagueness is ceretainly troubling. Harlan Ellison wrote a scathing and damning essay about this film somewhere, and much of what he says is deserved (Ellison, a writer, likes a clear-cut story and characters above all). Nevertheless, 2001 is strong enough overall to stand despite this vagueness.
Added Note: How to make 2010 a much better movie.
I like 2010, although a lot of people don’t seem to. To make it a great deal better, remove all of Roy Scheider’s voice-overs. Narration can be a great tool, but in movies it usually means that you failed to convey your meaning with the dialogue and actions – never a good sign. Also, take out all of the sound effects in space.
Why do i love 2001? Lots of reasons, many covered by El Kabong and CalMeachem, but the main one is, it’s one of the very, very few sf films ever made for an adult audience. And when I say “adult”, I don’t mean it has a lot of blood and tits. Also, it is one of even fewer sf films where humans come face to face with a great, cosmic mystery, and they don’t react by blowing the crap out of everything in sight. In fact, it’s an sf movie without a single giant explosion! That alone makes in practically unique.
