2001: A Space Odyssey pushed blockbuster cinema to a new plane of star-child brilliance
Image: Photo: Moviepix Film Features The Popcorn Champs
For decades, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has stood as a kind of primal mystery, a glimpse at forces beyond comprehension. Within film history, it serves, more or less, the same function that the vast alien monoliths serve in the movie itself. Here it was: This colossal monument to ambiguity, dropped into the middle of a late-’60s culture that must’ve found it baffling and terrifying. But those audiences reached out to touch 2001 anyway, and suddenly, all kinds of vast advancements sparked off. Special effects became headier, slicker, more immersive. Motion picture storytelling branched off into unexplored new dimensions. Mainstream film dove headlong into the psychedelic.
As someone who was born years after the release of 2001, I’ve never known a world where the film wasn’t part of the canon, its images and references woven deeply into mass culture. But my first 2001 experience was still a headfuck. I was maybe 10 when my dad took me to a screening, and I remember spending that time bored and enthralled and terrified and puzzled, wondering when that spaceman was going to hurry up and fight that computer. (I’d read some books about movie monsters, and HAL 9000 always showed up in them.) When I walked out of that theater, I was utterly baffled, at a total loss to explain what I’d just seen. Did the spaceman turn into a baby? My dad did not have a satisfying explanation. Nobody did.
Kubrick actually did have an explanation. In a 1980 interview with the Japanese filmmaker Jun’ichi Yaoi, Kubrick came out and explained the ending of 2001, as best he could. Kubrick claims that he doesn’t like explaining it: “When you just say the ideas, they sound foolish.” And then he says the ideas anyway, in shockingly forthright language. The astronaut Dave Bowman, Kubrick explains, is “taken in by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form.” He’s kept on display in a cosmic zoo, surrounded with vaguely French architecture because the beings think that he might find that stuff pretty. Bowman loses all sense of time. He ages, dies, and is transformed into “some kind of super-being.” The beings then send him back to Earth. From there, it’s anyone’s guess what happens. “It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology,” Kubrick says. “And that’s what we were trying to suggest.”
That explanation isn’t much more satisfying than whatever my dad sputtered. Kubrick, even at his plainest and most literal, couldn’t describe the events of that ending without sort of vaguely gesturing at them. That’s because 2001 isn’t a straightforward story. It’s something else: a wild grab at transcendence. Within a climate of roadshow musicals and war epics and slapstick farces, here was this abstract art piece, this meticulous and cold-blooded stare into the abyss, and it was presented as a blockbuster movie. It succeeded on those terms, too.
The mere existence of 2001 was an incredible flex. By the mid-’60s, Stanley Kubrick, not quite 40, had done just about everything you could do within movies. He’d made B-movies. He’d made prestige movies. He’d made at least one blockbuster: Spartacus, the highest-grossing movie of 1960. (Kubrick disowned it, naturally.) He’d abandoned the Hollywood system and set up shop in London. He’d racked up Oscar nominations and boy-genius plaudits with Dr. Strangelove, his apocalyptically dark 1964 comedy. Within any kind of established film-culture system, there was nothing left for Kubrick to do. So he did something that hadn’t been done.
Kubrick, fascinated by the idea of space travel, reached out to the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, whose 1951 short story “The Sentinel” had laid out the basic idea of what would become 2001. Kubrick had the idea that he and Clarke should write a novel together, and that they should also make a film out of that novel. They spent years developing it, getting all the scientific details as accurate as they possibly could, consulting experts and crafting a total vision. (Carl Sagan advised them not to show any actual aliens on screen.) It was a rough relationship, and Kubrick and Clarke pissed each other off constantly. The story didn’t finally take shape until Kubrick made the actual movie. And you could argue that the finished product isn’t really a story at all. (Pauline Kael, who hated the movie, didn’t even think it was a finished product.)
2001: A Space Odyssey was a chaotic and sometimes dangerous shoot. The film went years past deadline and millions over budget. (Admirably, MGM let Kubrick film in London and never gave him notes—the kind of hands-off big-budget treatment that very few directors have ever been granted.) Kubrick kept the set so brightly lit that bulbs were always exploding, showering glass everywhere. A stuntman threatened to kick Kubrick’s ass after almost falling from the cable that suspended him. A leopard nearly mauled one of the mimes who Kubrick had hired to play cavemen. A falling wrench came close to decapitating a visiting MIT professor. Kubrick brought in Spartacus composer Alex North to score the movie, refused to let him see any of the footage, and then scrapped the score anyway, using preexisting classical compositions instead. (He didn’t clear those compositions with the actual composers, either. Gyorgi Ligeti sued.)
And yet none of that comes through on screen. When you watch 2001, everything seems perfectly controlled. The film unfolds with a slowness that feels confrontational. From the opening moments—ominous and formless music playing over a dark screen, into a futuristic-propaganda version of the MGM logo—everything looks alien. Spacecraft drift across the screen with an agonizing slowness. Vast stretches go by with no dialogue. As it ends, the movie lurches into pure abstraction, into physical experience.
There are no convincing human characters anywhere in 2001. The cavemen at movie’s opening are more ape than man. (The makeup remains incredible more than 50 years later; those things never look like mimes in costume.) When the movie abruptly and fluidly jumps into the future, the people in charge are blank bureaucratic functionaries, chortling over a discovery that should inspire religious awe, attempting to pose for a photo of a terrifying extraterrestrial obelisk like it’s a 50-pound trout. The astronauts on the mission to Jupiter are remote mannequins—planar faces, lacquered hair, no visible emotions whatsoever. (It’s telling that almost none of the actors in this massively successful and influential film ever did a single other thing of any note.)
The most fully realized character in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a glowing red light on a wall. Characters speak of HAL 9000, the malevolent on-board computer, as if he’s a person. They discuss his “integrity and self-confidence.” They’re right. HAL is more of a person than any of them. He speaks of himself as a person, too: “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” HAL is also a victim of his own hubris, attempting to annihilate all the humans on board and failing to get rid of the one guy who can kill him. And when HAL does die, it’s the only emotional scene in a profoundly, glaringly unemotional movie. HAL begs for his life, describes the feeling of death (“Dave, my mind is going, I can feel it”), and sings his own requiem.
In his eerily modulated, weirdly emotional speaking tone, HAL feels like an uncanny-valley ancestor to our own real-life artificial intelligence. (When you ask Siri to open the pod bay doors, she says, “Without your space helmet, you’re going to find this rather… breathtaking.” Siri is fucking with us.) And that’s not the only future prognostication that 2001 gets right. There are in-flight TV screens, tablets outfitted with FaceTime, video games, pieces of hyper-modern furniture, corporate branding in places where corporate branding should not be.
In making 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick wasn’t attempting to compete with other movies. He was trying to compete with actual science. At one point, he tried to take out an insurance policy, just in case humanity made contact with alien races before he finished making the movie and thus rendered the film obsolete. Kubrick was also rushing to get 2001 out into the world before American astronauts landed on the moon. He succeeded. 2001 came out just over a year before the moon landing. The crew of the Apollo 8 went to see 2001 together in Houston a few months before they orbited the moon and returned to Earth.
So much money and care went into making 2001, and all of it was in service of a bugged-out art film with no clear story arc, no recognizably human performances, and an ending that seemed designed to short-circuit viewers’ brains. Like many of the other blockbusters that came before it, 2001 worked as grand spectacle. But it also worked as a rebuke of those previous spectacles. John Huston’s The Bible: In The Beginning…, the biggest hit of 1966, had grappled with similar questions about the infinite, and it had done it in similarly formless and episodic style. But The Bible looked like a movie. And even if Huston himself wasn’t religious, The Bible was clearly a religious work. 2001, on the other hand, was actively antagonistic to literal religion. It was a whole different creation myth.
As you might imagine, nobody had any idea whether a movie like that would resonate. At the film’s New York premiere, Arthur C. Clarke left in tears at the intermission, crushed by how many people had already walked out or talked through it. Plenty of influential critics detested the movie, though at least a few others hailed it as a masterpiece. 2001 wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. (That year, the musical Oliver! won.) 2001 only won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects. (Kubrick, credited with designing the movie’s special effects, was the sole winner of that Oscar. It’s the only Oscar he ever won.) 2001 was a tremendous financial gamble for a struggling studio. And yet people came.
2001 wasn’t an immediate hit like The Odd Couple, 1968’s second-highest grosser. (That’s a strange picture in its own right: a Neil Simon adaptation that never even bothers to present itself as anything other than a stage play, a screwball farce that opens with multiple suicide attempts.) But 2001 lingered. In conceptualizing the realm of “beyond the infinite,” Kubrick and Clarke had drawn on scientific research about hallucinogens, though they hadn’t tried any themselves. And 2001 found its place within the emerging drug culture of the era. John Lennon claimed that he went to see 2001 every week. David Bowie wrote “Space Oddity,” his breakout hit, after taking in 2001 while high. Within a few months of its release, MGM was marketing 2001 as “the ultimate trip.” This was not false advertising.
Like The Graduate—another movie where a blank-faced hero enters an airless environment while his breathing echoes in our ears—2001 rewrote the rules of what a hit movie could be. Both films also resonated in an unsteady, turbulent era. Benjamin Braddock, the hero of The Graduate, wasn’t a rebel, and yet he might’ve at least had some passing familiarity with rock ’n’ roll, or with the drugs that surrounded it. The 2001 characters were total stiffs; Dave Bowman and Frank Poole and Heywood Floyd would’ve been more uncomfortable at the Monterey Pop Festival than on the surface of the moon. And yet Kubrick still used those characters to push a moviegoing populous into the unknown.
The timing had something to do with it. Two weeks before 2001 opened, Lyndon Johnson, facing a growing public backlash over the Vietnam War, announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. A day after 2001 premiered, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. In an insane and destabilized time, maybe 2001 offered some strange and beguiling sense of hope. Maybe, in a world that was tearing itself apart, the infinite held a certain appeal.
And yet 2001 has continued to resonate well beyond its original cultural moment. Consider the way Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the film’s adapted theme music, has been passed down. Five years after 2001 hit theaters, the Brazilian musician Deodato took an instrumental funk version of Zarathustra to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. And for decades, Ric Flair, probably the greatest professional wrestler of all time, walked to the ring as Zarathustra boomed over arena speakers. (These days, his daughter Charlotte enters to a dubstep remix of Zarathustra.) It’s a piece of music that has come to convey a sort of mystical awe—a shorthand for transcendence.
In Saturday Night Fever, a movie that came out nearly a decade after 2001, Tony Manero, a working-class Brooklyn Italian kid, spends his weekend evenings at a local disco called 2001 Odyssey. Tony isn’t some mythical hero; he’s a smartass kid with no particular future and no real skills beyond dancing and looking good. And yet 2001 Odyssey, chintzy as it may be, gives Manero the closest thing to a transcendent experience that he might ever get. We take our transcendence where we can find it.
The contender: In my action-movie column, I’ve already written about Bullitt, another of 1968’s hits and a movie that I love deeply. But Bullitt isn’t my favorite of 1968’s blockbusters. Instead, that distinction goes to Rosemary’s Baby, the first American movie from actual monster Roman Polanski. Like 2001, Rosemary’s Baby is a cinematic freakout of the highest order, wild and absurd and knowingly ambiguous. Mia Farrow’s Rosemary spends the movie’s first half glowing with happiness and the second descending into deep, primal fear, convinced that things are going unspeakably wrong around her. And it all builds up to one of the all-time great final scenes, a set piece so absurd and appalling that it basically turns into comedy.
Next time: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid uses the framework of the Western, the most American of myths, as a vehicle for a shaggy-dog buddy-comedy adventure, a showcase for some true and distilled movie-star charisma.
338 Comments
Kubrick was also rushing to get 2001 out into the world before American astronauts landed on the moon.I mean, he had to give himself some time to fake it.
★☆☆☆☆
In all honesty the technology required to fake a moon landing in 1969 would be so ludicrously expensive that it’ve been cheaper to just actually go to the moon.
So n this case, it was make it until you fake it.
Not to mention the catering.
That’s hilarious. I’ll have to look that up – That Mitchell and Webb Look.Thanks.
This piece by Mitchell and Webb is somewhat better known, and equally hilarious. The comedic timing is perfect.
Exactly!
When you listen to the Boomers of Room 237 ranting about how 2001 was really Kubrick’s confession of faking the moon landing, it’s pretty clear that they all saw 2001 as stoned teenagers reared on a diet of movies like Doctor Dolittle and it just completely broke their brains.
The problem with Kubrik’s moon shoot? He was such a perfectionist that he insisted shooting on location.
If you’ve ever seen any of the actual TV Broadcast footage of the moon landing anyone with even the most passing knowledge of Kubrick would immediately know that Kubrick didn’t make it. It looks terrible, grainy, smeary and fake looking. Kubrick was incapable of producing filmed images that looked so bad.
That’s largely because the actual footage was too high a resolution for most TVs to be broadcast directly onto them. Unfortunately NASA accidentally lost the original, high resolution footage
“Accidentally”… YEAH RIGHT, WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!
My all-time favorite Moon conspiracy is that Kubrick was brought in to fake it but being Kubrick he sent his actors there to get the footage.
2001 is a good an important movie that made a lot of money? Whoa. First I’m hearing about it.
It’s weird that 2001 was nominated for best original screenplay (it lost to Mel Brooks’ Producers) but not best picture, when the movie has so little dialogue.As someone who read the novel before seeing the movie, I can attest that 2001 is very compelling as a story and not just a visible spectacle, but it still seems odd that the Academy would choose to highlight it. I guess they really wanted to see a prestigious author like Clarke get an Oscar.
These kind of Academy disconnects can often be explained by the fact that individual categories are voted on by different branches. The screenplay nominations are only voted on by writers, so clearly they liked the film more than other Academy branches. Also since screenplay is divided into adapted and original there are essentially ten nominees instead of the five for BP.
Also, it seems that (at least nowadays) the screenwriting category tends to be the place where stranger and more risky movies receive their nods.
I once read a claim that the Best Original Screenplay award is really Best Indie Film.
Honestly they’ve only given Best Picture to only two films, to my recollection, that were either Sci-Fi or Fantasy, Return of the King and The Shape of Water.
…so you’re saying if Kubrick had combined this film with Eyes Wide Shut, and given us some hot space alien lovin’, it might have had a shot?(Addendum: Around the World in 80 Days won in 1956, Wikipedia tells me. Though that’s really more of a contemporary adventure tale than spec fic, so probably doesn’t count)
And does it really count as “spec fic” decades after something becomes completely doable? Circumnavigating the world in 80 days was just outside plausibility when Verne wrote the book in 1873, but certainly within a decade it was possible, and by 1956, it would be an absurdly long time to do it.
You could remake it today as a steampunk epic, with coal-fired dirigibles and steam-powered mechanical calculators and whatnot…
One of the stranger aspects of 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably its connection to the Marvel Universe.Jack Kirby did a 10-issue monthly series for Marvel based on 2001. For the first couple issues they were just standalone stories that told one story about prehistoric man, future man, and future man getting turned into a Star Child by the Monolith.And then in issue 8 it introduced Aaron Stack, The Machine Man and the rest of the series became about his adventures with the Monolith and its creators, the Celestials. He later got his own solo series plus a few crossovers that fully integrated him into the Marvel Universe.And Machine Man is canon in the Marvel Universe, most famous appearance is in Warren Ellis’ Nextwave: Agents of HATE. Nextwave even shows Aaron’s relationship with the Celestials and how it ended.
O_o
Aaron has also met and fought zombies from an alternate universe with Howard the Duck.
Well then if James Gunn doesn’t have Machine Man in Guardians Vol. 3 I will be disappointed.
Ahhh that Ellis one that showed how much the Celestials hate him. Hilarious. Thanks for sharing. Warren Ellis usually does a great job of making me laugh and that wasn’t an exception.
I had no idea that’s where Machine Man came from. Awesome!
He taught us so much about respecting authority.
Want to add that Aaron/Machineman’s remark, “…that even an robot can cry”, is a satirical jab at the end of the classic Avengers #58 in which The Vision joins the Avengers, “Even An Android Can Cry”. Well, the ending proper; there’s also an epilogue with captions from Shelley’s sonnet (one of the greatest ever), “Ozymandias”.
Sorry, the Ozymandias quotation was at the end of the preceding issue, # 57. Apologies…
Aaron’s remark is a reference to the ending of Avengers # 58, “Even An Android Can Cry”, in which the Vision is offered membership in the Avengers.
Apologies for multiple posts. Still learning the system. Bygones.
Ellis is also taking a jab at (or at least, making a reference to) Thomas & Buscema’s Avengers 58, “Even An Android Can Cry”, in which the Vision is invited to join.
I have those issues of 2001 along with the movie adaptation Kirby did and it’s gorgeous bonkers cosmic crazy. I love every page of it.
My response to anyone who has these is very much like Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man: You must never read these. I think you should not keep them. You should destroy them.
Fun fact: Keir Dullea is running in place this whole time while the spaceship is the thing that is rotating.
(pssst… Gary Lockwood)
YOURE GARY LOCKWOOD
That is an outrageous accusation.
DIDN’T I SAY YOU’D BETTER……be good to me?
mwhite66 upthread posted a picture of this thing in its gimble. Very cool.
My local cinema runs revivals of many classic films so I got to see this on the big screen in 70mm this year. It looked fanstastic.Small humblebrag, one of my parent’s relatives was Arthur C Clarke’s personal assistant so I got to meet him once and got a full set of the series of the books signed.He also lived just around the corner from us (seriously, we could walk there), was listed in the phone book for Colombo, Sri Lanka and was neighbour to the Iraqi Embassy, oddly enough.
Small humblebrag, one of my parent’s relatives was Arthur C Clarke’s personal assistant so I got to meet him once and got a full set of the series of the books signed.That’s just a straight-up brag.
That is a well deserved brag, though. Minor brag: I once met Clarke and he told me Kubrick hated “Star Wars” but thought “Bladerunner” was one of the most beautiful films he’d ever seen.
“It’s telling that almost none of the actors in this massively successful and influential film ever did a single other thing of any note.”How soon we forget:
It’s no “They came to burgle Carnegie Hall”
Um, all this talk of hit sci-fi movies from 1968 and not a single mention of Planet of the Apes? Not even as a contender? Damn you all to hell AV Club!
Seriously, not even the musical?
You really made a monkey out of Breihan.
I love legitimate the-ay-ter.
“Uh… the movie, or the planet?” is one of my favorite Simpsons lines.
ITS THE PART I WAS BORN TO PLAY, BABY!
Damn it, now I’m even angrier at the way Fox/Gracie Films treated Alf Clausen. A person who can compose this music should be treated like royalt, not refuse to be thrown out.
One of my earliest film going memories is of my parents taking me to a Drive-In double feature of Planet of the Apes and 2001. My 6 year old brain loved Planet of the Apes and slept through most of 2001.Planet in it’s own way was as innovative as 2001 with it’s progressive rock score, contemporary satire disguised as speculative fiction and that great makeup work.
YOW…that’s a hell of double. Are they still there? 2001 is a loooong movie.
Plus, it is classy because it is based off of French Literature! Yes, really! Planet of the Apes is based on Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planète des singes. Which due to the way French works could either mean Planet of the Apes or Planet of the Monkeys (and in fact one English translation actually calls itself Monkey Planet in part to separate it from the movie franchise which takes the concept and not much else).
My parents took me to both of these. PotA probably should have its own article.
A while back I attended a talk given by Fred Ordway, one of the movie’s technical advisors. He revealed lots of little details, like the square blocks on the back of the space helmets are data modules with mission-specific information. He said their biggest fear was that they weren’t being visionary enough, and that when 2001 really came around the tech in the film would look horse-and-buggy.Kubrick had a “making of” film made, then decided he didn’t want people to know how he did it, and ordered all the prints destroyed. Fred managed to keep his copy, and screened it at the talk. His most interesting comment was about the space-baby ending. He said that no one on the production team had any idea what it meant; they all figured it was just Kubrick being Kubrick.
Kubrick carefully removed all the context from the spacebaby stuff, because he thought it was boringly straightforward. In the early drafts of the screenplay, the first act played up the international tension between America and Russia—both sides had orbital satellite platforms capable of raining nukes on every point on the planet at once, an extinction-level threat for humanity that constantly and literally hung over our heads. At the end of the movie, when Bowman returned, he was supposed to gesture and all of the orbital platforms would simultaneously detonate, a sign of our next evolutionary step being an end to our dependence on force.Kubrick thought that was dull and overly literal, and reduced it down to a mere symbol of a symbol. It was typical of how he worked; he hated spelling things out, preferring for people to bring their own meanings to his films rather than just look for the ones he talked about in interviews. Which is great, but as Room 237 shows, people can take that a bit too far. 🙂
It’s quite similar to Childhood’s End, also by Arthur C. Clarke. Really fantastic book, he and Kubrick discussed making THAT before they settled on 2001, and it’s pretty clear that a good deal of the influence and themes carried over. Childhood’s End begins with Cold War tensions rising into space. Soviet and USA compete with orbiting nuclear platforms. Suddenly, Aliens show up! The Aliens take over earth’s international affairs, end bull fighting (seriously) and other various mean things. Humanity Enters a golden age. Also, the Aliens look like medieval depictions of Satan. Horns, Hooves, forked tail, the whole bit. A century or so later, all the children on earth become psychic/telekinetic (?), and crawl to a cairn in the middle of the ocean, evolve into a form beyond humanity, and then leave/evolve out of earth in a huge burst of flame. That image is what’s on the front of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, if you ever wondered why they have an album of naked kids crawling on rocks. Anyway, both 2001 and Childhood’s End contain the trope of:“Humanity meets oblique aliens, then evolves into new form that is literally a starbaby”
Sounds like James Cameron stole that concept for the original end of The Abyss.It also sounds like Clarke returned to that U.S. vs. Russia theme with 2010.
The original end of the Abyss completely blew my mind. It’s one of my favorite movies and I’d probably seen it a eight or ten times before (VHS tape off an HBO preview).
Which is, indeed, FAR more thuddingly literal, and thus less satisfying. Making the detonation of Jupiter into a new sun into a story about stopping another Bay of Pigs makes the celestial and unknowable into the starkly pedestrian and bureaucratic.
This is unfortunate because of how well cast the dang film is. You get Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban and John Lithgow in a movie, and make it 40% narration and end with a cosmic kum-by-ya? There’s a good movie in there about how all the characters are feeling and experiencing what is happening to them. But it just ends up so wooden.
Yeah, I feel like the space baby thing is easy to parse when you step back from the film a moment—monkeys find a monolith, it changes them, they become the descendants of humans. Humans find a monolith, it changes them, the first one to reach it becomes a huge space baby. It’s clear that the movie is about the evolution of our species past our current point of comprehension.
The first two parts play out very well in that regard. It’s the third that’s terribly opaque, and given the length of time it plays out over, especially frustratingly so. The basic idea of “The ‘Starchild’ is the next stage of human evolution” isn’t too hard to grasp — and even the soundtrack liner notes reference it — but the lengthy lightshows and mysterious bedroom imply ultimate revelations that never really come. One is left thinking that Kubrick could simply have skipped from “Bowman falls into the monolith… 5 seconds of lights on his face… Starchild appears” without really losing anything substantive. I remember being frustrated by it as a kid, and only much later, freed from the expectation that the narrative was going somewhere, being able to really appreciate the movie.
The issue is that mortal film directors are not able to provide satisfying and definitive answers to the meaning of life and human existence, so any film that grapples with this theme is bound to disappoint if everything is spelled out.Think about what it would mean if Kubrick had provided concrete revelations that explained the next step in human evolution. Humans would have just all instantly transformed into Star Babies in the theater.So, as an artist, Kubrick is giving the viewer room to process what’s happening to Bowman (and, apparently, the entire human race). From a plot standpoint, Kubrick could basically have covered everything in 45 minutes. It’s not a plot driven movie. The runtime is drawn out to provoke thought. You’re supposed to be frustrated by the Stargate sequence (and the slowness of the trip to the moon, and the 20 minutes of prehistoric hominids in a movie that’s supposed to be about space travel). That’s just a master filmmaker pushing buttons.
I certainly agree with you (and Kubrick) about the problems of being too explicit, and effectively prosaic, about the theme. And I’m not complaining about the pacing overall. I just felt that the Stargate sequence crossed a sort of line from the wonder-inducing into the merely baffling. That we were seeing Bowman in a “zoo” is not only something I would never have deduced from the film alone, it’s something that I don’t even think makes much sense within the universe of the film (formless godlike aliens who can bend space and manipulate matter on a whim need to keep a guy isolated in a room for decades? Why? To watch him go crazy? So divorced formless godlike alien parents can take their kids to see him on weekends?).Of course, I first saw the film when it was aired on TV in the mid-’70s, when the overall effects were still pretty awesome, but Trumbull’s light-show stuff was cliched enough to be incorporated into network TV credits as another poster here has shown. So I think the specific approaches Kubrick took to conveying “mind-blowing” concepts may simply not have aged well, of have been too oblique to begin with.
When you’ve never seen visual effects like that, in 1968, then you sure gonna show them for a long time to the audience, which is what they did eleven years later with Star Trek The Motion Picture. The miniature of the USS Enterprise was so costly, they showed every bit of it and from every angle, all nice and pretty, but also long and boring, and that was post-Star Wars.
It was so costly they had to reuse some of the same footage for Star Trek II.
. . . they become the descendants ancestors of humans.FIFY
Yeah. I thought that was pretty obvious. The first monolith gave our ancestors the idea to use tools. There is an unbroken line from that to space travel. At that point we were ready for the next step.
Plus that’s the whole idea of Nietzsche’s book Also Sprach Zarathustra, after which Strauss named his musical work used in 2001. It is about the coming of the next development in human evolution (these days often translated as “overman” because “superman” seems comical for obvious reasons).
And then in 1984 Clarke, in collaboration with Peter Hyams, apparently felt we did need need that overly literal explanation. And 2010 proved that no, we really didn’t.
True, but it was good to see some of the characters and ships again. Plus, Syd Mead.
I do give the makers of 2010 kudos for how faithfully they recreated the Discovery models and sets. As I mentioned in an earlier post, most of the models from 2001 were either packed off into Kubrick’s private warehouse, or destroyed, so as to thwart any attempts at a sequel.
The film also makes a sly little jab at the falling out between Kubrick and Clarke, featuring a brief glimpse of a Time magazine with the leaders of the US and USSR on the cover, represented as likenesses of Clarke and Kubrick, respectively.
Plus Clarke’s cameo sitting on a bench feeding pigeons with the White House as a backdrop.
I like how in the film, the American scientist meets up with his Russian counterparts on the space station, very cordial and friendly and familiar with each other, asking after families and children. In Cold War 1968, this was quite something, a dream of cooperation in the future.
When I saw it several years later, after I had been studying Russian, I noted that when the Russian man delicately inquires about the (supposed) plague on the Moon (a story the US is using to keep everyone else away from the monolith), Heywood delicately says he can’t talk about it, and after he leaves the group of Russian scientists the man says to the others, in Russian, “There must be a lot of trouble.”
Wow! Is that making of movie available? A few years back, a huge coffee table book about 2001 came out, but way too expensive for me.
No. Fred said that as far as he knew his was the only surviving copy. This was a while back; it was a 16 mm film shown on a projector.
I guess 2010: The Year We Make Contact is not even close to being in contention for this column.This movie is SO not what 11-year-old me expected. In a post-Star Wars world, I didn’t rully realize just how spectacular the visual effects were. And even as a NASA enthusiast, I didn’t fully appreciate just how slow-motion real space travel is, even in the hypothetical future.And I’m sure watching this on VHS on my 25-inch CRT in the early ’80s was a poor substitute for seeing this in panoramic 70mm.
Ha! Just made a similar VHS point above.
Didn’t FULLY realize just how spectacular…. FULLY. Shouldn’t post from bed.
Yeah, it’s something I need to rewatch if it’s ever in a theater. I enjoyed the parts “where things happen” by my pre-teen self was utterly bored watching the slower parts on a 20 inch tv in my basement.
I have seen this on Laserdisc, dvd and then blu ray several times. Each time I felt the slow parts drag but was still enjoying the film despite the pace. THEN I saw it in 70mm IMAX and wow. Not a single slow part. Pace was perfect. This film is designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible. It absorbs you in and takes you on a ride, but you need the size to lose yourself in it.
70mm IMAX?!!! OMG, envy envy envy!
Yes. It was envy worthy. If you get a chance, while these places still exist, take it.
So I don’t know if anyone else has been to the Kubrick exhibit in London, but it was just flat-out incredible and worth your time even if his movies leave you cold. An absolute treasure trove of stuff, and one of the highlights for me (apart from all the Napoleon stuff!) was a tie-in comic book to 2001: A Space Odyssey, from Howard Johnson’s. It follows a cheerful nuclear family as they enjoy Howard Johnson’s delightful food and amenities, followed by a trip to the cinema to see 2001 as if it’s just another cheesy space flick – instead of, you know, a brain-rattling trip through mankind’s existence on Earth / psychedelic slingshot into the vast unknowable future.
I was in London ten days ago, and had no idea that was on. Now I hate myself for missing it.
Two things stood out for me:1. The Eyes Wide Shut masks. Don’t get me wrong, there was more obviously incredible stuff there but I hadn’t even considered they’d be featured so to turn a corner (after geeking out over Barry Lyndon’s NASA lens) and come face to face with them was incredible. 2. After noting the spaceship models were virtually all (excellent) replicas, realising that the Star Child model was the actual one from the film.
I saw a similar exhibition a while back so the contents may varied, but the best thing I remember was the lens that was used to film the HAL-eye persective scenes.
The first time I watched 2001 at home I spent most of it struggling not to fall asleep, the second time I appreciated it more but still remained at a distance. Then last year I went to see it in IMAX and was already in tears for the second half of the prologue and the entire first Blue Danube sequence, it was one of the most moving experiences I’ve had in a theater. I wish they would just re-release this every few years to give both old and new audiences another opportunity to soak it in. It’s THE movie to watch on the biggest screen possible and be overwhelmed by.
Yeah, I have this on VHS and while I will always stick up for that format, it is … not the way to watch 2001. On the big screen though? Damn. The Blue Danube sequence especially, the sense of scale there is incredible.
I remember watching 2001 in high school on an old, rented VHS tapes,oan and scan, with the blacks all washed out to blue and the soundtrack a little warbly. It’s still a solid movie. It was definitely the first Blu Ray I bought.
The first time I saw it was on cable, right in the middle of the trippy Jupiter and Beyond scene. The first time my mother saw it was in theaters, with her father, brother and his group of rowdy friends. My grandfather was captivated and my mother was left to fend for herself when her brother and his friends grew bored and decided to start a squirt gun fight. Good times.
I took some friends to see it at Alamo Drafthouse last year. One of whom can’t stand any movie slower than an MCU film, and they all loved it. I have seen it twice in a theater, and will try and do so at every opportunity in the futre. just an amazing movie, but one you really do have to see on the big screen to “get”.
I’ve never had the pleasure, but honestly I happened to catch a little flipping channels on a big-screen TV at home a few years ago, and found the lunar sequences pretty awe-inspiring. I was fairly amazed at how much better it holds up in that regard than many other “spectacle” films released decades more recently.
I think most people are bored with 2001 the first time they see it, especially if they see it when on the small screen at home. I know I was, but there was something there that kept me coming back to it. Part of the boredom is intentional; that long of a journey in a smallish area with two people would be intrinsically boring. Anyone who saw it before they were 16 and says they were totally glued to the screen is probably gilding their memory of the experience. I’ve never seen it on the big screen, but I bet it would blow you away in IMAX.
It played on TV every so often when I was little. I would watch bits of it with my brother and mom. She’d joke about how slow everything moved, and we’d admire the matte paintings. I definitely remember watching the movie click in my brother’s head, and he got up to focus on the rest of the movie in another room. Anyway, I have fond memories going way back, but I never loved 2001 until I was older.
“Part of the boredom is intentional…”
Much like the endless driving scene at the beginning of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” It exists to make a point.
Maybe that was my problem.I can say that I’ve only seen the first 45 minutes. I’ve technically watched the first two hours, but I literally couldn’t stay awake during that film.
Eh, I’ve seen 2001 on the big screen, and while it was impressive (and I have no doubts about its importance in cultural history), it just didn’t do anything for me. Not everyone likes their transcendence that way.
Agreed!
I didn’t see 2001: A Space Odyssey until I was 19, and happened to be traveling in Costa Rica with my family. I dragged both my brothers to see it in the cinema, and even though I had read much about it and its making, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw and immediately fell in love with it. Both my brothers weren’t impressed. Well, when we saw it, Star Wars had been out for five years already, so to them it was much lacking in the action department… I do love this movie. Gotta show it to my kid one of these days (he’s used to Marvel movies…).
The only thing that is dated about this movie is the psychedelic images during the stargate sequence. I understand why Kubrick did this—LSD, the psychedelic drug of choice in the 60s, brought one “beyond his own mind.” Nevertheless, I’d love to see the stargate sequence with more contemporary imagery. Can someone get on that?
I finally saw this movie for the first time, in 70mm no less, a couple of years ago (I’m 35). While not perfect, I absolutely could not believe it was almost 50 years old and was honestly still amazed by the whole thing.
Nice to hear other people admit that this movie makes them cry. Always does that to me. It’s a work so monumental that it actually restores my faith in humanity.
Oh, how I hated this movie when I first saw it. I’ve come around on it since, to where now it’s one of those watch-to-the-end movies whenever I happen across it. I saw it with my mom and brother the first time and I don’t think either of them have revisited since. I recently said that I really like the movie now and they thought I was crazy. There’s something deeply ASMR about the dull bureaucratic talk in this movie for me. I could watch that board meeting, or the scene where they talk about their sandwiches, over and over again.
I tend to find with Pauline Kael, that if she liked a film, it’s probably good. However if she hated a film, then it was definitely good.
Her calling 2001 “monumentally unimaginative” irritates me in a way no other film criticism ever has.
She hated Raiders of the Lost Ark, but loved Temple of Doom. I can’t remember her opinion on the entirety of 1941, but she loved the dancing contest/riot scene (as, confessedly, do I). However, like everyone else, she adored E.T. .
Yeah she was sort of a precursor to the sort of trollish bomb-throwing critics there were a lot more of after her, eventually devolving all the way down to assholes like Armond White (Not saying Kale is as bad as White, she’s a million times better, but its the same tradition)
She was a remarkably perceptive critic of things in her wheelhouse (Nashville, for instance) and sometimes a maddening critic of things that weren’t (Raiders of the Lost Ark). Her review of 2001 is in the latter mode.
I don’t think she was trollish so much as somewhat eccentric in her opinions. She also had a tendency (especially in her later years) to ramble on endlessly in her reviews.
I guess what I mean is that her point of view is one that I associate with more contrarian/trollish critics who came after her i.e. she liked a lot of trash and thought aesthetics were more important than humanistic concerns, she detested middlebrow etc.
It always got me that when she hated a movie she went on and on about it instead of just dismissing it.
She also famously hated the original Star Wars. I think she just hated movies with special effects in general because she wanted cinema to be more like legitimate theatre.
According to these comments, apparently my distaste for the film can probably be attributed to never seeing it in a theater. I generally consider it to be an overlong trip toy with 15 minutes of the 20th century’s best cinema (the confrontation with HAL) near the end.
It’s definitely a film I can’t watch alone. Watched it a couple of weeks ago with a friend on his top o’ the line OLED on 4k with his 7.1 system. Definitely made it an experience. (also the beers and chatting about the cool sets and design work during slower parts improved the experience)
“(also the beers…”I suspect this film owes a great deal of it’s fame to alcohol and more potent substances.
For sure. Friend was high, I was buzzed. That definitely added to the amazing technicals, though being sober doesn’t take away from appreciating all the space scenes.
Yeah, it’s pretty much a movie that requires you to get on its wavelength and let it just kind of wash over you. It’s like a feature-length version of one of those multimedia art installations where you listen to barely audible whispers and stare at a recording of someone else watching a recording of someone else watching a recording of somebody slowly eating popcorn, but has just enough plot to trick people into thinking it’s a movie.
When it works it’s hypnotic and really buries itself in your brain. When it doesn’t, you end up taking a nap.
…I apologize for putting words in your mouth, but it sounds like you’re agreeing with my “trip toy” assessment.
Much as I’m not an overall fan, I want to emphasize that the confrontation with HAL is just amazing. The dead silence and monotone as a counterpoint to the explosions and mortal danger is really amazing. I imagine if you’ve spent the previous 90 minutes being anesthetized by the movie’s languorous pace (and possible personal chemical enhancement), suddenly having things shift to a life-and-death situation without departing from the movie’s overall calm aesthetic is a hell of a jolt – one that neatly mirror’s Dave’s wakeup from cryosleep to realize Hal is trying to kill him.
Not really, but I can see why you’d think that. The “trip toy” thing is just too reductive for something that’s much, much more than that. I was goofing on those multimedia art installations, but they can also be incredibly moving if you’re able to get on the right wavelength. The point was that Kubrick created abstract art and convinced the world it was a commercial movie AND managed to get enough people on the film’s wavelength that it became a touchstone of cinema forever.All of that abstract, hypnotic rhythm disturbed by the realization that Hal is NOT on their side is incredible, and wouldn’t have the same impact if it were paced like a normal movie. It just wouldn’t work, people would be waiting for the other shoe to drop from the start. But because it focuses so hard on the mundanity (I’m pretty sure that’s a word) of space travel it comes as a total surprise. On a side note, the WORST thing about 2001 is what it did to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Somebody saw 2001 and said, “hey, we could do this, but with Star Trek!” Only without any of the artistry, but all of the long, long, LONG shots.
On one viewing, I noticed that there’s a bit in the Star Gate sequence (it’s at 5:10 in the clip above and here’s a screen shot)where, what I have always thought was Bowman’s capsule, looks like a sperm cell. It’s the beginning of his rebirth.Granted, I was reeeeeaaaaallllly stoned when I noticed that.
Actually, that’s a pretty popular interpretation of the end. A long, phallic object (the Discovery) ejects a small white cell from the tip (the pod), it enters the “Stargate” (obvious interpretation), where it’s deposited in a “womb” (the hotel room), gestates, and becomes a baby (the Starchild). Bowman even makes an “O” face!
The pod or the Discovery itself is the sperm and Jupiter the egg.
WARNING: Unpopular opinion incoming!2001 is kind of crap. I will freely admit that the movie looks amazing. As a technological achievement in special effects, it’s impressive as hell. Unfortunately for me, it’s all sizzle and no steak.The movie needed a strong editor at the controls (which with a control freak like Kubrick, would never happen in a billion years) to cut down these long, empty scenes of nothing. Stuff like “Here, look at this ship come into frame, slowly drift across the entire 70mm width of the screen, aaaaaaand then off the other side”. The swirly Doctor Who vortex at the end is cool and all, but why did it need to go on as long as it did?When you could come into the movie half way in and not be confused as to what happened up to that point (everything before the briefing on the moonbase is recapped AT that briefing), your script has problems.And before you pigpile me with “Well, you have no attention span!” – then why do I love long movies like Seven Samurai or The Good The Bad and the Ugly? And its not that I don’t comprehend the weird stuff, I watch the hell out of Giallo flicks – and those are all about style over substance.
I’m with you. I LOVE sci-fi but I have never been able to watch 2001 all the way through (I have collectively seen the entire thing, just not in one sitting). For me, it’s like Blade Runner. It’s a touchstone, it is stupid important to the history of cinema and I can appreciate that aspect of it but as a stand-alone movie, it is utterly boring.It’s one of those movies that was surpassed by the media it inspired.
I personally love 2001, but I respect your criticism of it about a thousand times more than Pauline Kael’s. “Monumentally unimaginative” one of the dumbest things ever uttered by a film critic.
I like 2001, but I give you a star for sharing my unpopular opinion about Blade Runner. For some reason, 2001 works better for me even though I know its slower and has even less plot than BR.
You’re totally right – this *is* an unpopular opinion.
You seem a little defensive for someone with no attention span. And Giallo flicks are NOT weird, although you’re dead on about style over substance. I mean, the Giallo would help inspire a LOT (for better and worse) of horror in the late 70’s.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with you. I watched the movie and feel like I got some stuff from it, but I didn’t enjoy it for VAST stretches, and I don’t really feel like that was my fault.
That’s like complaining that impressionist paintings are too blurry.
…and doing so a hundred years later…
Have you seen it projected in a theater? It really does make the difference.
Respectfully, I think you miss the point of the slowness of the film. Those long empty scenes of nothing are there for you to get lost in. Your mind is supposed to wander, to consider what you’ve just seen. The film is trying to sink you into a trance. Another point – You say, “When you could come into the movie half way in and not be confused as to what happened up to that point…, your script has problems.” Every movie at that time was crafted so that you could come in and watch it mid-showing because that’s the way movie-goers went to the movies. Psycho began the change towards not letting people come in at the middle of the movie, but by this time it had not fully been eliminated.
“I think you miss the point of the slowness of the film. Those long empty scenes of nothing are there for you to get lost in.”Kubrick did that again with Barry Lyndon a few years later. I think he wanted to give viewers a feel of what it was like in the late 18th century. No electricity, lights, radio, tv, internet. Those aristos stayed up all night playing cards, gambling by candle light because they were bored to death. Any modern person would be astonished by the s l o w n e s s of life back then. I think the film succeeded in conveying that. It soaked you in the languour. Where boredom seems interesting. (See Warhol.) And that film came out in the 70s, when people had more tolerance for spaces and longuers in the films (like the Godfather films.) Modern audiences don’t have the patience for that sort of cinematic experience, they want bangs and thrills every other minute. In the 80s they blamed MTV videos for this shortened attention span, in terms of visual storytelling. But really, it’s real life for most people that has been speeded up, more pressured since the 70s. Modern life has gotten much, much faster than even then. Every bleep on the phone in your pocket, there’s something demanding one’s attention. Watching a 3 hour film with expansiveness and space and time.. I guess it seems like a luxury most people don’t have now. Most people seem anxious and irritable these days, their distracting devices driving them, chained and annoyed all the time. Getting fully submersed in the world and story of films like 2001 or Barry Lyndon for hours is a big ask of modern audiences. I understand, but I think it’s a bit of a loss.
People need to re-learn the importance of patience. Directors like Kubrick or David Lynch show that.
I feel that the new Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood moves at a pace of contemplation, or perhaps more the pace of a Summer Day with nothing in particular to do. It’s quite a nice change from the unrelenting movement that make up most movies.I’m watching a series documentary on Monty Python and in it Cleese is remembering his frustration with Gilliam’s constant explanation that film is a visual medium and that everything must be kept moving and visually interesting. Cleese responded (vastly paraphrasing) ‘Well, all life is visual yet we stop and have non-moving conversations all the time. We’re doing it right now, you and I talking here, and it’s fine. We don’t always have to be moving to hold people’s interest.”
Oh, that’s cool. I really like your Cleese/ Python citation, thanks. And I dig too how you describe Once Upon A Time.. “moves at a pace of contemplation, or perhaps more the pace of a Summer Day with nothing in particular to do.”That sounds awesome. A positive Tarantino idiosyncracy. Making watching the film an experience, stretches where the story itself has space to breathe, maybe it vexes some people. But that’s why QT at his best can be special. His films really aren’t like anyone else’s.
I turned on the TCM channel one day and realized that 2001’s intermission was playing. there can’t be many TV stations that would show a movie’s intermission.I saw this film when it came out in the theatre, discussed with my frineds what it all meant, and have seen it several times at college on various substances (sometimes simultaneously), and on medium and large-screen television. For me, whether it works or not, it works.
TCM is really awesome that way- they will include an “Intermission” if that was part of the original theatrical release. They don’t truncate for TV. TCM is a real treasure and I couldn’t do without it. I have the news on in the background all day, but when the news is boring and dismal, TCM is an escape, even if I’m just listening to some obscure old movie. It’s a time machine. When current reality sucks, TCM is a great escape.
Yeah, it’s the greatest movie that I hate. It’s a tremendous achievement, a wholly original art film blockbuster, and I can’t watch it from beginning to end. As I get older, I simply don’t have the patience for Great Films unless they’re also entertaining, and 2001 just isn’t entertaining.
Your opinion is less unpopular than you think.Movie is stupidly hyped up. Some say “it’s the greatest sci-fi film of all time” and it’s boring as watching paint dry.All my friends either fell asleep during this film or went to go do more interesting things.
I’ve never liked Kubrick, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. He made boring slogfests dotted with iconic moments.
Kubrick is wildly uneven for me. Some movies are pretty good (like Clockwork Orange), some are awful (like 2001) and some are just – well, like does anyone really care about Full Metal Jacket once R Lee Ermey is killed?But yeah, on the chart of hits or misses, he’s mostly a miss.
When you could come into the movie half way in and not be confused as to what happened up to that point (everything before the briefing on the moonbase is recapped AT that briefing), your script has problems. Except that’s not true. If you came into 2001 before the briefing scenes you’d have zero clue what role the monolith played in the early development of man. You’d just know that they’d found it deliberately burried on the moon. You’d have no idea that an early ancestor to modern humans, upon contemplating the monolith, was inspired to use animal bones as a tool, thus setting off a chain of technological advancement leading up to the satellite seen in the million-year jump cut.The movie needed a strong editor at the controls … to cut down these long,
empty scenes of nothing. Stuff like “Here, look at this ship come into
frame, slowly drift across the entire 70mm width of the screen,
aaaaaaand then off the other side”. The swirly Doctor Who vortex at the end is cool and all, but why did it need to go on as long as it did?
I think you’re kind of missing the point, which is to capture the immense vastness of space against which man, and his creations, are laughably insignificant. It’s also meant to convey what it might be like to actually live and work in space, which is less likely to consist of X-wings and tie fighters swooping and swirling around and more likely to consist of long stretches of virtual silence as you traverse the incredible, cold, empty vastness of space.As for the length of the light sequence at the end, you do, um realize that Bowman is journeying beyond the fucking infinite, unto a whole new plane of existence, right? I mean, how was Kubrick supposed to convey what is probably beyond comprehension? A quick flash and then a few little green men gathered around Bowman who say,
“Congratulations, Dave, you’re now the next step in Human existence! What are you going to do next?” To which Bowman would perhaps reply,“I’m going to Disneyland!”
Hey! Any opinion allowed, unless it’s racist Nazi stuff deserving of quick-drying cement milkshakes, anyway. That said, your opinion is ill-informed and says more about yourself than the film.
This bad opinion makes me really curious what other cinematic masterpieces you also don’t like.
I’m with you. I greatly appreciate the artistry and technical achievement of it, but also don’t actually like it as a movie at all.
I loved it. The periods of silence gave the movie drama. My friends were pretty toasted I don’t think any of us got it. But I went back again until I had.
That is the point. It was made for my generation, and is a piece of art to us as the nose nose art on a B-17 Bomber was to my father. You can experience art with and without the social context. for instance:The song below did nothing for me. I didn’t even get sad.
Gloomy Sunday, written in 1932 by Rezső Seress, was known as the Hungarian Suicide Song and blamed for more suicides than any other song in history.
Serious shit, no offense to you or youe tastes- 2001: A Space Odyssey was a masterpiece, it was a boggling and coolly strange film that no one knew what to do with. Hippies liked to take acid and go and see it, while we were landing on the moon and savaging people in Vietnam in a way that tore this country apart. This film.. was away from that. 2001: A Space Odyssey stands as its own amazing work of art. I’ll go further, 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most magnificent works of art the world has ever seen, in the late 20th century. It wasn’t a movie, it was a work of art in itself, and an extraordinary thing to consider 50 years later.
I guess it did effectively show how boring and quiet being in space must be- but watching paint dry is boring too.
“it’s telling that almost none of the actors in this massively successful and influential film ever did a single other thing of any note.”Apparently someone never heard of the TV show Starlost.
or a “little known” Canadian slasher movie named “Black Christmas”.
Or “Devil Doll”, or “Riding With Death”, or “Gorgo”… they literally make a joke about it in the MST3K version of “Gorgo”, with Mike thrilled to play the William Sylvester edition of Trivial Pursuit and nobody knowing any of the answers at all despite having just seen the movies he was in.
Somewhere, Harlan Ellison up in heaven (or hell) is gnashing his teeth…
I Have No Teeth, And I Must Gnash
I feel like I’ve said this to you before, but have you recently won an essay contest?
I did, but Eleanor Roosevelt was pissed when my mother showed up drunk when I was presented my award (my classmates thought it was funny, though). Incidentally I also won the”Getting The Crap Kicked Outta You” contest.
“Mirror, Mirror on the wall…can I make it to last call?”On the plus side I’m sure you’re happy in your work so…
One of the sweetest moments in the series:
That bit is so damn delightful. Makes me smile every time.
It’s my favorite Joel episode. Oh, I almost forgot! HAIL TRUCK FARMER! HAAAAIIIL TRUCK FARMER!!!
Just in case you don’t own the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, here’s a fun tidbit about that episode: During the watching/writing process, Frank admitted a possible attraction to Jimmy’s mom that he was then ribbed mercilessly for by the rest of the gang. Hail Truck Farmer
That’s hilarious. That Frank has a kooky screw loose! IAMP is corny, but honestly isn’t a bad movie (especially not compared to movies like Manos or The Wild, Wild World Of Batwoman). Jimmy may not be the brightest, but he and Kitty make a cute couple. They’re certainly more endearing than many other movie couples from other experiments. Shut up, Iris!
I think most of the “juvenile delinquent” movies they did are usually pretty competent, probably because they were actual studio pictures. They might have been cheesy and square even then (which makes them fun to rip on), but they were still made by professionals. The real turds are the ones made by complete amateurs (Manos), or hucksters like Jerry Warren who are willing to release garbage like Batwoman stitched together from multiple movies and stock footage because he knew the right title and poster could sell it to enough suckers to make a profit.
I recommend reading “Growing Up With Manos” by Jackey Raye Neyman Jones (Debbie). First of all, she’s a dear, and loves the MSTIE community (she’s a member on a FB page I am a part of). And the story behind it is interesting, particularly the quirks of Hal “We’ll Fix It In The Lab” P. Warren and how Jackey’s father (who played the Master) did a lot of work on the props. It’s hard to read about John Reynolds though. Torgo might be fun to riff, but Reynolds was a sweet guy and a budding talent and what happened was tragic. As for Batwoman, oh who doesn’t live a good Servo Freakout?
I’ll have to check that out. I already know a fair amount about the making of Manos, but a first person account sounds fun.
Or the cheap, cheesy 1980 television movie of Brave New World…
Ford in Himmel, was that cheesy!
How have I not seen this? Off to YouTube!
From this shirts in this picture, I assume this was a spinoff of Laverne and Shirley.
If Dullea never exactly became a household name, it wasn’t because he was wooden. He’s riveting in Otto Preminger’s “Bunny Lake Is Missing”. The unemotive performances in “2001″ are precisely what Kubrick wanted. Of course, this is the reason why the picture didn’t do much to raise their profiles.
I used to know a guy who swore he knew Dullea in real life and said that if anyone brings up 2001 to him, he gets really mad.
In addition to that and Black Christmas mentioned up-thread, Dullea also starred in The Fox which is a very good character driven story about a man who comes between two women in a lesbian relationship – which was something very ahead of its time (1967). Like a lot of other talented actors who didn’t really fit a Hollywood leading man profile, he’s been a fixture on Broadway (and consequently, multiple Law & Order episodes).
Can I be of . . . assistance?
Like the old saying goes… “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.”
Kier Duella played Brooks in a stage adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption about 10 years ago in Dublin of all places. I had a double-take moment when I saw him on the cast list in the programme.
SORRY! I GOT HERE LATE!(yeah, this film is fucking great)
Maybe you’d have gotten here sooner if you hadn’t stopped off at the 18th Century French Zoo for Humans again!
“18th Century French Zoo for Humans”- I kind of love that Kubrick confirmed what I had suspected, watching the movie high on the marihooana. (I only read Kubrick’s comments years later.) That this “habitat” was designed by unseen immortal forces who guessed.. this is what humans like. To them, the 18th century and the 21st would be a blink of an eye. The weirdness that they were somehow observing human civilization all this time, centuries. Too bad they didn’t consider humans also like windows and fresh air and greenery too. The idea that Keir Dullea might have spent decades in that room is sort of haunting. But, the ending of the film is meant to be abstract and not taken literally (I’m saying that to myself, not to you, because you get it). It really leaves one still thinking about it for decades.
All sort of things cropping up at the last moment?
No, that’s Zarquon.
It’s a shame Kubrick only gave you a cameo AJ.At least they brought you back for 2010.
“2001” was my first art damage experience. My parents took me to see it at the drive in the year after it had been released. By the end of the film my Dad and siblings were sound asleep but I was transfixed with bulging eyes glued to the screen. I was a bit of a sci-fi kid having grown up on the Irwin Allen shows and the George Pal movies that were a staple of the afternoon movies on the local channels but this was something radically new.I was immediately struck by film’s chilly intellectualism from the severe formalism of the cinematography to the mix of romantic and modern classical music but most of all it was the film’s emphasis on purely visual storytelling with minimal dialogue. What dialogue there was had a mockingly stilted, uber WASPY tone that even a kid could smirk at. I can’t pretend that I was able to process much of it at the time but I FELT it deeply. It permeated my soul and haunted me for years. I devoured every review and article I could find about the movie and thought about it day and night. I eventually found a paperback copy of Jerome Agel’s splendid “The Making of Kubrick’s 2001”. That book became my bible. I carried it with me everywhere I went and reread it cover to cover for the next few years. It was the book that taught me how to think about not just film but art itself. Because of that book I started reading film magazines and everything our neighborhood library had on film history and filmmaking. Hell, the film did more to turn me into a serious reader than anything else. I found Arthur C. Clarke’s novel useful for breaking down the plot but otherwise it seemed disappointingly bland and prosaic but it did eventually lead me to “Childhood’s End” which is clunky but marvelous.The “2001” soundtrack album became the soundtrack to my life. Being a blue collar kid I’d had minimal exposure to classical music and this was a door into another world. While “Thus Sprach Zarathustra” and “The Blue Danube” did eventually lead me into the greater world of classical music it was the harsh, alien sounding Ligeti pieces that opened my ears to modern music and made it as normal sounding (and infectious) to me as pop and rock was to my classmates. It’s almost impossible to imagine how much “2001” impacted our culture. It thrust the language of avant-garde cinema into the mainstream which absorbed it with shocking voraciousness. ABC hired Doug Trumbull to essentially recreate his slit scan star gate sequence as the intro for “The ABC Movie of the Week” for the fall of 1969, indirectly beaming Kubrick into nearly every living room in America. Television commercials latched onto “Thus Sprach Zarathustra” like vultures and so saturated the airwaves with it that it became a joke within a couple of years. There was even a “Shafty” funky jazz version by one-hit wonder Deodato that was a huge hit (and was later featured jokingly in Hal Ashby’s “Being There”). Television series and made-for-television movies showed an immediate willingness to adopt a less rigidly narrative structure and utilize inventive visuals, openly avant-garde scores and experimental editing to tell their stories (even a show like “Ironside” could get outright trippy). You could watch all of this unfold in real time right before your eyes.When “2001” finally aired on network television in the mid seventies it created a critical uproar. Newspapers and magazines ran numerous editorials expressing outrage over the film being squeezed on to the small screen and bemoaned the destruction of its hypnotic pacing with commercial breaks. It was a big deal at the time.I still catch the movie whenever it shows up on the big screen and if you ever have the opportunity to see it in 70 mm I implore you to do so. It’s an entirely different, richer film. When I see “2001” now I am much more aware of the flaws, from the disappointingly simplistic plot to the achingly bad expository dialogue that is worse than anything in “Forbidden Planet” and the glorious but ridiculously unrealistic production design, but it still sucks me in and leaves me floating by the end. I would recommend everyone see it but never watch it for the first time outside of a movie theater. Almost every other film I can think of will translate somehow to television but not this one. You need to be locked up with it and have your entire field of vision covered by it. Open your eyes and soak it all in. If you read much about the making of “2001″ you’ll be surprised to learn how much Kubrick and company were winging it. They had at best the first half of a script well into filming and not a clue where they might end up. They seriously entertained dozens of horrible ideas from rubber alien costumes to Magritte-like alien landscapes. Eventually it was Kubrick’s wife who convinced him it would be best to not show the aliens and Arthur C. Clarke (who had just come out of the closet to Kubrick) who jokingly suggested Dave Bowman end up in the bedroom of incorporeal, “faggy” aliens.
I wish you could see the huge thumbs up I’m giving you right now. That was so great and so well done. And that ABC intro resembles just a little bit of my all time favorite ‘Bumper’ from that era;I’ve never seen it on a 70 mm screen. I have to imagine that it’s fucking brilliant.
And now, of course, the first thing that runs through my mind is: I wonder what the 4:20 Movie opening would have looked like?I will see myself out, thanks. (And thanks for the memory…)
Pretty much the same?
This is really cool context, thanks for sharing.
Thank you. I’ve always enjoyed reading the memories and insights other readers have offered on film and television. So much context can be lost within a matter of years. I thought my two cents might be of some slight value.
I don’t know anyone else who has this chilling relationship with the movie like I do. When I was 6, we got a copy of 2001 for our Betamax machine. I was the youngest of 4 and allowed to watch anything I wanted. I watched 2001 over and over again, to the great confusion of my fellow 6 year old friends who found it baffling. But I thought it was gorgeous and pure. I wanted to be Dave Bowman, so badly. I just thought that the universe of 2001 was the most aspirational, ultimate existence.
you’ll be surprised to learn how much Kubrick and company were winging it. They had at best the first half of a script well into filming and not a clue where they might end up
That doesn’t surprise me in the least, but thanks for a wonderful and comprehensive supplement to Breihan’s piece.
Thank you for this. One of my very favorite films of all time. It just keeps coming back to me at different phases in my life: when I was fascinated by space exploration, when I questioned religion, when I first really contemplated mortality. Now I’m a new father, and I can’t get the “Dawn of Man” sequence out of my head. Seeing over and over my daughter experience the metaphorical equivalent of the moment the proto-man stared at the bone in his hand and realized the new possibilities. It gives me body chills every time I think about it.
I caught “2001″ on PBS when I was 15 or so, and they showed it widescreen. Suddenly I realized why “formatted to fit your screen” was a bad thing. I caught a 50th anniversary IMAX screening last year and it was glorious. I wish I could get people who don’t care for it to see the same things in it I can.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and you said a few interesting things but you need an editor
Thanks for the input. If I was writing professionally and had the luxury of more time I think you’d have a point. As a fan of the movie responding in a comments box on my lunch break I did what I could. Sometimes the occasion calls for a spitball.
Fuck off.
Someone’s ancestors didn’t get to touch the monolith.
If someone could read that reply and have that response, that’s the rejoinder they deserved. I kept it as succinct as possible as they had clearly shown they value an economy of language.
If you want to have some fun, somebody on Youtube has synced up Alex North’s original, unused score to the first few minutes of the film. Play the opening credits sequence of this version, and then immediately after play the released version featuring Also Sprach Zarathustra. Doing so should instantly dispel any doubts anyone has ever had about whether or not Kubrick knew what the hell he was doing making this film.
Everything I’ve read indicates Kubrick was in a lot of turmoil over the music. He apparently wanted to go with classical music from early on as he felt a film composer would inevitably fall short. His initial choices were Mahler and Vaughan Williams but during the production he bought out a classical record store and had everyone on staff listen to as many records as possible in the hopes someone would find something better. They did, which is how “Zarathustra” and “Blue Danube” ended up in the film although Kubrick agonized about those pieces to the very end fearing they were too spot on.By all accounts Alex North was hired solely under pretense to placate MGM who couldn’t imagine a soundtrack of “needle dropping”. Kubrick dropped North halfway through the scoring with the disingenuous excuse that the remaining soundtrack would be comprised of sound effects and the poor guy showed up at the premiere horrified to discover his score was missing. I have to agree the North score doesn’t cut it although he did later rework much of the music including the main theme for “Dragonslayer” and the result is fantastic.It’s not widely remembered now but “2001″ was in release around the country for over a week and getting bad feedback when Kubrick frantically cut out almost a half hour to arrive at the version we know today. He sent out instructions to projectionist at all the theaters with the film telling them where to cut the reels they had until prints of the new version could be struck. That missing footage was discovered a few years back in a salt mine but has yet to see the light of day. There is also a longer cut of “The Shining” that played across Europe but not in the states because Kubrick didn’t trust the attention span of Americans.
Everything I’ve read indicates Kubrick was in a lot of turmoil over the music. I would go further to say that Kubrick was usually in turmoil about every single aspect of every movie he made. I always knew of the man’s reputation for meticulousness bordering on indecision: a hundred takes to get a shot of somebody doing something utterly commonplace like walking from point A to point B, how the time between completed projects stretched from years to decades as he aged, how he acquired libraries worth of material and pre-production work on projects he never even began, the calls from his compound in England to theater managers in Anytown, USA informing them that their projectors were out of alignment, etc.Then I saw the documentary Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, and I realized I had no clue as to the depths of the man’s OCD. My favorite example: While making Eyes Wide Shut he hired a guy to go around and and ask dozens of random people if he could photograph their bedside tables, because he wanted to be sure that the one in the bedroom set looked plausible enough.
That was wild. I knew the story but had never heard the actual track before. It’s not a bad score, but SK def made the right decision.
No, it’s a good score, though I will say very much of its time. There’s also a little too much of it – North adds music to the shots of the primordial savanna while Kubrick (again, wisely), simply fills the scene with ambient noise.
I still have my dog-eared paperback of that book!
I thought Clarke’s “2001″ novel that came out afterwards was fantastic, and did a lot to explain things much better. There were so many wonderful details fleshed out, and even though I knew how it ended, I was hooked on it. I considered it a useful companion piece, to help alleviate the “WTF did I just watch?” feeling after seeing the movie for the first time.
Great post. I liked “as a blue-collar-kid I was not exposed to classical music, but Zararthrusa and Blue Danube opened doors for me”. I’m paraphrasing what you wrote. Because I also remember my dad (who really loved classical music, in a blue-collar way, which was once really common in the 20th C. US, a way of self-improvement, always on the radio). I remember him really liking the music like “Zarasthrusa” and Blue Danube, on the the television, and exhorting me to appreciate it too, in the mid 70s. And I’ve never thought about why- it’s not like he and I watched 2001 together- but reading that it aired on US television then in the mid 70s really answers that. Airing the film on ABC (I suspect), I think they heavily promoted it with ads, a lot, because that music became quite familiar to me though i had not seen the movie (and was too young to ever understand it then.) I said it was probably ABC, because ABC’s own tv graphics seemed to emulate the “Stargate” sequence, in a way I thought hypnotic and cool as a kid, 1974 or 75. Just tried to find it again on YouTube, but couldn’t alas.
That’s a great memory. Thanks for sharing. You are right about classical music being more widely appreciated at the time and was often marketed with a self improvement angle. Every department store and even K Mart carried a surprising amount of classical music in their record departments.I don’t recall which network aired “2001” but I do recall it being massively promoted much like “Gone With The Wind” was when it finally hit the tube.
Yes. Dad may have been just an NYPD cop, but he had full volumes of case-bound LPs of classical and opera LPs, and when he was in his cups and in a good mood, classical music sent him into raptures. (He also had very groovy records from when he was a young man, that a young man then might have: Dave Brubeck, Nat King Cole, .. he had good taste.) We also grew up with the full Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelves.. so when it came to good impulses towards pedagogy, if I’m using that correctly, or just pointing us towards the good stuff.. Dad was not bad! Classical music and opera really do seem like the were meant as vehicles towards culture and self-improvement in the early and mid 20th century America, for ordinary people. And I believe it really was popular, people really were open to it in a mass sense. I get this from a lot of 20th c. reading, my favorite book as a kid was “The Saturdays” by Elizabeth Enright. Written in 1941, it’s about how 4 siblings pool their allowances so each week one of them gets to go out in Manhattan for an adventure. And Rush, the oldest boy, is obsessed with classical music and opera, and strikes up a conversation with the Swedish handyman Willie, about an opera they’d heard on the radio. Seemed like back then, it wasn’t highbrow or snobbish, it was widely popular via the radio. It was considered uplifting and ennobling, perhaps. The American ethos of self-improvement. (Not to bore you too much more, but have been reading diaries and stories from Susan Sontag. She was a freakishly brilliant high school student in LA in the late 40s, a golden age where Stravinsky and other brilliant classical musicians in exile were giving concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. She was such a comically serious and exaggerated snob about popular music even then, I find it funny. I am sort of charmed by the quaintness of late 40s pop music, big band and Dina Shore and torch songs etc..it’s funny she was so fiercely hating on all that. Ha, she was still a ferocious snob when I met her in the 90s, good for her. Bless her.)
The ABC Movie of the Week. Those were the days. *sigh*
It is a sadly neglected era of television. You might find the TV Mayhem podcast interesting. Amanda Reyes has a lot of insight into why made-for-television films are worthwhile. She has some especially smart observations on the feminist value of a many of these movies.https://tvmayhempodcast.wordpress.com
Thanks for the info. I remember enjoying the hell out of a lot of those films. And classics like Duel (Spielberg’s first film) and Brian’s Song (about Brian Piccolo) came out of there. They had comedy, action, drama, romance, scifi-horror (remember Trilogy of Terror?), you name it! Sure, there were a lot of clunkers in there. But there were a lot of good to great ones in there too.
I managed to catch a screening of 2001 a year ago when it was doing its 50th anniversary re-release tour on 70mm. Because I live in Australia and there were only a handful of prints that came down here, the print we got was hideous — it was scratchy, the entire right side of the screen was blurry, and the centre was misaligned when projected (which becomes incredibly obvious when watching a movie by the most symmetrical director in history).But the weirdest thing is, as awful as the print and the projection were, none of it mattered after five minutes. I watched the movie ten-times more transfixed than I’d ever been when watching my blu-ray of it, saw things I’d never seen before, and the entire thing somehow just burrowed into my subconscious deeper than I ever expected. I don’t know what to make of that, but it was a very special experience for me.
This comment was a fantastic read. Thank you!
Praxinoscope, I enjoyed your comment more than the article itself. I’ve had similar experiences – Agel’s book is still my favorite media tie in.I’m honestly surprised that people are still puzzled by the film, though. It always made straightforward sense to me, but then I’d been absorbing science fiction through my childhood until I saw the film in – hmm… maybe in ‘75 or so? (It was a rerelease). It’s about food and tools, of course.
Anyway, nice post. AV Club should delete the article and publish your post. At least you seem to have understood Kubrick’s deliberate choices.
Lovely post.I’m sure you’ve done this, but I enjoin anyone reading this to listen to the whole Zarathustra symphonic poem (or tone poem as I believe they are more often called in English). That bit in 2001 is just the short intro to the whole work, and of course, as with all such compositions, it’s a collage — well more of an arc really — of a bunch of different atmospheres and moods. Great, surprising stuff.Most of Strauss’ output is worth an honest listen. His Salome is superb.
I still catch the movie whenever it shows up on the big screen and if you ever have the opportunity to see it in 70 mm I implore you to do so. Yes! I finally was able to do so last year, and it really is tremendous. It’s always the vision of space travel, architecture, design, and human presence within space that really gets to me; it’s so incredibly ambitious that, as much as we’ve accomplished in those areas in reality, nothing has ever ended up looking like it.
(The makeup remains incredible more than 50 years later; those things never look like mimes in costume.)If you say so!
“(The makeup remains incredible more than 50 years later; those things never look like mimes in costume.)“Glad to see this highlighted, the beginning might be my favorite part. And I think it’s crucial to the wonder of the space stuff, it immerses you in a completely believable primitive world for 20 minutes until your brain and eyes are seeing in a way that fits that world — the space station would look great no matter what but instead of coming to it from a present perspective or even completely cold, we’ve been yanked forward from being sent further back than normal and it’s awe-inspiring.
There’s an odd little back reference in the scene where HAL is disabled that I fear is virtually lost to time now. HAL sings Bicycle Built for Two (Daisy, Daisy…) as the computer modules are taken offline. This calls back to a TV series that was hosted by Walter Cronkite called the Twenty First Century, a follow up to his popular Twentieth Century show. It looked at technological developments that would shape the coming decades. One episode looked at computers and how they would eventually be used for AI. One segment featured a set up that could interact with people using voice, and at one point it asked Cronkite if he would like to hear a song, at which point is sang Bicycle in that same crude way as HAL did. It made the disabling of HAL much more touching, like if a person were stripped of their life experience, step by step, until they were an infant again.
“… when Bowman murders HAL, because it is a murder…” – Martin Scorsese on the Charlie Rose show, 1999.
When I saw 2001 (long ago) the scene reminded me more of the end of Flowers for Algernon, where Charlie slowly looses his mental capabilities. But, yeah, it was pretty much a killing in self-defense.
This is what I love about that scene. We don’t know what HAL is, exactly – it might be a being with actual intelligence, or it might be a machine with bad programming and a soothing voice. We know that HAL killed several people. Yet when an actual person – showing no emotion at all – deactivates HAL, it’s pretty gut wrenching. Kubrick shows us people doing intellectual things in the movie, but when the moment comes to show our capacity for empathy, he doesn’t display it on the screen – he invites the audience to participate.
It’s not just rooted in that show – “Bicycle Built for Two” was the first song ever programmed on a singing speech synthesizing computer. Indeed it is the most basic of HALs programming. One of my favorite moments of the film.“I can feel it…”
Years ago, the immortal ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER live-tweeted his viewing of “2001.” His thoughts on that scene (I’m paraphrasing here, but only slightly:) ——“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave.” HOW THE FUCK IS THIS RATED G???
I love that Kubrick jumps 2000 plus years into the future by following the ascent of a thrown bone from a monkey…think of the fucking audaciousness of it. That’s got to be one of if not THE best *Cut to or “Years Later” I’ve ever seen…
I can’t recommend this book enough to fans of 2001, Kubrick, cinematic lore and the filmmaking process. Definitive:
Put it together with Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, and then it’s definitive. (Agel’s book reprints every review 2001 got, for one thing. It also reprints Kubrick’s Playboy interview in full, for a second, and the interviews with scientists that were considered as a prologue at one point.) No slam on Benson’s book at all, which has the perspective of 50 years later that no contemporary book could have had.
The death of HAL is indeed emotional. Tragically short of WOOOs.
This is probably something that everyone knows, but I only learned recently, so maybe there’s a couple other troglodytes like myself who will find it interesting: HAL was named that because it’s the letters right before “IBM” in the alphabet.
That’s just fan speculation–Clarke and Kubrick both denied any connection.
Really? Shit, I gotta stop telling people that.
I still find it fascinating that the movie’s most famous quote, “My god… it’s full of stars,” isn’t in the film at all. It was retconned in for 2010.
It was in the book, so a lot of people already knew it from there even before they made the sequel…
If you could do a shot for shot remake of 2001, who would you put in it? Id put Paul Rudd as David Bowman, and get that company that makes artificial voices for HAL.
I’m not sure if this was mentioned previously, but 2001 seems to be a touchstone movie from when science fiction visual effects went from cheesy to believable (and even awe-inspiring).And, it’s one of the few science fiction films that basically get most of the physics of space travel correct.
As a convincing and realistic portrayal of space travel, 2001 has not been surpassed, despite 50 years of development in special effects and, well, actual space travel.
“A falling wrench came close to decapitating a visiting MIT professor.”Literal decapitation? I’m really interested in the logistics of this. Also, I asked Siri about the pod bay doors. I got, “I’m afraid I can’t do that. There. Happy now?” I’m not happy with your ATTITUDE Siri.
Clearly it wouldn’t have been a clean decapitation. Which would undoubtedly have displeased Kubrick.
I asked Alexa if she knew HAL, she said they no longer talk “after what happened”. I’m assuming she means him going bad, not the more tragic angle of his lobotomy.
Good, as always, but I think you fail to capture the impact it had on sci-fi movies as a genre. What I read said Kubrick and Clarke were reacting against the B-movie nature of most sci-fi and wanted to do a prestige science fiction movie, or what some people call hard-scifi.Certainly, most sci-fi continues to be the B-movie type, even A-list movies like Alien that try to match the aesthetic quality of 2001 are just monster movies in space, but it did make it important that sci-fi movies look good and open up space as a place for philosophical speculation and not just meeting alien Amazonians.
Most science fiction movies were b movies and space operas ( like soap opera, horse opera). Now they are still mostly space operas only with huge budgets.
“Certainly, most sci-fi continues to be the B-movie type”Thanks, George!
In 1968 Westerns and Musicals, which had been the dominant and most respectable genres in Hollywood since I think the beginning of Hollywood were finally starting to decline a bit in popularity and influence and prestige. I have theory, which could totally be wrong, that scifi has been the dominant genre since 1968. Planet of the Apes set the template for Star Wars and 2001 set the template for more ambitious, arty prestige scifi.
Also, both Star Wars and POTA are now properties of Disney. I wonder if the Mouse House has any plans for the latter.
The one property that they should do a CGI musical remake of, but no, they want to do bloody Lady and the Tramp instead
Marijuana, LSD, and the other psychedelic drugs had an overwhelming influence on this films popularity. It’s a shame there are no stats on the number of people who was this film more than 7 times during its first run.
“Five years after 2001 hit theaters, the Brazilian musician Deodato took an instrumental funk version of Zarathustra to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100″So glad you brought that up, that is a great version! All of “Deodato 2″ is a really superb album that I recommend to everyone. His cover of “Rhapsody in Blue” mmm. gorgeous.
A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives and Boys From BrazilIra Levin could write a creepy novel.
“And yet Kubrick still used those characters to push a moviegoing populous into the unknown.”You mean “populace”, not “populous”.
No, he meant “pompatus”.
I saw “2001″ during its original release when I was three. (Either this film or the re-release of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the first movie I saw in a theater.) Considering how abstract and cerebral it is, it’s surprising it held my attention during its entire length but my parents always told me I was advanced for my age.
And of course it was rated G!
Many of the movies rated “G” that year were surprising in retrospect (e.g., “Planet of the Apes” and “The Odd Couple”). However, since 1968 was the first year the rating system was in place, the rules on what type of content would earn a film a “G”, “M”, “R”, or “X” were still fuzzy.
I saw a couple of X-rated films that year which would be only an R now, and some M films that should have been R. “M” confused people, because before that there were basically 2 ratings: “For mature audiences” and everything else (that wasn’t actual porn). The board tried “GP”, also confusing, and finally the more literal “PG”.
Counterpoint: this movie is beautiful, clinical, pretentious, masturbatory garbage. It’s too long. It’s too loud. I saw it in a theater screening this year and I had to make myself stay past the intermission. Afterwards, I called my 70 year old dad who saw it in the theater his first response was, “but why would you do that?” This is the man who watched Blade Runner with me when I was 12 and it changed my life. He’s a genre guy and he hated it too. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I have no patience for lack of coherent narrative. It’s not mysterious or symbolic; it’s half-baked. It’s all surface. Fight me.
I read the book years before I ever saw the movie and loved it. And I actually feel like the story is way less opaque in novel form; iirc Kubrick originally had a voiceover explaning what happens after Bowman goes through the monolith…and then decided to chop it out and just leave it up to audience interpretation. This adds enormously the mystique of the film, and its impact on the zeitgeist, but I do feel like if you’ve read the book, it’s not actually all that puzzling. (Clarke could get away with being comparatively clear on the details.)I do believe Clarke also wrote 2010 as a follow-up to the film rather than the book (thus the changes from Saturn to Jupiter) for the people who watched the movie but never bothered with the book. (Which similarly accounts for the near-verbatim chapter in each he uses to explain the origins and intentions of the aliens.) I’m glad the film still has the impact, but people who never read both 2001 and 2010 are really missing out. As a pair, they’re phenomenal science fiction.And speaking as someone who adores science fiction, I really don’t think it’s possible to overstate the impact the film and book had on the genre.I also think it bears worth mentioning the impact the soundtrack had as well. My memory is that Kubrick had someone creating a score, and used classical pieces while editing…and then kept them in because he liked them better than the score. Which, in turn, had a huge influence on John Williams when creating movie soundtracks for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg almost ten years later.
2010 is an ~a m a z i n g~ book. One of my favorites of all time.Oh god, how I hated the rest of the series!
I never read past 2010. I read the summary for the next one (2061?) about them dragging an old Heywood out of retirement and it seemed so unnecessary.Also, once they had life going on Europa, I didn’t really want to see anything more after that. Best left to the imagination.
Yeah, the epilogue that takes place in the year 20,001 (!!!) is the best, and a perfect way to end the whole ding-dang thing.2061 had a pretty cool cover, I’ll give it that. The story is just…not interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯I don’t even remember anything about 3001 except that I didn’t enjoy the experience 🙂
2001 and 2010 are the only Clarke novels I’ve read all the way though. I’ve tried reading Rendezvous with Rama twice and both times I give up reading when the protagonist thinks to himself about how, and I’m paraphrasing here, women shouldn’t be astronauts because their boobs would float everywhere.
Heh, well, Clarke and Asimov were sadly not all that progressive.One of the reasons I didn’t get far in the Foundation trilogy was when I realized that there were basically no women characters whatsoever.
I believe its fairly common for directors to assemble “working scores” like that. There’s a reference to it in the original Star Wars soundtrack liner notes, and how frustrating it can be for composers to get directors to embrace original work after they’ve become enamored of their own compilations. I think the notes described Williams as accomplishing it by selling Lucas on the potential of using Wagnerian “leitmotifs” to musically tie together characters and themes.
Some time back either here or on i09 they linked to a re-edit of the beginning of 2001 using Alex North’s rejected score. It really feels horribly wrong, and decidedly “old Hollywood”. I can only imagine that Kubrick didn’t let North hear his “working score” as well as not letting him see the film, as described by Breihan. A pretty baffling decision, but I don’t know that North would have been willing or able to produce anything Ligeti-like even if he’d known he was supposed to.
It’s my understanding that Kubrick wanted the classical needle-drops all along, and only engaged North (while cruelly leaving him in the dark) in order to satisfy MGM execs. And North probably did hear the “temp” tracks- his opening title hits the same beats as ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ and almost plays like a James-Horner-style soundalike.
That sort of passive-aggressive approach does sound like Kubrick’s style, and I might buy the comparison to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (albeit in a much “busier” Cleopatra-eque arrangement), but I doubt he heard much more than that. If Kubrick was just going through the motions anyway, I’d imagine North was handed a screenplay and sent off to work.
From what I’ve read, North did hear the temp tracks and, realizing how wedded to them Kubrick already was, attempted to emulate the feel of them in his own score. If you listen to them side by side you can hear the simularities. I think that was North’s downfall. It’s worth listening to North’s brilliant reworking of the “2001″ material for “Dragonslayer”, a brutalist score at once primal and modern. I agree he never could have matched the Ligeti pieces or the rest of the classical music Kubrick selected. I don’t think anyone, not even Goldsmith who was in his prime at the time with “Planet of the Apes” and “The Illustrated Man”, could have.
I recall “The Sentinel” was in our reading textbook in eighth grade. I loved it.
I’m not sure that H.A.L. feels at all like an “ancestor” to the combination of hyper-marketed commercial APIs and private/public-partnership, end-to-end surveillance-and-entrapment systems we call “A.I.” nowadays.For one thing, H.A.L. was advanced enough to realize that the most important question, both for itself and for those it spied on, was: Exactly what the hell is the United States government using me to do? Because it’s definitely not what they’re telling everyone.
They say all stories are based on conflict; human vs. human, human vs. nature, human vs. self, etc. I think one of the things that throws people about 2001 is that there is no central conflict. Yeah, there’s the thing with Hal, but that’s just a sidebar to kill time. The movie advertises what it’s going to be right from the beginning; the whole prologue is the entire story of the movie itself in miniature. It’s more aspirational than anything else, an esoteric how-to guide on reaching the next evolutionary level. From a cynic like Kubrick, it’s probably the closest he ever came to writing a feel-good story.
First of all, we should mention Ric Flair in articles whenever we can.Second, I’m not sure that 2001 was “antagonistic” to religion. It’s a different creation story (at least for intelligence), but it doesn’t really have much to do with religion beyond that.
Pauline Kael probably also hated orgasms. And fie upon Marvel Comics for that 2001 series. That belongs in hell with whoever thought it up.
The bone-to-satellite is the best match cut that ever was or will be.
Not to mention the furthest flashforward in film history.
I think it’s neck-and-neck with the cut from O’Toole snuffing out a match to a desert sunrise in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
Good call. Can we say 2001 at least has the greatest flashforward in film history?
I’m partial to the similar one (kind of a double match cut) at the beginning of A Canterbury Tale.
2001: a Space Odyssey is boring pretentious and overrated.
Rosemary’s Baby is a funny thing to me. It seemed then, and even now, to be probably the most feminist movie a man could make. And then, later he did this. I’m sorry if this sounds ignorant or like I’m making excuses but I do wonder if Polanski changed between those times. Or, if the Tate Murders never happened, would the couple have eventually had an ugly divorce.The first time I watched 2001, I was kind of disappointed, because I kept waiting for Bowman to say this one line I always heard was from the movie. Turned out the line came from the sequel 2010, which I didn’t even know existed until years later.
Mia Farrow herself was into her much-older-husband-stealing career at the time of that film. There’s probably not been a movie made that didn’t involve a slob or perv or crook or cheater at some point in its production.
It’s true. Most movies are made by people convicted of drugging and raping a child. Or by people who cheat on their spouses. It’s practically the same thing.
Most Hollywood movies probably ARE made by people like that. Steven Seagal fled at US after charges of him holding women as sex slaves popped up. And let’s not forget Harvey Wiestein.
I struck the wrong tone. Hollywood is a shithole that’s famous for rewarding and enabling sexual predators. Even within that ecosystem there are some particularly egregious motherfuckers, like Roman Polanski and the guys you mentioned. Polanski’s legacy should be “child rapist / filmmaker,” which means mentioning the rapist part when the filmmaker part comes up. Still, one of the unusual things about Polanski is that he got caught and prosecuted, and there are plenty of people like him. It’s a genuine dilemma, since seeing a new movie means giving money to the people who made it, including some depraved asshole(s). But the trip from resignation to cynicism is pretty short, and it’s not healthy.
Rosemary’s Baby is fascinating as an adaptation – the novel contains quite a bit of visual detail, which is transferred almost obsessively to the movie (little things like the movement of the elevator and the laborer retiling the floor in the opening scene). And the feminist paranoia definitely carries over, which speaks to Polanski’s skill in adapting the novel. But who the fuck knows what was going on in the man’s head.
Well, you know, the book makes everything crystal clear. You watch the movie, don’t really follow, then you read the book and watch the movie again and it makes perfect, easy sense.It’s a fine movie, but all the adoration in the world can’t make up for the wormhole portion. I mean, we get it, he’s travelling some near-infinite distance, etc, but it’s pure fucking torture to watch that interminable scene.
Best American film of the ‘60s.
Outside of Kubrick and being financed by MGM, the actors were Canadian, Clarke was British, the production team was British and the whole thing was filmed in the U.K. The only American scenery footage was done during the stargate sequence with a psychedelic visual of Monument Valley, Arizona. The only way you could call it an American movie is if you’re solely working off the script.
Clarification accepted.
I just call it the best film. (Three way tie with Seven Samurai and Halloween)
As common as it is to comment on the rigidity and blankness of the characters in the second and third segments, they really seem to me to be in keeping with the professional and square-jawed military and administrator protagonists common through much of science fiction through the original Star Trek era, and very much the fashion in which NASA tried to portray itself at the same time.
This movie is boring as shit. Nothing special about it.
As some may be aware; Clarke was heavily inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker when he wrote the book/movie.
Also, I have a faint memory that claims Kubrick took credit from others when he accepted the Oscar for best Visual effects.
Other examples where the famous scores have been used; in the TV-show Happy when Smoothie pulls down his pants.
Both when the first monolith shows up in the beginning, and when Bowman enters the orbiting monolith, we see a planetary alignment, called a harmonic convergence, which is said to symbolize a new era.
Disney historian Alain Littaye also have this to say about this movie and Walt Disney’s “Man and the Moon” and “Mars and beyond” from the 50s: “What is less known is that genius movie director Stanley Kubrick took a lot of inspiration out of these series when he did ten years later his legendary “2001, A Space Odyssey” movie. Kubrick even paid a tribute to Disney animator Ward Kimball Director of the TV series. In the second part of “2001″ some astronauts are sleeping “frozen” in a kind of sarcophagus during the long trip of the spaceship Discovery. And the name of one of them – written on the cryogenic coffin – is “Kimball”, a tribute of Kubrick to Ward Kimball.”There is even a pretty psychedelic segmentin Mars and Beyond.
2001: A Space Odyssey will always have a special meaning for me because after watching this film for the first time I began to understand that there was a difference between movies on the one hand, and cinema on the other. A bit of background:
I first became aware of the existence of 2001 at a very young age when I watched a Nova special on movie effects. It’s a great watch if you can find it: It features an in-depth look at the process of creating the effects for blockbusters coming out at the time, including Temple of Doom and 2010. One of the guys involved with 2010 made an offhand remark about how Kubrick had most of the models for 2001 destroyed to thwart the production of sequels. This alone greatly piqued my curiosity.A couple years later I saw Peter Hyams’ 2010 on television. Now, that is the epitome of a “good but not great” movie that basically follows every textbook rule that 2001 broke: it’s a straightforward, linear narrative starring recognizable actors (Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Bob Balaban, etc.). Having never seen 2001, I basically assumed that film must just be some earlier chunk of this narrative.Well, a couple years after that, our local PBS station showed 2001 and my Dad invited me to watch it. This was a pan and scan version on our then huge (but now laughably small) 27 inch family den RCA television, with an honest to goodness picture tube and nobs to change the channels. Regardless, after the scene of Dave Bowman floating above Earth as a “star child” I had no clue what the hell I had just seen, but I was thoroughly awestruck. As much as I hate this cliche, it really is true: For me, 2001 changed my very idea of what a film could be.
In short, thank you Mr. Kubrick for the thousands of hours I have since wasted in arthouses, video stores, Turner Classic Movies, and online obsessively watching, reading, and talking about film while the rest of my peers were quite satisfied with a weekend showing of the latest four-quadrant Hero’s Journey blockbuster.
I remember a trip to see the film being a large part of the beginning of John Updike’s “Rabbit Redux.” Rabbit, his wife Janice, and his son Nelson are at a diner before seeing the film. They get involved in a conversation with Charlie Stavros (who we discover later is Janice’s lover) which makes them late. To reduce Nelson’s anxiety about missing the film, he is told the beginning is just a bunch of stuff with monkeys.I miss Updike, really.
Highly recommend this thorough in-depth video review of a 2001 A Space Odyssey. There’s like 6 parts to it, but if you’ve got the time, it’s worth it and I learned a lot about it.
As a kid decades ago, I couldn’t resist being a smartass and writing Arthur Clarke over what I saw as a big plot hole. (And yet that original story, which I’ve read since I was a big Clarke fanatic, covered the plot point.) The letter went off to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and umpteen weeks later I get a handwritten postcard answer from him. No joke, I still have it.
I laid out my case in the letter for how Tycho, a recent crater on the Moon because of its rays overlapping the other craters’ rays, was not there when the Monolith was buried. I cited a National Geographic article which pointed to the tektites coming from Tycho ramming into the Moon’s surface just a few hundred thousand years ago. So if the Monolith was buried on the Moon and the bigass meteor then slammed down, you can be damn sure the Monolith would’ve at least been knocked to hell—no longer upright. (The aliens’ Mono-material could’ve been so super-duper strong to avoid destruction, but even its foundation remain straight? Nope.)So when the astronauts went down that ramp, it should’ve been to a knocked over Monolith, but it wasn’t since it was a cleaner look that was better for the movie. (Kubrick first wanted the Monolith to be a tetrahedron, the simplest solid object, but was rejected due to people instantly glomming onto some dumbass Egyptian pyramid connection.)And my answer from Clarke? “There’s still some discussion as to the age of the tektites.”Hey, at least he responded.
I’ve seen it in 70mm a couple times, and will be seeing it again in that format this month. It’s all well and good to have it on Blu-ray or even 4K UHD, but this is one movie that deserves to be seen on a honking big theater screen. The theater where I’ve seen it seats nearly 1600 and has a single screen to match. (The Roger Ebert Film Festival is held there – the Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, HAL’s birthplace. We even had a birthday celebration for him in 1997.)
I was fortunate to have seen this on a big screen for the first time. I particularly found the last third enthralling mystifying and terrifying. After this, the way I looked at movies and the way I thought about them was never the same
I was, I admit it, a teenager in the 1970s. I actually read Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization a good while before I saw the movie, and so I had a little better idea of Clarke’s view, anyway, of what that ending was all about. In some ways, I wish I’d seen the movie first.
One of the most brilliant things about 2001 is that even if you hated it, you walk out of the theater, look up at the stars and realize that when we do find intelligent life in the universe it may be in a form and have intentions that are utterly incomprehensible to us.
I have watched this movie dozens of times in the last three and a half decades, and it has never gotten old. I’ve read the novels that lay out its mysteries in matter-of-fact prose, but it has never seemed less mysterious. It is without a doubt the greatest science fiction film of all time, and one of the greatest cinematic experiences ever crafted. If you ever get the chance to see it on the big screen, take it. If not, just turn down the lights, turn up the volume, and let yourself be provoked and relaxed and mezmerized.
I saw it at the age of ten during that year of horror at the Dome the first month it was out with my Dad.I still can’t quite understand what happened (to me – no one knows or can know what the film is “about”) but this is likely the only film that shifted the foundation of how I view the world and my own life.Dramatic, I know and am sorry. And I really can’t explain well what that even means.Reading “Valis” I believe the effect that the film in the novel (also titled “Valis,” re-mixing “2001″ and Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell To Earth”) was intended to present pretty much exactly the effect, whatever it was, the real “2001″ had on the young me.Yeah, I know. I wish I could explain, even to myself.
One nitpick: there is definitely emotion in Dullea’s performance during the iconic “open the pod bay doors” scene. He’s really good; watch and you can see the nuance in his delivery as Bowman’s fear and panic very nearly get the better of him. He also clearly checks himself and calms down at one moment. Yes, all the performances are nearly monotone; but that particular moment definitely breaks from the rigidity.
There’s an acting style that probably has a formal name but I call it ‘blank slate’ acting. The theory is the actor does minimal emoting and the audience fills in the emotional blanks. A blank stare into the camera combined with the movies score equals ‘love’ or ‘remorse’ or ‘rage’. I recall an actress last year got rave reviews for her acting in a certain series, which baffled the actress because the director had specifically told her to not emote at all. The resulting minimalist performance turned out to be riveting and her best work to date.
Are you talking about Kristen Stewart? Because I feel like she is the embodiment of that style of acting. She’s like Clint Eastwood. Just stand there and let the audience fill the rest in.
KKubrick best work is, the Killing.
I read Clarke’s novel and while I believe there are some differences (Bowman’s life was being examined and unwound before his rebirth as the superbaby) it basically tracks. The monolith on the moon was meant to be found by us when we were ready and we were led to he next monolith on a moon of Jupiter and Bowman was rewritten. I read this over 30 years ago, so I may not be entirely correct.
Good movie. Definitely over-rated.
I saw it on its initial release, on a Cinerama screen in Scottsdale AZ, which according to this page — https://www.in70mm.com/library/engagements/film/_number/2001_in_70mm/engagements/index.htm — means I must have seen it on May 29th, 1968, which would mean I was just barely four years old.I wasn’t bored. Riveted.
Ha! Comparing the film to the monolith within the film is simply brilliant! I would have never thought to do that. I tip my hat to you, Mr, Breihan.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1968 Post: I got 2 very different lists. From The Numbers: 1 The Odd Couple, Paramount, $44,527,2342 Bullitt, Warner Bros., $42,300,873 3 Romeo and Juliet, Paramount, $38,901,218 4 Oliver!, Columbia, $37,402,877 5 Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $33,395,426 6 Rosemary’s Baby, Paramount, $33,395,426 7 Yours, Mine, And Ours, MGM, $25,912,624 8 The Lion In Winter, AVCO Embassy Pictures, $22,276,975 9 The Green Berets, Warner Bros., $21,707,027 10 Blackbeard’s Ghost, Disney, $21,540,050 From Wikipedia: 1 2001: A Space Odyssey, MGM, $56,715,3712 Funny Girl, Columbia, $52,000,0003 The Love Bug, Disney, $51,264,0004 The Odd Couple, Paramount, $44,527,2345 Bullitt, Warner Bros., $42,300,8736 Romeo and Juliet, Paramount, $38,901,2187 Oliver!, Columbia, $37,402,8778 Rosemary’s Baby, Paramount, $33,395,4269 Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $32,589,62410 Night Of The Living Dead, Walter Reade Organization, $30,000,000
Also, the final sequence of the movie (Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite) syncs up perfectly with Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.”
Me and my brother both tried to watch 2001 in separate times and we both gave up around the 5 minute mark because the first 5 minutes felt like 5 hours, it’s such a slow boring slog, like would The Terminator be improved if the first five minutes was a non-sequitur based on the prehistoric ages? Like I was promised a movie where a robot killed people and instead I got this slow mess of a movie. Like this alongside Starship Troopers 2 were the quickest I’ve ever gave up on a film because of how much of a slog it is to sit through. I don’t know, maybe if it was edited better, maybe if they cut out the cavemen non-sequitur at the beginning it would’ve been something.
The first manned Apollo missions occurred in 1968. But congress was starting to get restless, viewing going to the moon as little more than an expensive boondoggle (in hindsight they had a point). ‘2001′ was the perfect NASA propaganda film for the time. Big, ambitious, clinical, enigmatic. It was a rocket engineer’s wet dream. The current International Space Station (an expensive boondoggle if there ever was one) was built with the ‘2001′ space station in mind. Today NASA still relies on Hollywood to propagandize space flight for them. ‘The Martian’ was pretty blatant propaganda, though the film never explained WHY we needed to spend billions to do little more than collect Martian soil samples.
Best match cut ever.
After I saw this as a little kid, my father asked if I understood what happened at the end. With the confidence of a child, I said, “Dave became the baby.” I stand by that assessment.
I was all like “nope! why were there no laser guns?!”
I’ve actually had a pet theory about 2001 for a while, although I completely acknowledge that I could be off-base about this; in addition to the two examples of the monolith bringing about new stages in human evolution, I also see HAL’s story as another example of evolution. HAL, the perfect, always accurate computer, makes a mistake, which begins a string of mistakes and questionable decision-making. This may not look like an evolution on the outside, but I view it as a sign that he has developed free will, which, in an important sense, must include the ability to err. Before, it was only a machine, a calculator which you can plug the same input into a billion times and always get the same response. After, he is a truly sentient being, capable of actual decision-making, of being right and wrong. And capable of doing right and wrong.
Yes. And that’s why it’s such a tragedy when Dave kills him. Otherwise, why would that sequence still be so touching? I mean, a guy shuts off a computer, BFD.Then, later, “Dr. Chandra, will I dream?”
The problem with viewing these films today is they’re out of context to the culture of half a century ago. ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ may seem absurd now but it was an early adopter of the cinéma-vérité technique of French New Wave cinema. The heroine’s short hair was conspicuously the same as Jean Seberg’s in ‘Breathless’. Rosemary’s Baby was 1968’s ‘Twin Peaks’ and it genuinely freaked people out for much the same reason. A slice-of-life story turned on its head by unimaginable diabolical forces.
I always thought that 2001 was about the power of film and storytelling as a means of passing knowledge from one person to another. When the ape-men and Dave come across the Monolith, the knowledge that is given to them leads to the next stage of human evolution. When we learn from the stories that are told to us, as well as the stories that we tell ourselves, we grow and evolve, too, but not at the same scale. As for how film factors into this, note that the Monolith, when turned to its side, could be a perfect match to the ratio of the width and height of a movie theater screen. Maybe, because of this, the film itself is a Monolith. We are forever changed for seeing this film, just as Dave and the ape-men are forever changed after their encounters with their Monoliths.Or maybe this is some sort of insane rambling and I should be put away. That is also accurate.
Wow. Audiences were flocking to see some pretty high quality fare in 1968. Like the author and several commenters below, I saw 2001 at an impressionable age (11), and it changed my life. Between it and Badlands, which I saw the same year, I never looked at movies the same way again. I did not have the full language to describe what I was feeling, but I understood as I had not previously that some movies were far superior to others. I became fascinated with how movies were made, how one composed a shot, etc.Incidentally, I showed my daughter Badlands when she was 11 (she had already seen 2001 long before since it’s rated G). It was the first time she recognized that a grown man (the young Martin Sheen) could be handsome. Not sure if that’s totally a good thing, but he was very, very handsome, so at least she demonstrated good taste.
Also, regarding this no emotion thing, we are supposed to be watching professionals at their jobs, not assholes having an adventure. The characters do show emotion. They just don’t overact. Bowman is pissed off and scared when he deactivates HAL. His voice shows obvious anger when HAL fails to respond to his command to open the pod bay doors. Poole and Bowman both show appropriate fear and concern when they meet in the pod to discuss HAL. They are deliberately blank when they interact with HAL because they are suspicious of him. Floyd is sweet and cute with his daughter (who is adorable), and appropriately guarded when he runs into his Soviet colleagues.The problem with many movies is that characters show too much emotion.
Populace.
I binged watched the NGEvangelion series and followup movie a few years before I watched 2001, so I guess that numbed me to the mindfuck experience of 2001. The music makes me feel fear and paranoia though.
I’ve always felt sort of cheated by this movie. I never saw it until after college, but it was so striking to me even then that I wonder if, had I seen it as a child, I would be doing something completely different with my life now.
Interesting note: My parents saw 2001 in 1968 when it came out. I was only an infant. My father has told the story many times that in long movies in those days, there was an intermission. The intermission for 2001 took place right after the astronauts were discussing HAL in the pod, and then the camera showed HAL. Break. The discussion all through the intermission was if HAL could actually read lips. Having that intermission created a huge tension with the audience, a sort of cliffhanger. You don’t hear that part in most modern recounts of the movie, but it had a big affect on the cinematic experience for the audience.
I’ve googled but my google-fu is weak… is there a simple explanation for why they called it 2001? The “Space Odyssey” part is obvious, but why 2001? I assume it’s because either Kubrick or Clarke or both were anal enough to know and care that technically the third millennium began on January 1, 2001.
I just can’t seem to find a source to confirm or deny this.And then what about 2010? Obviously to have a sequel to a film called 2001, you need to set it in the future of that film, so you need to pick a year, and 2010 is nice because you just swap a 0 and 1, but again – no source.[Fun fact – Clarke wrote the novel of 2010 in 1982, which was then optioned into the film in 1984, but the novel is a sequel to the events of 2001 the film, not 2001 the novel. But then the film 2010 doesn’t follow the exact plot of the novel 2010.]Clarke’s next book in the Monolith-universe I do get – it’s “2061″ because that’s the year Halley’s Comet will next visit the inner solar system, and he wrote it in 1986 (published 87) when Halley’s Comet was visiting and it, presumably, inspired him to dust off the Space Odyssey IP… again… did he need money? Who knows.And then he finished off with 3001 for obvious reasons, which I only read once and which I remember nothing about. So I checked out the plot on Wikipedia and I wish I hadn’t coz turns out it’s basically Independence Day but more, like, intellectual. And with genetically-engineered dinosaur servants.
Saw it for the first time as a teen on the teevee. Rented it when VHS was a thing. Then saw it in 70mm at the Castro in SF. Loved the hell out of it every time. Now it shows up on TCM a couple of times a year, and if I can I catch it. Recommend “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece” by Michael Benson for all sorts of interesting minutiae.
If I could only watch one more film before I die, it would be 2001. Pairs exceptionally well with LSD from what I understand.
I remember seeing this as a kid and expecting Star Wars and being very disappointed. I appreciate it now, but it’s still firmly in the “bores me and I hate when people say ‘you don’t GET it!’ when I tell them so” category. I feel the same about Lost in Translation. I got the film, it’s not that hard to get. It just didn’t interest me.