2001: A Space Odyssey

139 minutes, 1968, Written by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, Directed by Stanley Kubrick (Won the Oscar for Best Visual FX), Starring - Keir Dullea, William Sylvester, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain (as HAL), Daniel Richter (as Moonwatcher). Filmed in Monument Valley, Utah, USA.

Bonesaw thinks
this film is

Ratings Key

This film is open to many interpretations. Clarke once said: "If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered," and they certainly have. This review is only my personal rendering. I've spend most of my time reading other people's reviews and they aren't really that. They're intellectual ponderings of what it all means. It's taken me 2 weeks to sift through just a portion of what's out there on the net and I've yet to see a consensus. One person said, "It's TOO DEEP and complicated for us to comprehend OR something that is so simple that we oversee it."

This is a big movie, a Colossus. When the title appears on screen simultaneously with a resounding cymbal crash, you get a hint of what you're about to go through. And you go through it. Watching it on video is CRIMINAL and that's one of the few things that everyone seems to agree on. To see this film in the theatre is about as close to space travel as anyone of us will probably ever get and remember, it was made in 1968. A full year before Neil Armstrong had stepped foot on the moon. Kubrick showed us what it would be like on the moon before man ever landed there.

2001 STILL holds up better than Star Wars or Star Trek or any space travel film I've seen yet when it comes to what the universe looks and more importantly, feels like. The only scene that dates the film are the transmissions of a crew-member's family from Earth.

If I had to describe 2001 in one word it would be Vision. 2001 was shot in Super Panavision and made full use of the huge, curved Cinerama screen. Sit anywhere in the first ten rows and you'll have image to the limits of your peripheral vision.

Clarke studied technical reports, NASA photographs, or consulted with professionals in the field, to find out what was really known about futuristic communications or about what the Earth will look like when seen from the Moon, or how space suits will be designed thirty years from the time of the making of 2001 as well as what it would sound like in space.

Neil Armstrong has been quoted on the curious sensation of blasting off the moon on the start of his return journey in silence, and the contrast between that and the violent noise of a lift-off from Cape Canaveral.

Kubrick's innovative F/X were ingenious as well. One example is when Heywood Floyd is sleeping on the shuttle and his pen floats into the aisle. To make the stewardess walk so jerkily, the entire floor of the set and the bottom of her space booties were covered in velcro. The pen was attached to a squeaky clean slab of cellophane that a crew member moved around from above. The stewardess simply grabbed the pen off of the plastic.

The atmosphere of 2001 should have been listed in the credits. It's sometimes dark, cold and forboding or bright, large and inspiring. There's a slow, creeping buildup of tension that we're just not used to compared to the pace of most other film experiences. We linger and see things in painstaking realtime. The last 40 minutes of the film have no dialogue whatsoever.

"Thus Spake Zarathustra" (plays during the scene where Moonwatcher discovers tools and when the Starchild is born) was composed by Richard Strauss in 1895 in homage to the contemporary essay by Friederich Nietzsche. "I mean to convey," Strauss wrote, "an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin through its various phases of development up to Nietzsche's idea of the superman." Nietchze's masterwork "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" could very well be 2001. In the book, Nietchze described man as walking a tightrope between the ape and the overman. Zarathustra proclaims that God is dead, and that the time for the overman has arrived. Man must walk the tightrope across the abyss to the overman, the embodiment of the will to power (interpretation by Thomas J. Bogdewic).

And finally here's Vision for ya, the concept of color televisions on the back of airplane seats, picture phones operated by a card, a tiny gun-like, trigger-operated video camera, hibernation or cryotubes, an emotionless machine-like work ethic (man seems to have committed emotional suicide) and a zero gravity toilet that comes with an instruction plaque that advises passengers to read the lengthy, 10-step instructions before use.

So what's it all about? To me, the evolvement of mankind. Some detractors of this film don't understand the importance of "The Dawn of Man" beginning. We watch the apes evolve: shock to fear to anger to impatience to paranoia to calm to contemplation to weapons to rage to carnivore to greed to pride to competition to revenge to power.

The next evolvement that we see is not by man, but by one of man's creations. The HAL9000 mega-moby-uber-zilla artificial intelligence computer. He goes from consciousness to pride to intuitiveness to contemplation to paranoia to sabotage to subterfuge to lip-reading to murder to mass murder to power to denial to defeat. Ever try reasoning with an A.I. that has a superiority complex? Better get them psych books ready.

But the real bump to the next level is man's evolvement to a state of higher consciousness. To realize and confess one's arrogance towards creating a brain seems like the first step.

2001 is a breathless space ballet that pulls you into the screen. Keep your eye out for art houses that might show it the way it was always supposed to be seen, Beyond the Infinite.