From the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, It's Retro Nerd Girl with a film review for you.
Today I'll be reviewing the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey released in 1968.
Starring:
Keir Dullea (pronunciation sounds like: care du-lay), Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Directed by:
Stanley Kubrick
Genre:
Adventure, Mystery, Sci-Fi
Rating:
G
Budget:
$12,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb Rating is currently:
8.3
The Synopsis is:
This film is a grouping of short stories that lead to the evolution of man into a superbeing starchild.
Story:
Director Stanley Kubrick contacted Arthur C. Clarke about making a science-fiction movie and Clarke suggested a story he did in 1948 "The Sentinel" written for a BBC competition, about finding an alien artifact on the moon.
They both worked on the screenplay together and finished in 58 days. But at the same time Clarke worked on the book that was released a bit after the film as not to confuse initial audiences and give away any surprises.
Stanley Kubrick acknowledged the influence of producer George Pal's films especially Conquest of Space released in 1955 citing what life would be like in space, a vast vision of space travel and it even has a very similar looking a rotating space station demonstrating the precision of man’s design.
In the story there are four distinct acts:
- The Dawn of Man
- TMA-1
- Jupiter Mission
- Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite
This film has been considered very confusing and lack luster experience to many people upon first viewing. But to their credit, Arthur C. Clarke once said, "If you understand '2001' completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered."
So if you’re confused by the story, that is exactly what the filmmakers intended to do.
Pacing:
At 2h 29min it pacing is awful. But on the other hand, if you can patiently watch this film, you may come to appreciate that the scenes really hold on for a long time to show you every detail of its impeccable special effects… showing them off in fact.
Challenge:
The challenge in this film is often non-distinct and much of this film is really up to you own interpretation.
At first you may think that the challenge is the appearance of the mysterious black rectangular structure that appears out of nowhere referred to in the book as the monolith. In the film, it’s never named and the mystery of its presence is not explained either.
Every time the monolith appears something evolutionary happens and we aren’t told if it is causing it or simply observing it.
There are lots of theories about the story, but l lean towards the thought process that the monolith is causing it the evolution.
I think the monolith is a kind of portal for aliens to send programing to evolve the ape man. Their programing is in the transmission of sounds and in the film, the music transmitted is the requiem, a series of nonsensical operatic and orchestral sounds that are disorienting and disturbing to the audience.
I think that the aliens controlling the monolith are striving to advance man to the point that they can eventually communicate with us.
The sun and the crescent moon aligned with each other was a symbol of the eternal struggle between light and darkness. As we have the monolith evolving mankind out of darkness and into the light of advancement.
At first the monolith gives birth to the ape man and his use of tools to master his world, then reveals a transmission signal that leads to a star gate at Jupiter.
The outright memorable villain in the film appears in the third act of the film in the form of HAL 9000, a spaceship computer used in the mission to Jupiter.
Hal is a heuristically programmed algorithm computer and according to the film, the most reliable computer ever made and refers to himself as a conscious entity.
The error in Hal’s performance is a human error because he is a tool and the fault in the tool is always how it is constructed or used.
There is an actual error in his programming that makes him report a false malfunction. This is the paradox that makes HAL react irrationally acting on self preservation.
He’s quite a memorable villain because he is understated in his demeanor. All of the humans in the film have no cause to fear him and in fact trust him with their very lives. It truly made me feel awful seeing him kill off the members of the crew. It was quite chilling.
Nerdy fact: As Hal dies, he sings a song which is a vaudeville song that was the first song ever programmed into a computer to be played back using a simulation of speech synthesis in the IBM 7094 at Bell Labs in 1961.
Empathy:
The empathy is strange because there are many characters in the film that you really don't get attached to any of them until the very end.
The ape man fights animals for food, other apes for food and becomes food. The leader of the ape men is Moonwatcher. When the strange monolith shows up, Moonwatcher now sees common objects around him such as an animal bone as a tool so can kill for food, protect his turf against other ape men and defeat his predators.
There is an infamous transition into the next sequence of humankind in the film where in the bone tool of the ape man is compared to satellites in orbit around the earth thousands of years later.
The second story follows Dr. Haywood Floyd who is on the way to the moon to investigate the appearance of a 40 million year old monolith buried 40 feet below the surface on the dark side of the moon.
We get to know a little bit about his life as a father and a scientist, but we don’t get any hints about his character, or his personality. I believe his story is meant to set up the next story.
The monolith, it emits a high pitched sound… a radio emission to aimed at jupiter. The humans believe that it is a rendezvous point to meet or discover alien life.
The next story segment begins 18 months later. A team is sent to jupiter on a top secret mission. 3 of the team is in hibernation until their services are needed and 2 other team members are Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole, in charge of overseeing their travels.
The humans are cold and barely acknowledge each other. It’s frank’s birthday and his dad manages to get him a pay raise and frank has no reaction to it. It is almost as if the film is commenting that the evolutionary growth of man removes the emotional state.
Because the emotional connection in the humans is missing, the audience isn’t really upset when Frank dies. It’s sad, but it doesn’t break your heart.
And David Bowman seems to be slightly upset when he discovers that Frank has been killed, but he isn’t broken up about it. He just sets into his mission to disconnect Hal so that he can gain control of the ship with the use of another tool, a screwdriver.
David becomes a hero and you really root for him as he is struggling to survive against HAL. We don’t know much about him, but most of us share a universal desire with him to want to survive.
Technical:
Stanley Kubrick involved himself in every aspect of production and consulted the best science experts of the time that the film predicted the invention of the ipad, skype, voice recognition, utilizing computers to manage daily life and companionship.
One of the most notable effects of the film are the scenes in space and how according to what we know about space today, it all seems accurate.
In fact, the effects were so good, that people have wondered for years whether or not the first moon landing was real and if it was staged by kubrick himself.
The film was made 9 years before Star Wars and the first believable space voyage depicted on screen. It’s just gorgeous and still holds up today.
Having calculated that it would take one person 13 years to hand draw and paint all the mattes needed to insert the assorted spacecraft into the starry backgrounds, Kubrick hired 12 other people who then did the job in one year.
Filming all of the special effects shots took a total of 18 months.
Rather than using bluescreen, Stanley Kubrick filmed all the model shots against black backgrounds and required the compositing work to be done by a team of British animators painting travelling mattes by hand frame-by-frame to mask out each element. When production ended, most of the animators signed onto Yellow Submarine (1968) in order to work on something colourful after spending two years painting little black blobs.
It took Stanley Kubrick and his crew months to figure out how to make the pen float during Dr. Haywood Floyd’s trip to the Moon. They couldn't come up with a wire fine enough not to show up on film. Finally they taped the pen to a glass plate held in front of the camera. If you look closely, when the stewardess plucks it out of the air, you can actually see her pulling it off the plate.
The film's spaceships were models made from wood, fiberglass, Plexiglas, steel, brass and aluminum. The fine details that forever would change the look of space on the screen were created with heat-forming plastic-cladding, flexible metal foil, wire tubing and thousands of tiny parts taken from hundred of plastic model kits--everything from railroad cars and battleships to airplanes and Gemini spacecraft--bought at a European toy fair. The fine details made it possible for the cameras to get as close to the models as possible with no loss of believability.
To create the space travel at the film's climax, Douglas Trumbull combined aerial footage of Monument Valley, Utah, shot through colored filters, with other aerial shots originally made for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). He also invented a split-scan effect by keeping the camera's shutter open to expose a single frame of film while he moved the light source toward the camera to create fantastic light patterns.
The soundtrack includes quotations from four pieces by György Ligeti ("Aventures", "Requiem", "Atmosphères", and "Lux Aeterna") used without Ligeti's permission, and the composer did not find out about it until he attended the movie's Vienna premiere.
Of course, Ligeti sued.
However, the music is an outstanding feature in the film proclaiming many moods of grandeur during the story telling.
I didn’t mind the classical music, but I did not care for the requiem, the song that emits from the monolith. It sounds like a series of vibrating hums, operatic choir warm up sounds and orchestral gibberish. It was very disturbing for me personally, and maybe it was intended to be just that because it really gives you a sense something is otherworldly about the monolith.
Performances:
The performances are great, but the only actor you really get close to is Keir Dullea who plays Dr david Bowman. And he played it well being very logical and matter of fact-like stoic hero.
Best:
The star gate is my favorite part. I could probably watch that scene for hours and hours. It’s so hypnotic. I love it. Someone should loop that for 10 hours on YouTube. Heck, it’s probably done already.
Wish List:
I am not sure that I could wish for anything that wouldn't change the value in this film so I digress.
Even the pacing as bad as it is, is the reason why the film has such gravity. (No pun intended)
The ending:
The ending is nothing short of imaginative and inspirational.
At the rendezvous point in jupiter space, the monolith appears and the stargate opens. The film doesn’t tell you it’s a stargate… we get that information from the book that was written and some of the language used to describe scenes in the film by the filmmakers. So for many people who saw this movie back in 1968, they had no idea what was happening. Without an explanation it seems so disjointed.
David travels through the gate and then get to the alien planet. We get to see a little bit of the landscape.
Once on the alien world David is placed within a holding cell, that looks like a gorgeous luxury room where the aliens can observe and program David.
You can also clearly hear sounds, like animal grunts, humming, strange noises of an alien language perhaps. These little details are just full really fascinating to me and I just wonder what’s really going on here. The imagination can go anywhere?
The monolith appears to David is on his deathbed. He sheds his human body it becomes the Starchild.
At the very end, is the Starchild observing earth and the audience has so many questions.
Enjoyment:
I really like this film a lot, but it isn’t one of my favorite films of all time. I definitely appreciate the art, craft, genius, and amazing features that this film accomplished in its day and how it still impacts us today. It’s a gorgeous film and it’s definitely one of those films that you just simply must see.
Stanley Kubrick had style and a vision for composition framing great moments in the film with music, anticipation, taking visual risks that one had ever seen before done so well.
And the cool thing is that I believe that this film is itself a monolith, raising questions and inspiring viewers.
My Rating:
9
That sums up my review. I hope you liked it. This is Retro Nerd Girl signing off!
Take care movie lovers! I'm off to the next review!
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