2001: A Space Odyssey

Whenever you see a very old but very widely acclaimed movie for the first time, it can be tough to view it with a truly neutral and passive eye. All too often, there's a desire to like the movie and to appreciate it because it's what so many people before you have done. Or, if the movie just isn't clicking for you, there's a sudden impetus to take things in the other direction, to hate the film, to dub it "overrated," and to feel at least somewhat counter-cultural for doing so. But 2001 was just too weird, too unique, too ahead of its time, and too dated all at once for me to either emphatically like or dislike it. This is a movie that came out in 1968. That's before man had ever even walked on the moon. (Or - fine, I'll entertain the conspiracy theorists - before the government ever tricked us into believing man had walked on the moon.) The movie depicts a "future" 2001 in which the space age has really taken off and traveling to the moon is commonplace for civilians. On the one hand, we can certainly forgive a movie from the past for having a very optimistic view of the future. On the other... did Kubrick really think in 1968 that mankind was 33 years away from space colonization? But I guess the year in question doesn't really matter. Pretending this film takes place in 3001 instead of 2001 takes nothing away from it, and remembering that it was made back in 1968 is what's important. The special effects used in 2001 were seriously impressive. This was nine years before Star Wars, which seems to have set the precedent for space age special effects, and it holds up just as well to this day. So no matter how I look at it, 2001 was a very impressive filmmaking feat, both in hindsight and also contemporarily. But that story... so ambiguous. So strange. So light on narrative. The first twenty-five and final twenty-eight minutes of the film contain no spoken lines at all. They're fairly engrossing and visually engaging, for sure, but it cuts nearly an hour out of any expository or conclusive story that can be told. Now, without dialogue the film remains visually stunning and is loaded with iconic scenes and moments. There are also a number of well-made musical montages of sorts; at one point a number of man-made satellites spin through space to "The Blue Danube" for a few minutes, and frankly, it just plain works. Actually, the whole film "works." But it still gets extremely weird before it ends. I don't even want to ruin anything by trying to describe it, but if you've seen 2001 you know what I mean. Apparently the novelization of 2001 was written in parallel with the film's development, and provides a much better narrative to the story than the film (while the film provides musical and visual storytelling that the book simply can't). I'm definitely at least somewhat interested in reading the book someday and finding out just a little bit more about the monoliths, HAL, and that giant floating space fetus. The book even has three sequels that further expand the mythology and story of Kubrick's futuristic universe. Maybe they're all worth a read. But of course, due to the current heft of my backlog... not yet. Not yet.