Posted by Monkeys. Monkeys growling and screaming and beating each other up. That was my first thought when I first caught a glimpse of Stanley Kubrick’s epic, genre defining and incredibly famous science fiction film, a movie he made in an attempt to make the proverbial “good science fiction film” (his words). I was very young, and the film was airing on Channel 4 in the UK on a very late night time slot and I was a little afraid to watch it because my aunt, who I was watching it with, warned me of something violent happening to one of the monkeys. Of course as I got older I learned that they weren’t actually monkeys, but in fact man-apes, so I was getting a little bit of an education from the movie as well.
They may have looked a little weird and creepy to me at such a young age, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. I was on edge and very afraid and my heart was beating out of my chest, especially when that weird black thing (The Monolith) showed up accompanied by creepy music (Lygeti’s Atmospheres) all of which was shortly followed up by the moment when, in probably one of the greatest moments in the history of cinema (which this film has a LOT of), one of the man-apes learns how to use a discarded bone to beat up other bones and then promptly uses it on one of his rivals in what appears to be an argument over water.
Of course, we all know what happens next. The bone is thrown into the air, and then, through the course of the single most famous edit that the movies has ever given us, we jump forward to the future and the bone has turned into a space platform, allegedly referred to in Arthur C Clarke’s source novel (although written in tandem with the movie since Clarke was collaborating with Kubrick on the production) as a nuclear weapons platform.
Everything about 2001: A Space Odyssey has entered the lexicon of film history that it seems silly to even actually be writing about it for this movie “bucket list”/classic list, but if you’re going to recommend a genre movie and make it the first of such a list, then you should really start with the film that took what was viewed as a B-Movie genre and then legitimised it by having a director take said genre and turn it into Art (that capital letter is not an error, but very much deliberate because this movie is Art).
The use of classical music, evocative production design, dazzling camera work, storytelling that is filled to the brim with ideas, Stanley Kubrick may have set out to make the proverbial “good science fiction film” but he ended up making one that ended up being representative as the greatest of the genre. Influential to many of the greats who followed in his wake (Christopher Nolan and James Cameron in particular who made their own variations of the film in the equally beautiful shapes of Interstellar and The Abyss), 2001 is still the benchmark for science fiction cinema.
This isn’t a film to be simply watched. You experience it, you take it in and whilst you may or may not love it, its ideas and themes will stay in your head, whist the scope of its world building and story threads mean it’s joined the pantheon of important films that changed the medium. The movie is awash with ideas and philosophies, and whilst it’s more interested in those, as well as the technologies at the heart of it, as opposed to people, it does so without compromising itself or simply becoming just a visual exercise. The Nolan and Cameron movies may have more heart because they put their characters front and centre, but the craft of the film making going on in 2001, especially for a film made in 1968, is quite frankly sensational.
After my first viewing, of which I may not have been in double digits, I can’t exactly remember, I found the film a haunting, troubling experience, but one which I strangely loved and couldn’t get out of my head. I had no idea what the hell it all meant, in fact I still don’t know what it all means, but I understand enough to enjoy everything about it. Arthur C Clarke in an interview claimed that if you understood it all then he and Kubrick failed in their intentions.
Abstract, mysterious and beautiful are the main words of the day here. There is in fact not even a “central” character. Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, played by Kier Dullea and Gary Lockwood, are probably the closest, but they don’t appear until nearly the halfway mark and it’s clear that Kubrick’s focus is more on the ideas and themes rather than the people. Bowman himself is probably the film’s categorisation of a “lead” but really only because of the “trip” he takes at the end, supposedly the reason why some patrons who paid to see it in theatres would take illicit substances because it added to the final act’s psychedelic effects. In reality, the actual “central” character could be said to be Hal-9000, the psychotic, softly spoken computer whose death scene, even for a psychotic computer, proves incredibly moving due to the use of the song Daisy, Daisy. For a character represented by one shot of a camera lens with a red dot, he always feels strangely personable, especially for a machine, at least, especially in comparison to the human characters, a delightfully dark joke that lies at the heart of the film, which was no doubt not lost on Kubrick. The vocal performance from Douglas Rain remains one of science fiction’s most famous.
Like all classic movies, the film has been spoofed and referenced in everything, most famously The Simpsons. If you’ve never seen the movie before, but have seen Homer Simpson in space eating potato chips whilst on a NASA mission, or going into a strange psychedelic tunnel whilst testing out a vibrating chair, or man-ape Homer learning about goofing off when discovering the Monolith, then you’ve experience some of 2001.
For anyone with even a passing interest in genre cinema, 2001: A Space Odyssey should be experienced. You may not enjoy it, or love it, but it is something that should be viewed once in your lifetime and if you can, try and do so on the largest screen you can. This is a film made for the big screen. To quote Christopher Nolan, it’s pure cinema.
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