Film Review : 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY * * * *
2001; A Space Odyssey(1968)
CAST Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Douglas Rain
DIRECTOR Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubricks "2001: A Space Odyssey" is a masterwork of human evolution. From the origins of man to the dawning of a new race. It encompasses imagery as its main storytelling vehicle and it allows us to rely on our own conclusions.
The film opens with the famous"Dawn of Man" sequence. We see different clans of primative man fighting with prehistoric boar over plants to eat. We see them resting and mingling giving us a glimpse of their every day lives. One night the ape men see a black rectangular object that awes them. Slowly they are drawn to the object and begin to touch it. This brings on some kind of excitement within the group. The next day one of the primates picks up a bone and discovers it can be used as a weapon. Kubrick uses his camera like a paint brush, slowly allowing us to see the picture come in to focus. The monolith brought intelligence and the next step in to human evolution.
Kubrick then uses a brilliant jump scene to advance us into the future. A caveman hurls a bone in the air and it transforms in to a spinning space station in space. Dialogue is minimal making us rely on imagery and our imaginations to follow the story. Kubrick doesnt baby sit us, and he allows us to use are minds, trusting us to come up with our own ideas and theories.
The story is this. A monolith like in the beginning has been discovered"deliberately buried" in the core of our moon. Men our sent to investigate and are apparantly killed or something. We jump ahead eighteen months to the Jupiter mission, where five astronauts are sent to investigate a much larger monolith in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Only two are awake, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Fank Poole. They are kept company by an onboard computer called HAL9000. Hal is an intelligent, independant thinking machine. He is so human like you can hear his own personality emerge in his conversations. Hal makes an error on a satellite malfunction and the crew question his abilities. Hal is aware of this and he begins to take matters in his own hands.
The ending of the film is the best in film. A psychedelic journey for David Bowman that leads him to an open book of his life cycle. Kubrick never tells us anything point blank in his film. He allows us to see just enough for us to make up our own minds on what really happened. The film is a one of a kind that will have any the most patient movie watcher scratch their head in wonder. I can count on one hand the number of movies this special, simply because movies are not made like this, ever. It is a study of mans origin and mans destination, for which none of us know.
Blackie, I hope you won't mind if I offer some alternatives to some of the things you say in your paragraph that begins, "The story is this".
First, the monolith found on the Moon isn't at the Moon's core, it's about 20ft below the surface of the crater Tycho. Secondly, the men who investigate the monolith aren't killed, they are simply deafened through their spacesuit radios by a strong radio signal the monolith sends in the direction of Jupiter. Thirdly, it is strongly hinted (in the marvellous scene in which Bowman shuts down HAL's brain) that HAL's breakdown was caused by a logical conflict in his programming, having to do with the secrecy he must maintain about the mission's goals.
Glad to see you review this film, which I, and many others, consider to be one of the great landmarks in cinema history.
Well.. I was trying to be vague in my description as to give first time viewers of the film a natural response to the film.
And as an aside, I've recently discovered that that SPOILER tag works everywhere except in the actual list/poll itself (not sure if it works in articles). I'll fix that soon. In the meantime it works in comments and discussion posts.
To quote a well-known dunderhead, "D'oh!"
The trouble with me is that I'm very literal-minded and so I tend to naively take things at face value.
There's no trouble with you Bertie. You're THE MAN!!!