- 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
- Film (1968). Prod/dir Stanley KUBRICK, starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood. Screenplay Kubrick, Arthur C. CLARKE, based loosely on Clarke's "The Sentinel" (1951). 160 mins, cut to 141 mins. Colour.Originally in Cinerama.This was the most ambitious sf film of the 1960s and perhaps ever. Kubrick's unique production, which received a 1969 HUGO, takes several traditional sf themes - including the idea, derived from Charles FORT, that "we are property" - and spins from them a web of pessimisticMETAPHYSICS. In prehistoric times the mysterious arrival of an alien artefact, a black monolith, triggers primitive ape people into becoming tool-users; the first tool is a weapon. The transition to the AD2001 sequence - marked by the resonant image of a bone weapon thrown (in slow motion) into the air and becoming a spaceship - suggests that, for all the awesome complexity of our tools, humanity itself is still in a primitive stage. The idea of human deficiency in the 21st century is reinforced by the deliberate banality of the dialogue and the sterility of the settings; ironically the most "human" character is a neurotic computer, itself subject to Original Sin, HAL 9000. A second monolith discovered on the Moon beams a signal at one of the moons of Jupiter and a spaceship, theDiscovery, is sent to investigate, but, through HAL having a nervous breakdown, only one of the astronauts (Dullea) survives to reach the area. There he embarks (through a "Star Gate") on a prolonged, disorienting tripthrough what appears to be inner time and INNER SPACE, pausing to meet his dying self in an 18th-century bedroom, and becoming the foetus of a Superbeing, an optimistic apotheosis - with its suggestion of atranscendent EVOLUTION, directed by never-seen ALIENS, or perhaps God - in an otherwise dark film.Aside from its intellectual audacity, 2001 is remarkable for a visual splendour that depends in part on astonishingly painstaking special effects. Conceived by Kubrick - notoriously a perfectionist - and achieved by many technicians (pointing forward to the huge teams that would work on the special-effects blockbusters of a decade later), these mostly employ traditional techniques. Instead of such modern automatic matteing processes as the blue-screen system, hand-drawn mattes were produced for each effects frame at the cost of two years' time and much money, which is why this method is now rarely used. Innovative in another way is the setting of romantic MUSIC by Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss and Gyorgy Ligeti against much of the technological action, givingthe paradoxical feeling of a cool romanticism and reinforcing the film's ambiguities. The present 141min version, cut from the 160min preview length, should be viewed in the full wide-screen 70mm format (2001 was one of the early films designed for Cinerama).The tension between Kubrick's love of oblique allusion and Clarke's open rationalism is resolved in the latter's book of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey * (1968), whichwritten after the film's completion - provides clear explanations in Clarke's usual manner. He described his connection with the film in The Lost Worlds of 2001 (coll 1972), which also prints alternative script versions of key scenes. The film sequel, based on another Clarke novel, was 2010 (1984).PN/JB
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
