2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - film review

Millions of years ago, a tribe of herbivorous apelike hominids discover a mysterious black monolith which immediately exerts a strange influence over them.  They learn how to kill other animals, to fashion bones into weapons and to assert their control over the world around them.  Cut to the year 2001 AD, and Dr Heywood Floyd arrives at an American base on the moon where a remarkable discovery has been made.  Buried just beneath the lunar surface is a large black monolith which is transmitting radio signals to Jupiter.  Eighteen months later, spaceship Discovery One is en route for the planet Jupiter.  Whilst three of the crew remain in hibernation, two others – Dave Bowman and Francis Poole – have been revived.  The ship’s life support and navigational systems are controlled by its HAL 9000 computer, a triumph in artificial intelligence which the crew affectionately refer to as Hal on account of its apparent human personality.  When Hal incorrectly diagnoses a failure in part of the ship’s communications system, Dave and Francis conclude that the computer may be malfunctioning and agree that it should be deactivated.  Hal isn’t going to let that happen and decides that it is the human crew which must be deactivated...

There are very few films that can rightly be described as visionary, in terms of both accurately predicting the future of our civilisation and redefining and reinvigorating the art of cinema.  Stanley Kubrick’s visual epic 2001: A Space Odyssey is one such film, arguably the finest science-fiction film ever made and certainly one of the most influential and important films of the Twentieth Century.  It is extraordinary to think that a science-fiction film made before man had first set foot on the moon should still be so highly regarded, with special effects that even the latest generation of computer generated wizardry have yet to surpass.   

Buoyed up by the success of his earlier dystopian fantasy Dr Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick envisaged making what he considered to be the first serious science-fiction film.  In his view, all previous examples of the genre were marred by unconvincing effects, absurd plots and grotesque caricatures.  By the mid-1960s, scientific reality was rapidly overtaking science-fiction, with major strides in science and technology revolutionising the lives of millions and radically altering our view of the world.  The arms and technology race between the US and the Soviet Union was gathering momentum, prompting the American government to commit unlimited resources to sending a man to the moon by the end of the decade.  This quantum leap in scientific reality would have to be accompanied by a comparable leap in science fiction if the genre was ever to be taken seriously again.  Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey provided just that – the first modern science-fiction film.

Work on the film began when Kubrick contacted the writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1964.  Clarke had already acquired a reputation as a visionary and a maverick and proved to be the ideal collaborator for a director with similar traits who was in search of a storyline that was both imaginative and scientifically plausible.   The writer sold Kubrick several of his short stories, one of which, The Sentinel, provided the basis for the film.  Over the many months that followed, Kubrick and Clarke worked closely together, developing a screenplay and novel in parallel.  Clarke would later write three further sequels to this novel – 2010 Odyssey Two (made into a film by Peter Hyams in 1984), 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

On the strength of Kubrick’s reputation, MGM committed a budget of six million dollars and were initially very optimistic about the venture.  This optimism did not last long, as Kubrick’s perfectionism saw the shooting schedule slip alarmingly and the production costs spiral out of control, ultimately reaching ten and a half million dollars.  When the film was initially released, it received mixed reviews – some critics praised it as one of the greatest movie experiences ever, others dismissed it as being boring and pretentious.  When the film failed to attract an audience in the first few weeks of its initial release, the distributors were ready to withdraw the film and write it off when, inexplicably, the box office receipts suddenly took off.  The film grossed 15 million dollars in the United States alone and would achieve similar returns across the globe – success that can be attributed to an accelerating public interest in the NASA lunar project and the burgeoning psychedelic youth culture.  

2001: A Space Odyssey is best known for its groundbreaking special effects which still manage to amaze audiences and confound those working in the industry today.  These include the use of front projection (where a background image is projected onto a half-silvered mirror in front of a studio set and reflected into the camera), slit-scan (an electronic feedback effect used for the stunning Star-Gate sequence) and model shots that were the most ambitious and convincing ever realised at the time.  For the sequences in which one of the astronauts walks around the interior of the Discovery One spaceship, a full-size Ferris wheel was constructed.  The wheel was rotated with the actor walking on the spot to create the illusion of an astronaut walking around the inner circumference of the wheel, apparently under the influence of centrifugal force.

The effects are just one part of the film’s visual magic.  Equally impressive is the way in which shots are composed and edited together, the best example being the celebrated jump cut that takes us from the prehistoric era to the space age, an animal bone becoming a nuclear weapon orbiting planet Earth. 

Since there is so little dialogue, background sound and music are an essential component of the film.  Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube Waltz played over balletic shots of space vessels effectively suggest a species that has arrived at the pinnacle of technological and social advancement, but with a sense of irony since what we also see is man’s smallness in a vast, seemingly barren cosmos.   Equally effective is the use of Richard Strauss’s Auch sprach Zarathustra, to underscore key stages in man’s evolution, coinciding with the discovery of the mysterious black monoliths.  This latter music is particularly appropriate for the film since it was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s book of the same title which explores the idea of man becoming a superman, losing his primitive superstitious beliefs and acquiring a deeper understanding of the forces of the natural world.

It is a testament to the imagination and discipline of the film’s authors that many of the scientific developments the film shows us have become scientific fact.  The film’s prediction of routine space travel may be somewhat optimistic but its portrayal of video-phones, artificial intelligence and manned flights to other planets in the solar system are either reality or about to become so.  Anyone who regularly interacts with the Windows operating system will identify with Dave Bowman and his fraught relationship with his computer.   "Please open the frigging file!"  "I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that..."

One thing which continues to vex and bemuse spectators is the film’s ambiguous ending, which seems to defy any attempt at rational explanation and has inspired a veritable mountain of literature offering various interpretations.  Originally,  Clarke and Kubrick envisaged a more conventional denouement in which Dave Bowman finally got to meet the aliens who had been thoughtlessly littering our solar system with those hazardous black obelisks.  Kubrick was reluctant to portray the aliens as the familiar men-in-costumes and couldn’t agree with Clarke on a suitable ending to the film.  In the end, the money ran out and Kubrick made a virtue of necessity by crafting a more abstract and mystical ending which invites the spectator to draw his own conclusions.   

What we see is astronaut Dave Bowman approaching one of the strange black monoliths in orbit around Jupiter.  As he does so, he passes through a light tunnel in space and ultimately finds himself in a futuristic room furnished with antiques.  Here, he sees himself age and die.  On his deathbed, the astronaut sees a monolith and is transformed into a Star-Child that watches over the Earth.  A masterfully composed piece of abstract cinematic art, this climax to the film is both poetic and poignant, although its precise meaning remains elusive, changing subtly on each viewing.  

One possible interpretation is the film’s ending depicts the union of two notions – the mortality of one individual man versus the immortality of the human spirit.  Only when man learns to reconcile these two things will he be at peace with the cosmos and then fully appreciate the true value of existence, without the need for superstitious beliefs and fanciful self-delusion that goes by the name religion.  This seems to tie in with the less ambiguous themes in the earlier part of the film – man’s evolution from a savage animal to a civilised being and his ultimate dependency on machines that acquire human-like characteristics.  The unifying theme is man discovering his identity, taming his savage nature and thereby achieving a kind of atonement with creation.

No single film has ever had the impact on a single genre that 2001: A Space Odyssey has had.  Every single science-fiction film made subsequently owes something to this film, one which completely changed viewer expectations of what the genre should offer in terms of realism and visual impact.  Both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have acknowledged the influence of Kubrick’s film in their own important contributions to the genre, Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  Watch a sci-fi film or TV series today and you can be pretty sure to see something of Kubrick’s masterpiece in there somewhere.

© Chris Alderton 2009

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