I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was about sixteen, and for a long
time, like several decades, it remained my favorite movie.
There was the sequence at the beginning with man’s apparent
evolutionary forebear, who discovers a solid rectangular object, and in short
order, learns to kill. (Like they weren’t predators prior to that, right?) But,
okay, we’ll go along, and recognize that the writer-director wanted to make a
point about moral progression in humans. We jump forward in time to our own
near future, where we encounter human settlement on the Moon, and sure enough,
there’s the same monolith, causing the same kind of curiosity and alarm. Then
the movie takes a completely different direction, and we join Keir Dullea and
Gary Lockwood on their mission to Jupiter. HAL the computer gets a mind of its
own, people start dying, yada yada, and then the real fun starts.
Kubrick takes us on some kind of metaphoric journey as the
Keir Dullea character ages before our eyes, in rather sterile (symbolic?) circumstances,
and then dies, and then circles Earth in outer space, an embryo in orbit.
When I first saw this, I was awed. There wasn’t anything I
could find fault with, and kind of enjoyed the freedom it gave me to speculate
about meanings. But of course, I was sixteen years old, and the movies I had seen
before that did nothing to prepare me for it. I have seen it since, and there
are parts, particularly when the astronaut battles HAL, that seem so slow as to
be interminable. If Kubrick did that on purpose, what was the purpose? Yes, the
silence of space is realistic, and the scientific/technical effects of this
part of the movie hold up pretty well even today, but … geez! Now, I think of
this movie as interesting, personal, experimental, and pretty self-absorbed. I
think there’s a danger, into which a lot of reviewers fell, of taking this
movie way too seriously. Because I don’t think Kubrick had a very exact point
in mind. I think he wanted to play around a little bit, explore some
metaphysical territory while making a man-in-space epic, and generally play
around with some special effects. Do you guys think that’s too dismissive?
I don't think that's too dismissive. 'Dismissive' is a word I wouldn't use if I were discussing how my changing maturity level affected how I viewed a film later on in life. I guess, if you felt that way after viewing it for the first time, maybe.
ReplyDeleteFor me, an important sci-fi-type of movie in my early stages of transitioning to en soi was The Matrix. I'm not sure the "favorite movie" description fits as much as "very important movie" for me. It lit a philosophical fire under my ass with its basic Cartesian dilemma and (Norm and) I hit the ground running from there.
Watching it later--even in 1999--and now, the pacing is so much slower than I remember, but that could be do to the effects of cannabis those first few times Norm and I saw it in the theater.
While I don't think the Wachowskis are on Kubrick's level as filmmakers (few are)(the "Speed Racer" movie?), I do think it took a little daring to discuss Cartesian metaphysics in an action movie--as a central tenet even--and to mix it with live-action anime direction.
In any case, did you hear? The Brothers W are making the movie for David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas".
I feel like I have more material about this topic inside me...