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Film Review by John Demetry
2001: A Space Odyssey was originally released in 1968. Re-released in 2002, it's still ahead of the times. The late filmmaker Stanley Kubrick surely creates A Space Odyssey - an epic comedy about film space! Kubrick puts human folly and glory into hilarious 70mm perspective. Only a most perverse satirist elides the evolution of man from ape man to space traveler with a single cut - a graphic match of a bone flying through the air with a spaceship waltzing to "The Blue Danube."
The Blue Danube sequence opens with a spaceship waltz
Maybe animated TV series The Simpsons best prepares audiences for enjoying "2001". "The Simpsons", with its numerous references to this famous edit and other moments from 2001, appreciate Kubrick's monolithic wit. Like The Simpsons with TV, 2001 challenges mainstream expectations of movies. Most special effects movies since 2001 (from Star Wars to Titanic) have sunk audience sophistication. With 2001, Kubrick intended to raise spectator consciousness into the hysterical heights of the cosmos. Its truest heirs - Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars and Steven Spielberg's A.I. - Artificial Intelligence - were humanistic and aesthetic advancements, but critical and popular failures. The movie really is prophetic of the changing times. In the same way that the ape men and the space men ponder the giant black slab of alien origin - called "The Monolith" - movie culture hasn't quite known what to do with "2001". A work of almost extra-terrestrial genius, 2001 is Kubrick's most inspired film. The Monolith encourages the apes to use their imaginative faculties. Consequently, they develop the first tool for hunting food - and for war. The evolved humans discover The Monolith buried on the moon - and pose for pictures in front of it. Hilarious Cold War commentary expands to cultural satire.
The Monolith encounters primates on Earth
The restored 2001, prepared by the meticulous Kubrick before his death, is a revelation - and remains relevant. The 70mm horizon is a shocking, salacious solid red ("The Dawn of Man"). In the ape's desert, each grain of sand reflects a yellow glow. At night, a blue light highlights the skin of the apes. This primary-color scheme continues throughout the film. It's the graphic sensibility a film modernist. The opening ape segment prepares the audience for Kubrick's witty choreography of film space. The apes and their environments are recorded in long shots - making full use of the 70mm screen dimensions.
The sequences of space travel, initially scored to "The Blue Danube," constitute a sublime comic vision. Already attuned to scale, color, and imaginative sutures, the audience joins the cosmic dance. In this highly mechanized waltz, it's hard not to have one thing on the mind: sex. Set against the flat expanse of space and the voluptuous crests of planets, phallic space crafts perform teasing mating rituals with orifice-like space stations. One vertiginous camera angle: viewed from inside a rotating space station, a spaceship slowly approaches the landing dock. The stars spin dizzyingly behind the prolonged penetration. Inside the space station, humans seem more mechanized than the machines. The humans make banal, polite chitchat (often concealing more sinister intentions). Identity gets reduced to a voiceprint. Submerged impulses pop up everywhere in the set design. Example: vulgar red furniture decorates the sterile white environment. The meanings the audience project onto the images humanize the film's technology. Kubrick dramatizes this process in the Odysseus-like conflict between astronaut Dave and a spaceship's mainframe computer named HAL. The audience ascribes emotions and thoughts onto HAL's unchanging red "eye." Only HAL interprets the events surrounding the mission to Jupiter.
HAL and David
HAL tells Dave: "Perhaps I'm just projecting my own concerns." Dave rebuffs HAL, thinking that HAL is only preparing a psych report. Such lack of imagination can only hinder the mission. So, HAL lies - and kills. It's the archetypal struggle between the Ass (Dave), who always says, "Yes," and the Lion (HAL) who always says, "No." Finally, Dave says "No" to 'No'." Thus spake Zarathustra! Dave and the audience are now ready for a trip "Beyond the Infinite." An interstellar light show tests perception and erases definitive meaning - a 70mm Rorschach test. Dave's eyes reflect the spectacle. An alien hotel room collapses time and space so that Dave sees himself growing older. This commingling of audience and filmmaker imagination resolves rationality and ecstasy, machine and man, movie and audience.
The Star Child
2001 ends with the grandest visual sexual innuendo of them all. That famous final shot: the "Star Child" floating towards Earth in its luminous placenta. Kubrick's Olympian wit puts man's apparent insignificance into perspective with the infinite significance of the imagination. It feels like The Birth of Cinema. |
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