2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

TAGLINE: The ultimate trip

Four years in the making, the movie is loosely based on the Arthur C Clarke short story, The Sentinel, and is often hailed as one of the greatest movies of all time. It is and it isn't. The few pages and sparse ideas of The Sentinel are stretched beyond breaking point into a 188 minute narrative, so the story sucks (basically, it's this - way back in the mists of time, primal apes get all aggressive when they encounter a black monolith which is quite clearly represented as fucking with their heads. Centuries later, that same black monolith is drawing people into space. And still fucking with their heads. A computer fucks with everybody's head. A spaceman goes on a simulated acid trip. The black monolith has fucked with his head. The end. Whatever) The acting is OK - especially the monkeys - and the cast does include Leonard Rossiter but most of the time the actors are just sitting around in large chairs looking by turns stern and confused. There isn't a lot of action. There are, however, plenty of ideas, and cinematic ideas at that (ie not just lifted straight from comic books). it is very much the work of an auteur - a pure realisation of Kubrick's vision.

The film is episodic (like the original Odyssey), a series of set pieces that revolve around different characters and locations. Most of the film is concerned with visual spectacle. As an audience we are fascinated by the details of mise-en-scene, as opposed to performance and narrative.

The creation of 2001... was a process of filming the future. The depiction, shown in such loving detail, of space stations, space craft, space habitation and space protocols, predated the Moon Landings by at least a year, and is still
proving itself prescient in terms of developing computer technology, the space shuttle and deep space probes.

Kubrick and his team paid obsessive attention to detail, and created a whole new world, that while it is clearly science fiction, is always utterly workable and realistic. No more wobbling flying saucers, or pink spaceships that, aeronautically, could never get off the ground. All the creative decisions for 2001... were extensively researched, all designs tested, and the results are utterly realistic. For instance, you can read for yourself the Zero Gravity Toilet Instructions, shown only briefly. They are completely consistent with current NASA guidelines for toilets on board the space shuttle.

Unsurprisingly, 2001 won an Oscar for Special Effects. This is why it is seen as such an amazing movie, because it takes viewers on "the ultimate trip". It acknowledges that cinema may be a purely sensory experience, that plot is just something to link the images together, and that the medium of film may only be limited by the imaginations of those who manipulate it.

2001 paved the way for almost all subsequent great sci-fi films. We see echoes of it in texts as diverse as Star Wars, Close Encounters, Hardware, the Alien Quadrology, Event Horizon, in fact any space film which shows a spaceship in the same shot as a slowly rotating planet. Kubrick proved that film-makers could boldly go anywhere in the universe... and beyond.

 

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