2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

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Rating: G
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark
Stars: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Release Date: May 12, 1968 (United States)
Run time: 2 hours, 29 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki

In a prehistoric veld, a tribe of hominins is driven away from a water hole by a rival tribe, and the next day finds an alien monolith. The tribe learns how to use a bone as a weapon and, after a first hunt, use it to drive the rival tribe away.

Millions of years later, Dr Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the United States National Council of Astronautics, travels to Clavius Base, an American lunar outpost. During a stopover at Space Station Five, he meets Russian scientists who are concerned that Clavius seems to be unresponsive. He refuses to discuss rumours of an epidemic at the base. At Clavius, Floyd addresses a meeting of personnel to whom he stresses the need for secrecy regarding their newest discovery. His mission is to investigate a recently found artefact, a monolith buried four million years earlier near the lunar crater Tycho. As he and others examine and photograph the object, the sun hits the monolith, and it emits a high-powered radio signal.

Eighteen months later, the American spacecraft Discovery One is bound for Jupiter, with mission pilots and scientists Dr Dave Bowman and Dr Frank Poole on board, along with three other scientists in suspended animation. Most of Discovery‘s operations are controlled by HAL, a HAL 9000 computer with a human-like personality. When HAL reports the imminent failure of an antenna control device, Bowman retrieves it in an extravehicular activity (EVA) pod, but finds nothing wrong. HAL suggests reinstalling the device and letting it fail so the problem can be verified. Mission Control advises the astronauts that results from their backup 9000 computer indicate that HAL has made an error, but HAL blames it on human error. Concerned about HAL’s behaviour, Bowman and Poole enter an EVA pod so they can talk in private without HAL overhearing. They agree to disconnect HAL if he is proven wrong. HAL follows their conversation by lip reading.

While Poole is floating away from his pod to replace the antenna unit, HAL takes control of the pod and attacks him, sending Poole tumbling away from the ship with a severed air line. Bowman takes another pod to rescue Poole. While he is outside, HAL turns off the life support functions of the crewmen in suspended animation, killing them. When Bowman returns to the ship with Poole’s body, HAL refuses to let him back in, stating that their plan to deactivate him jeopardises the mission. Bowman releases Poole’s body and opens the ship’s emergency airlock with his remote manipulators. Lacking a helmet for his spacesuit, he positions his pod carefully so that when he jettisons the pod’s door, he is propelled by the escaping air across the vacuum into Discovery‘s airlock. He enters HAL’s processor core and begins disconnecting most of HAL’s circuits, ignoring HAL’s pleas to stop. When he is finished, a prerecorded video by Heywood Floyd plays, revealing that the mission’s actual objective is to investigate the radio signal sent from the monolith to Jupiter.

At Jupiter, Bowman finds a third, much larger monolith orbiting the planet. He leaves Discovery in an EVA pod to investigate. He is pulled into a vortex of coloured light and observes bizarre astronomical phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colours as he passes by. Finally he finds himself in a large neoclassical bedroom where he sees, and then becomes, older versions of himself: first standing in the bedroom, middle-aged and still in his spacesuit, then dressed in leisure attire and eating dinner, and finally as an old man lying in bed. A monolith appears at the foot of the bed, and as Bowman reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus enclosed in a transparent orb of light, which afterwards floats in space above the Earth.

My Review:

2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie for film makers and serious film reviewers. It’s a movie that was meant to be experienced in theaters. It’s simultaneously weird, entertaining, and sublime – even today. In a lot of respects, the movie feels more timely than it ever, addressing concerns over artificial intelligence, the inexplicable development of human consciousness, and strange intelligently built objects on places where humans have never set foot.

Kubrick’s movie is more of an experience in film art than usual cinema. Despite the long runtime, dialogue for this film is at a bare minimum. Long stretches of 2001are either entirely silent, filled with discordant sounds, or filled with the film’s bombastic classical music score. The movie is a masterpiece in cinematography, with outer space filming that looks good even almost sixty years later. In fact, the scenes on the moon are as realistic as the NASA moon footage that came out a year later. Kubrick has a particularly trippy scene toward the end of the movie as Dave seems to pass through a kaleidoscope of colorful scenery, while passing onto what seems to be a higher plane of conscious. The moment is a callback to the similar moment, earlier in the movie, as man began to emerged from lower primates.

What is Kubrick saying with this movie? That’s a harder question to answer, than is normal in a film, because he eschews normal narrative conventions by limiting dialogue by such a great degree. My main takeaway is that it asks us to question the nature of consciousness. We see this as we meet primates, early humans, advanced humans, and a highly advanced artificial intelligence. Did the primate have consciousness before contacting the monolith? Did HAL have a consciousness despite being a computer? Why or why not? Kubrick doesn’t answer the questions he raises, either. 2001 then ends on something of a cliffhanger, with Dave passing through old age (is it still Dave?) and then becoming a fetus again but perhaps no longer a human one.

I enjoyed the movie, but it’s not something I’d be particularly eager to watch again soon. It is long, the scenes with the discordant audio were painful for my ears, and I don’t know that I need to dwell on the nature of consciousness on a regular basis. That said, I recommend that everyone see it, for the sheer artistic genius and realism in the cinematography if nothing else. 2001 looks so good that it might have you questioning whether Kubrick filmed NASA’s moon landing footage when you’re done.

Have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? If so, what did you think?