This swiftly brings me on to today’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was famously,
shot on 70mm, just like The Master,
but way back in 1968. This didn’t stop it being a spectacular looking film
which earned the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, an Oscar for visual effects.
What perhaps is most remarkable about 2001,
is that audiences marvelled at what it was creating as a future world, showing
huge space ships spinning through space, high tech gadgets, special anti-gravity
shoes and futuristic furniture that no one had really seen before, as science
fiction films were not particularly well established at the time. The visual
effects were so breath takingly realistic and Stanley Kubrick created them without
even using a computer. He used models and manipulation of the film cells to
create his effects, an art which has long since bitten the dust. Before Man had
even landed on the moon, Kubrick had made a convincing and technologically
accurate film about space travel. 
2001 starts off
on Earth in prehistoric times where we watch a family of Apes or ‘hominids’ as
they would rather be known, with the help of a tall, black oblong, learn how to
use rocks and sticks as weapons to kill other animals for food, kick starting
our rapid evolution into Man. We then hop forward a few thousand years to Dr
Heywood Floyd who is travelling through space in a large, rotating vessel travelling
to the moon. We learn that something has been discovered on the moon which is
remarkably similar to the object that appeared before the hominids. A great
amount of mystery surrounds this object – the monolith - which is assumed to be
extra-terrestrial intelligence which is millions of years old and Dr Floyd and
his team are sent to the moon to examine it, only to be deafened by a high
pitched noise omitting from it. 18 months later Dave Bowman and Frank Poole,
two young astronauts, are travelling on board the ‘Discovery’ – a spaceship
bound for Jupiter sending them on a so called ‘training mission’. Little do
they know, they are following up the discovery on the moon 18 months previous. Their space ship is controlled by super
computer HAL-9000 who has been programmed to behave and speak like a human, and
to act as a friend to Bowman and Poole. HAL suddenly starts behaving strangely and reporting
that communication devices are broken when they are not. Things rapidly go from
bad to worse when HAL completely turns on Bowman and Poole and tries to kill
them. Bowman escapes in a small pod and travels through a psychedelic tunnel of
lights and flies over strange foreign lands in a spiralling, trippy sequence
that is quite un-nerving to watch. Eventually he is spat out of this vortex of
light and he finds himself orbiting Jupiter, along with our old friend the
Monolith. It’s about to get very strange now as Bowman lands in a baroque,
French style bedroom. There are no windows, no doors and the floor is made out
of light. Bowman goes through a series of stages in the room, when he lands he
has aged slightly and when he is outside of his pod he has aged even more. 
He
hears a noise and investigates where he sees himself as an old man, eating
dinner. He turns into his aged self and then sees himself on the verge of death
lying in his bed. He then becomes this man and the monolith appears before him.
He is transported through the monolith as a foetal baby where he is reborn as a
master of the universe. I know this may sound like I am making it up, but I
promise you this is what happens.
Kubrick and Clarke had a vision to create the ultimate
science fiction movie and this one has it all. Its meaning is hard to decipher,
especially of the end, but Kubrick didn’t want everyone to been spoon-fed
meanings and philosophies. He left the whole thing completely open to
interpretation and when asked about the meaning of 2001 he would skirt around the question without really giving an
answer. It was a well known fact that Kubrick and Clarke had serious
reservations about the possibility of man creating artificial intelligence,
like HAL, and that we would never be able to fully understand what we create.
So what do they do? They turn HAL completely evil for seemingly no reason at
all, thus making their point.
2001 is
essentially a depiction of the evolution of Man from our most primitive form to
our most intelligent, predicting what Man could be capable of doing in the year
2001. Throw in a murderous computer, a few reprises of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra and a horse
painted like a zebra and you’ve got yourself something really quite special.
Paving the way for great science fiction movies of the
future like Bladerunner, The Alien
Trilogy and even Prometheus, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a ground-breaking
piece of cinema that is replicated time and time again in modern culture. If I
had a penny for every time I saw an inter-textual reference of 2001 in The Simpsons, I’d have enough to
buy myself a Freddo bar. Unfortunately,
it’s not for everyone. It was poorly received when it was released and gained
its fame from a cult following of 60’s youths who found it ‘trippy’ and has
been splitting audiences for the past 44 years. I highly recommend it to
science fiction fans, Kubrick fans and those of you who enjoy something a
little bit different.
The nights are drawing in and the weekends are
predominantly rainy, so why not give it a try? Snuggle up in the warm and
prepare yourself for the ultimate Stanley Kubrick experience…
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