Digging into the Classics: a series of posts exploring cinematic classics that I’ve missed or I have turned away from
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Very late to the party, clearly.
I’ve seen this movie probably twice before in snippets caught haphazardly over the years but permanently hamstrung by my staying power to get through the sheer length of it. For a 2 hour 20 minute movie, it feels a whole lot longer - minutes worth of black screen where strings and voices swirl threateningly are great for atmosphere in short doses but here end up bordering on torture treatment not unlike a less interesting version of A Clockwork Orange.
Ponderous doesn’t begin to capture it really, does it? Glacial comes close but is probably still too expedient sounding a term. That said, I do feel conflicted criticising the movie on the basis of its pacing. While it may deliberately take its time in drawing the scene and giving a sense of scale to the events, narratively the movie positively blisters through millions of years worth of story.
Kubrick gives a sense of gravitas to almost every scene, which is appropriate in spades where it aligns with the thematic content but is utterly bewildering and frankly, fucking boring when it doesn’t. The level of care in the detail and science of how deep space exploration works was revolutionary for its time, I imagine. I don’t think any movie has come quite this close to depicting the true banality of space travel as well as this, yet not made the entire thing a waste of the audience’s time by boring the living fuck out of them - though it did come perilously close to losing me more than once.
In terms of brave storytelling the dawn of man sequence seguing into modern man’s next awakening or stage of evolution is still powerful today, even if the message gets somewhat muted in the delivery by a whole series of fairly pointless scenes on the circling doughnut space station. I get that Kubrick likes to portray almost all facets of human interaction as meaningless bureaucratic twaddle while the interactions of machines and the emptiness of space are filled with a childlike wonder and sense of true beauty, but what that does is distance the audience from any human core in the storytelling and makes the experience cold yet enjoyable, like an academic pursuit.
The ending is ultimately a source of concern for me though, and I can’t help thinking it fails to satisfy what comes before it. In building a picture of man’s evolution through alien and machine interaction in such bold, broad strokes that then gives way to a bad acid trip and playing with the perspective of time in a disco floor hotel room through the lens of one man (who we never really know and hence can’t care terribly about) feels like the grandness of the tale lost its way in the conclusion.
Also, Kubrick’s unwillingness to spell anything out causes needless confusion… is the monolith over Saturn the same one that was on the Moon or a different one? Did he “enter” the monolith or did the alignment of the planets (a sequence repeated twice before) trigger the “beyond the infinite”? Is there something in the planetary alignment that speaks about a higher force yet again? Is mankind bound to evolve into Star Children or is it the new “monolith” for the next evolutionary step? I don’t know, and no one does clearly as evidenced by the number of theories that abound on the internet.
Ultimately it was an interesting but unmoving experience. I doubt I’ll ever revisit it and while I can appreciate the level of technical craftmanship involved in the project, it doesn’t feel complete to me.
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