50th Anniversary - 2001: A Space Odyssey Review!

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) returns to theaters in IMAX format for it’s 50 anniversary. To be honest, there is no comparison from seeing at home and the theaters especially in IMAX. It opens with an orchestra warm-up, dissonant chords that wipe away thoughts, then a symbolic MGM logo comes up. We hear the brass from Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, which could be theme for the film, then it blares with drums bringing in an epic quality as the sun rises over the Earth. This literal space opera has a gradual pace, far removed from the Star Wars frantic pace, which really separates it as science fiction, not science fantasy. 

 It is of course directed by Stanley Kubrick, who moved on from this genre, but put a cinematic stamp on one of the best films of all time. There are some sci fi influenced by 2001, but seeing it on the screen for the first time, I will say that you can take Star Wars and all other sci fi and bin them because this film is unrivaled. The closest I think, in terms of space travel is Gravity (2013) directed by Alfonso Cuaron and the more surreal travel scene and extraterrestrial contact is the Robert Zemeckis film, Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel, even combined they fall short of the beauty, reality, and strangeness of this movie. 

2001 is of course based on the Arthur C. Clarke’s story, “The Sentinel”, and turned into a novel at the film’s release by Clarke. He followed it up with 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), and the final book, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). I did read the first book which is a great work of science fiction, but what Kubrick achieved on film which makes it powerful as a cinematic experience superior over reading the novel. What is most important about seeing it in the theaters is the sound. You are surrounded and assaulted by sound, music, the activation of a button, which is all lost at a passive television screening.  

In IMAX, the music is blaring, it fills your ears like a live orchestra. We get the title The Dawn of Man at sunrise and see the vistas of the African plain and the soft howl of wind. The cinematography is by Geoffrey Unsworth who also worked on Cabaret (1972) and Superman (1978). This resolves to a tribe of early men, close to apes, with fur and ape-like faces.  2001 was the same year as John Chambers’ make-up effects with Planet of the Apes, but this groundbreaking prologue had an earlier species with ape speech and nothing too human from what he recognize.  The tribe members had thin limbs with wild hair, not a mere man in an ape suit, with fangs. Tapirs wander close by the tribe members. At the boneyard, a leopard ambushes one member and the others leave. We get the fear of early man with fierce beasts. 

Then, there is the waterhole, when another tribe moves them out. The tribe is huddled in an outcropping, there is very few shots were we get a sense of individuals until this scene, closeups where we get the chimpanzee infant and also very human looking eyes. A leader called Moon-Watcher (Daniel Richter) wakes up to discover the Monolith to the choir singing out almost indistinctly in “Requiem for Soprano” by Gyorgy Ligeti. This would be the theme music of the Monolith. Moon-Watcher's name is identified in Clarke’s novel. He gets others attention by stomping his foot. The leader is followed by the tribe who touch the Monolith.  

The leader at the boneyard picks up a leg bone in what we might assume is the Monolith jumpstarting human evolution. He strikes a tapir skeleton and gets images of a live tapir. Next, there is the watering hole, the other tribe is there and the leader strikes one hapless rival. The others pummel the body with their improvised weapon, the club, and the leader roars and tosses it into the air, slow motion shifting across time, to a space bomb identified as such by Arthur C. Clarke.  n amazing jump cut. We see other weaponized satellites from other nations. The space scenes are to Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz”, very gentle in comparison to the other themes, the music enhances the scenes without intruding on the images.  

There is an extremely minor effects flub with a space bomb moving towards Earth and the sun and there is no moving of shadows or light. It resolves to a Pan Am Orion III spaceplane headed to a double circle of a space station, Space Station V. The shuttle has an arrow shape with wings and is a sleek white. The space station has unfinished sections and the turning of both station and ship is perfect with the waltz. Aboard the craft, is the sleeping passenger (William Sylvester), his pen floats in zero-g. A space hostess (Heather Downham) in a white trouser suit and conical hat (to keep in hair) grabs the stray pen and places it in his pocket.  

She walks upside down and then into the cockpit with the pilots who aligning the ship with the station’s rotation. There is a rotation of a room with another space hostess in pink uniform (Maggie London) and the passenger. The first dialogue we get is the space hostess informing him that they have reached Main Level D and he says he will see her on the return flight. The passenger has to identify himself at the voiceprint identification as Dr. Heywood Floyd of the National Council of Astronautics. Then, we get the “Blue Danube Waltz” as the Aries 1b lunar lander approaches the Moon. The visual effects supervised by Douglas Trumbull relied on the designs by NASA consultants that gives the film an extra layer of realism.    

A space hostess is bringing food trays, but finds Floyd asleep. She slowly walks upside down to enter the cockpit and give food trays to the pilots. Floyd is sipping from the straws on his food trays and then nervously has to read the instructions on how to use the Zero Gravity Toilet. All of the space travel details are put on a typical passenger flight level. The lunar lander approaches the lunar base as astronauts watch it’s descent. I couldn’t help, but see the triangular hatches withdraw look too similar to the Star Destroyer’s profile. The flashing of words like GDE and ATM are like the readouts seen in Lucas’ THX-1138 (1971). 

Floyd has a meeting to debrief members on a situation on Clavius, a crater on the visible side of the Moon. The only outfit from costumer designer Hardy Amies that looks dated is the photographer’s striped polyester suit. Next, we see the Moonbus carrying Floyd and his team, the flight is to Ligesti’s haunting “Lux Aeterna”, a flight with a more mysterious purpose. The music fades and we get sounds of Moonbus interior. It picks up during the landing, but we also hear the sounds in the cockpit. After it lands and they head towards the pit dug around the anomaly, Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1, which contains the Monolith. They touch it and later sends out a piercing shriek before we see the Earth in alignment with the sun.       

Then, we get the title card, “Jupiter Mission, 18 months later”, closeup to the spherical cockpit of the Discovery-1 left to right. The long ship modules pass, the radar assembly, more modules, until we finally get the engines. The scene where the Star Destroyer passes overhead in Star Wars (1977) is said by moviegoers to be endless, it runs about 13 seconds, the Discovery-1 passes by in a full minute! Then, we get another stunning shot of Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) running around the circular room and past three crew members in hibernation (technically suspended animation, they are not bears), then a shot tracking Frank running the circular room, impressive since we saw slow movement in low gravity. Lockwood played Gary Mitchell in the Star Trek pilot, "Where No One Has Gone Before " (1966).  

This seen by a close-up red eye of the computer, HAL-9000. Later out of a hatch in the middle of the circular room comes David Bowman (Keir Dullea). He joins Frank with a food tray. A BBC interview covers the mission and astronauts before turning to HAL, controlling the ship. It speaks (with the monotone voice of Douglas Rain) and identifies itself as a “conscious entity”, uh-oh. Frank speaks about HAL, but doesn’t know if he has emotions. Dave shows HAL some of his sketches of the crew in hibernation and HAL asks about the suspicions about the mission. Then, HAL interrupts their conversation, “Just a moment”, and then says the antennae array is going fail.  Frank and Dave contact Mission Control and we get Frank in his orange suit, just the sound of his breathing and oxygen in his suit, brilliant.  

He has HAL prepare the EVA pod and Dave monitors the mission. There is a closeup of Frank’s helmet with the Pod controls reflected on it, this was replicated in many sci fi films, and also in Iron Man (2008). Frank exits the pod and floats over to the antennae at some distance. He removes a component from the dish and later they analyze it for failure. They find nothing wrong with it.  Mission Control says that the HAL’s findings are in error checked by their HAL-9000. Dave says he wants Frank to check out a transmitter in one of the pods. Inside the pod, Dave shuts off communication and gives an order to HAL, no answer.  

Frank says he has a bad feeling about HAL, echo of the famous line in Star Wars? This is a great conflict of Artificial Intelligence that we later see in I, Robot (2004) and The Terminator films. It is a surreal exploration into the life of Dave and encountering the otherworldly life behind the Monoliths. Kubrick as a filmmaker offers no answers, he dropped the narration and challenges audiences, which makes audiences watch the film several times to work out for themselves. I see Kubrick akin to Akira Kurosawa, controlling everything, supporting actors, everything that is in the frame, pacing of ships, and objects. The film had screened in IMAX this weekend, but hopefully you can catch it in theaters in any format. 

Five Monoliths out of Five!    

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