Movie review: 2001: A Space Odyssey

MPAA Rating: G

Year of Release: 1968

Time: 139 minutes

Cast: Keir Dullea

A rectangular monolith, impassive, enigmatic,

black: The central image of \"2001: A Space

Odyssey\" is a symbol chosen to be evocative

but reticent. Biblical tablet? Giant microchip?

Interdimensional gateway? Whatever it is, you

will talk about it as you leave the theater.

\"2001\" is beloved for many different reasons,

including its scrupulous scientific accuracy, its

vast reach from \"The Dawn of Man\" to the

next stage of human evolution, its unrivaled

integration of musical and visual composition,

its daring paucity of dialogue and washes of

silence, its astonishingly creative psychedelic

sequence and its still-gorgeous pre-digital special

effects.

As predictive futurism, to be sure, \"2001\" is

pretty spotty. Attention has been focused this

year on the film\'s vision of the HAL 9000

computer; HAL supposedly went online in

January 1997, and that has been enough, in this

computer-obsessed era, to inspire magazine

covers and scholarly conferences noting how

little \"2001\" got \"right.\" As our calendars race

toward the film\'s date, we also note that our

steps into outer space have been far more timid

than \"2001\" imagined. At best, the film\'s

predictions remind us that the future never

unfolds as we dream it.

Predictions, fortunately, are the least interesting

and most disposable aspect of \"2001.\" The

chief reason the movie still holds \-- no,

demands \-- our attention, long after a million

bad science-fiction epics have deservedly faded

from memory, is its respect for its own

mystery. Its vision of what science-fiction

authors call \"first contact,\" the first brush of

Homo sapiens with some other intelligent

species, remains disturbingly and enticingly

spectral. There are no bug-eyed monsters here,

just profound questions to ponder.

\"2001\'s\" ambiguities are not, as is so often the

case today, a by-product of sloppiness or

last-minute editing-by-committee; they are a

deliberate choice, a preference for open-ended

speculation over the pat satisfactions of tying up

loose ends. Do the monoliths actually spark the

stages of human evolution, or simply witness

them or beam information about them back to

its alien creators? Why does the supercomputer

HAL turn on its human companions? What

exactly happens to astronaut Dave Bowman on

Jupiter? And what does the apparition of the

fetal \"Star Child,\" floating in space at the film\'s

finale, portend? \"2001\" is stubbornly \-- and, to

some, distressingly \-- unwilling to spell out its

secrets. (I know that Arthur C. Clarke\'s \"2001\"

novels have offered detailed answers to

virtually all the film\'s questions; that\'s why they

should be avoided.)

The film\'s willingness to entertain unanswerable

questions is a function of the era in which it

gestated. The 1968 collaboration between

director Stanley Kubrick and science-fiction

master Clarke took place in a time unlike any

other in American film and American history.

Old formulas were no longer working. Here and

there, artists responded by abandoning formula

entirely. But the window of opportunity didn\'t

stay open long, and once \"Star Wars\"

demonstrated that the old themes and

characters and devices could be spiffily and

profitably resuscitated, Hollywood, relieved,

returned to form.

Still, the power of that historical moment

remains strong. I first saw \"2001\" as a

9-year-old in the year it was released.

Somehow I assumed that this was what all

movies ought to be: treasures for moral and

aesthetic contemplation that did not provide all

their answers on first contact. Today\'s

Hollywood not only would never make \"2001,\"

it has forgotten even how to aspire to such a

movie. At this stage, it would take the

ministrations of a \"2001\"-style monolith,

discovered high atop the Hollywood Hills, for

the movie industry to leap again into such

marvelous, uncharted voids.

BY SCOTT ROSENBERG

March 21, 1997