Somewhat overrated - visually stunning and profound, but can be excruciatingly boring

Rating: 7/10 (23 July 2003)

*******some spoilers*******
2001 is a movie which I have watched several times in my life, and each time I try harder to 'get' it. When I first saw it I was too young to understand the themes, and was bored to tears, mainly because I was comparing it to Star Wars. Viewing it as an adult has changed my opinion - it's a visually stunning movie, with very profound themes and a prophetic grasp of space technology. However, it is by no means the best sci-fi film ever, or Stanley Kubricks best film, and in truth has not aged particularly well. But enough about that just now. Whats good about the film?
It boasts some of the most brilliantly composed shots I've ever seen, right from the beginning with the slow reveal of the Moon, the Earth and the Sun to the iconic strains of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. The zero gravity settings and the various methods used to combat the effects of zero-g enabled Kubrick to play lots of cool tricks with the camera with people walking upside down or seeming to walk on the ceiling. Then of course there's the famous cut from the ape throwing the bone in the air to the satellite floating in space - it's effect is somewhat lessened due to the fact that everyone knows about it now, but back in 1968 it must have been a startlingly original edit.
The choice of music in the film is superb - probably the best collection of sourced classical music that exists. The music so perfectly fits each scene that you would think that each piece had been written especially for the film, rather than selected from a record collection. In particular, aside from the above mentioned Also Sprach Zarathustra, there's Khachaturyan's Gayne Ballet Suite, which perfectly conveys the crushing loneliness of space travel (and was of course lifted by James Horner for use in the Aliens soundtrack), and Ligeti's Requien for Soprano, which after the Ark of the Covenant theme in Raiders of the Lost Ark is probably the creepiest piece of music I have ever heard in a film. I could probably do without the Blue Danube, but that's just my personal opinion of that piece, and it does lend the shots of satellites circling the Earth an almost balletic quality.
Arthur C Clarke's story is incredibly prophetic in it's grasp of developments in space technology, even if he was a bit too optimistic in the timescale within which he thought it could all be developed. Every ship looks like it could exist, and of course the film showed a lunar base a year before the first Apollo landing. This is all very much science heavy science fiction, rather than being a fantasy set in space a la Star Wars - the ships make no sound in the vacuum, unlike almost every other celluloid space ship. Clarke also of course predicts the development of Artificial Intelligence in HAL, and there are numerous other little touches of technological foresight - note what look like thin plasma screen TV's that the Astronauts watch the BBC broadcast on.
The themes of the story are incredibly profound, dealing with the evolution of man, and can be debated endlessly. For instance, am I the only person who noticed the symmetry of the monolith giving the ape intelligence, which it then uses to commit murder, and the development of self awareness in HAL (presumably due again to the monolith), who then goes on to murder the crew of the Discovery?
In addition, all the scenes with the apes are great - how would have thought to fill the first fifteen minutes of a sci-fi film with a short story about the family life of a group of early hominids? Also, Bowman shutting down HAL feels incredibly tragic, as the computer reverts to its 'childhood'. Of course, the infinitely weird ending can be puzzled over till the cows come home, but is again beautifully shot.
Writing all this makes me think I've been unfair to 2001, but being objective about it, I must say that the film shows its age. No doubt the special effects were stunning in 1968, and in truth still look great today, but the endless shots of spacecraft floating at a snails pace through space just take forever, and become mind numbingly boring after only a few minutes. I am a University graduate and consider myself reasonably intelligent, and am quite prepared to commit my attention to films which don't feature endless action scenes, but it's very hard to appreciate the themes in 2001 when for long stretches of the film absolutely nothing seems to be happening. It's not artistic, it's just boring. And to be honest, the sequence when Bowman goes through the Stargate just smacks of the psychedelic hippiedom of the times the film was shot in, and again seems to take forever.
Having said all this however, it must be acknowledged that 2001 is a groundbreaking film without which modern sci-fi films in all probability wouldn't exist, and probably deserves to be seen just for that reason alone.
Rating - 7/10