Best In Show, Once and Future

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2008)

I could go on quite at length about 2001. Plenty others have, so I'll just try to tether the following comments to the personal and at-times parallel odyssey of this particular user.
Some years before its premiere a grade-school librarian had the good taste and uncommon foresight to round up select classes, seat them in the library or small auditorium, gently command their collective attention and silence, hand out papers with colored pencils or crayons, set a vinyl LP or two of highbrow music on a mono phonograph, and say, "Draw!" ("What?" "Anything.")
Months before the premiere an assigned middle-school reader included Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "The Sentinel," which inspired me to visit the local public library and ask if Mister Clarke had written anything else, prompting the on-duty librarian to point to a bookshelf and a half.
I'd asked my parents to take me to the first-run in my hometown, shown on a decidedly non-Cinerama screen. Towards the end my mother was asleep on my left shoulder and my father asleep on my right. I could well have been the only person besides the projectionist awake in the theater (well, perhaps not), and the appearance of the Star Child very nearly scared the marmalade out of me, but not so badly that I'd want to awake my parents or anyone else. And then, quite suddenly, I GOT that closing shot, and the opening one, and a lot of everything in between.
Haven't been quite the same since. I view 2001 to this day, and it remains the movie I've seen the most times in a theater, or in any other format. I quote lines from it at home and (quite fittingly) at the workplace. I draw and write to highbrow music. I may disagree with but still read Clarke (90 years old as of this writing, bless him) and other masters of his genre. And from that first-run viewing forward I started recognizing Stanley Kubrick's name and those of other directors.
This isn't nostalgia. 2001 connected, transported, embedded itself, inspired, and resonated on so many levels. It continues to do so and always will. What more can anyone ask of the silver screen?
A postscript on factual errors, continuity and goof-spotting: As Abe Lincoln said, people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. Instead, respect what got 2001 made in the first place. Its ending turned out a lot more collaborative than anticipated. We might've seen not apes but more humanoid proto-humans (though only from the waist up), a transparent or translucent monolith, Saturn instead of Jupiter, and a swarm of ETs, likely none of them satisfying. And if Doug Trumbull, one of the credited FX supervisors, had his way the lunar surface would've looked a great deal different and arguably more accurate.
Fact is, when 2001 was in production and driven by a director with a passion for accuracy (to be charitable) we'd still had only a glimpse of Earth from orbit and the surface of other planets. Though we'd already seen grand ideas, actual spacefarers had nothing roomier than a first-generation Soyuz capsule. The only ET to date was a "BEM" or "bear" that wore makeup. The Bell System would last forever (and might yet). And in Space no one can blur your photographs (except perhaps yourself), so to this day meticulously rotoscoped cutouts of kit-bashed spacecraft models moving very slowly across a star field provided an accurate depiction of interplanetary travel. ("Why, you been there?" "Close enough to hold my breath, friend.")
I still doubt astronauts will hibernate or HAL 9000 will be entrusted with anything more complex than a chessboard anytime soon. But 2001 made us both dream and consider these very points and far more. The moral: Making a visionary masterpiece is hard work!