Brilliant Experience, So-So Story

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2009)

Watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" is like being run through a washing machine. You come out feeling a bit cleaner, a good deal more jumbled, and all wet.
It is a film in four parts. 1) A gang of prehumans discover how to defend their waterhole from a rival band by using bones as weapons. 2) An executive from the National Council of Astronautics visits a base on the Moon to investigate an incredible excavation find. 3) On the first manned flight to Jupiter, Astronauts Bowman and Poole have trouble with their computer assistant, HAL. 4) Bowman goes on an incredible journey beyond the known solar system and comes out the other side looking both very old and very young.
Behind all these elements is the sometimes invisible, often active presence of a flat black monolith, inert in itself but capable of producing powerful reactions.
What it all means, other than an often confusing 2 hours and 20 minutes, I don't know, but you have to give it up for director Stanley Kubrick. He made a film unlike any ever made, dealing with vast cosmic themes and philosophies, and it connected both with its own time and on to the present day. "2001" is still ranked the greatest sci-fi film of all time in many quarters.
The images of "2001" remain powerful in isolation, and the overall story captures the evolutionary nature of man's existence in an often gripping way. But between the long shots of spacecraft docking and the odd Gregorian-style portentous chanting, the self-importance of this movie does grate, not to mention the thinness of the story.
The part of the film that gets the most attention, the standoff between the astronauts and HAL, is alternately fascinating and labored. HAL seems to be ready to do to man what we saw man doing to those pig-like tapirs in Part 1, and it's up to Bowman to avoid being left behind by the evolutionary tide, not to mention being marooned in space. Long sections of astronauts moving in slow motion showcase the brilliant special effects but go on too long.
What's good is very good, though, a terrific standoff between Bowman and HAL, brilliantly dramatized by actor Keir Dullea and the eerily dispassionate voice of Douglas Rain, with a chilling, powerful finale. There's even some humor. "Take a stress pill and think things over" is pretty funny when uttered by a killer about to get his.
My favorite part of the film is the second section. Again, this features long slow-moving scenes, though used to better effect. The Strauss waltz accompanying the station-docking sequence still blows you away. William Sylvester as the Council executive, Dr. Floyd, has a striking cool efficiency about him that comes as quite a transition after the apemen in the opening. This sequence moves slowly but well to the mystery at the center of the story: I was disappointed to have it over with as quickly as it was.
Some may wish Kubrick dropped Part 1. I wish he had dropped Part 4, which just throws a lot of half-baked concepts in the air and doesn't bother resolving any unless you happen to read post-film interviews with Kubrick or Clarke. One long visual sequence suggests what it might be like to be trapped in a Guitar Hero game programmed by H.P. Lovecraft.
The last image is supposed to be triumphant, somehow, but winds up looking lost and sad. "Going up or down?" Dr. Floyd asks earlier in the film. Down was what it felt like to me. "2001" is great for what it is, a brilliantly thought-out and arrestingly executed enigma. For me, the enigma is this: How can a film be so great without also being that good?