The Slow, Cosmic Ballet

Rating: 10/10 (13 February 2005)

There is no question what Stanley Kubrick is looking for in 2001: man is insignificant. Space is vast, space is monotonous, and humans are insignificant because we cannot comprehend the vastness that is space. This space movie begins on Earth, before man had inherited it, when mankind was still toiling in the form of hapless primates, barely surviving and not at the top of the food chain. Then it happened. What exactly? We don't know, but something from above, in the form of a black monolith, helps the primates become man. Zip ahead a couple of thousand of years (literally, cut from prehistoric Earth to the space age is unofficially the biggest jump in time in movie history) and we find man living in space. One of the most famous, and beautiful scenes, of the movie is the ballet between a space ship and the spinning Hilton Hotel orbiting the Earth to the classical song "On Blue Danube." The music suggests grace and elegance in space travel, but the action and dialog suggest slow, tedious, boring work. This might as well be a silent movie, the most interesting dialog comes from a taped BBC interview that appears halfway through the movie. The character with the most speaking may be the computer that runs a ship that is headed towards Jupiter, on a mission to investigate another monolith. The infamous HAL 9000, voted as one of movies best villains, is not really a villain, just a confused cyborg. The computer is in charge of two living, breathing scientist and 3 who are hibernating. There is action, but not in the usual sense of science fiction action. There are no lasers, nothing blows up, just slow, problem solving. What happens at the end of the movie is open to interpretation, and that's the fun of the movie. What one of the astronauts goes through when he finds another monolith orbiting Jupiter is up to the viewer. Whatever you think happens, it is important to remember that we as humans look for answers, but in this universe, maybe we aren't supposed to have all of them. This is not a movie to be taken literally, everything is symbolic. There are no wasted shots, no teases, nothing extraneous. It's up to the audience to figure out, to answer one famous question, "what the hell just happened."