2001: The First Chink In Kubrick's Armor

Rating: Null/10 (4 December 2004)

Stanley Kubrick's life as a director can easily be charted in an up and down graph that looks like one large (if not evenly measured) pyramid.The up side begins from his start with a few documentaries, then rises quickly with The Killing (1956), and Paths of Glory (1957).It then soars to his peak with masterpieces like Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove (1964).The Kubrick career chart shows its first slowdown, however, with the dull, plodding 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which irked many film goers by its refusal to explain what the heck those dumb "monoliths" where supposed to mean.From then on things went even more downhill for him.A Clockwork Orange (1971) was a muddled mess of sexism and violence, Barry Lyndon (1975) was a snore-inducing swashbuckler that buckled under Kubrick's bad decision to use "available light" in most shots, The Shining (1980) was a weak attempt at horror (certainly not Kubrick's style at all), even prompting Shining author Stephen King to later do his own version of the script (1997).Then came Full Metal Jacket (1987), a piece of belated back- biting about Vietnam (produced about 15 years too late), and his finale flop, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring the sickeningly sweet married couple Cruise and Kidman.Had he lived, another even worse bomb was next up, called A.I. (2001). It was such an overdone can of stale spam that even the great Steven Spielberg (a sci-fi movie veteran) couldn't save it, when he later finished it for Kubrick.In short, Kubrick should have stopped right after Dr. Strangelove.