A giant leap

Rating: 10/10 (7 February 2011)

Kubrick's monolithic mid-period masterpiece is as remarkable as much for what it has NOT influenced in sci-fi filmmaking as what it has. So while special effects took a giant leap in 1968 (thanks in no small part to Douglas Trumball, who would give us a grim new world in 1982 with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the original ending to which made use of a series of helicopter shots lent by a certain Mr Kubrick), to this day we still have the sounds of swooshing of ships and zapping lasers in the vacuum of outer space. Then there is also the small matter of awe. Other than Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, it's hard to think of another example of a science fiction movie with such an unflinching commitment to spiralling wonder.
And to think it all came from a (very) short story named The Sentinel - a tall tale about a pyramid-shaped creation half-buried on a Moon populated with "degenerate plants". (Well, it was written over 20 years before humans set foot on the thing.) Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay plonks this lunar discovery into the second act of a four-act epic. Long before that there is early, ape-like Man. The mysterious monolith appears to the Moon-Watcher and his flock, perhaps signalling the birth of religion. Jump-cut a couple million years (as you do) and the age of technology reigns - so Man is able to detect a magnetic anomaly on the Moon, which leads Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) to our species' second audience with the strange black block. It's pointing toward Jupiter. So begins the third act, wherein astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) set sail for the great Red Eye, along with their infallible red-eyed companion, HAL, who represents the pinnacle of Man's technological endeavour. Paradoxically HAL also represents the limitations of technology, inadvertently highlighting the need for Man to transcend his current form. This paves the existential way for the final act, which sees Bowman enter a Jovian Stargate and undergo an exhilarating process of accelerated self-actualization. And then... well, my personal belief is that the final frame is the most profound image in cinema.
No, in art.
Clarke and Kubrick surround their characters with the clinical environment of technology, almost to the point of fetish - what delightful convenience, what intricate design! - only to strip it all away in the final reel, where some kind of apotheosis occurs in a cosmic hotel room decorated in the design of pre-electronic Earth. Luminous floor aside, we could be back in the time of Enlightenment.
Much has been made of the technological prescience of Kubrick and co-writer Clarke. There is Heywood's video call to his daughter (Vivian Kubrick, who would go on to make the documentary The Making of The Shining, as well as score Full Metal Jacket). But look closer and you'll also notice that the screen is FLAT. And what are those contraptions Bowman and Poole use to watch the news on BBC 12? They look an awful lot like a certain popular tablet computer...
This was 1968, remember.
It's easy to throw around words like "pompous" and "pretentious" when viewing conceptual art. Clearly, if a viewer finds it does not affect them on an emotional level, then the natural defence is to attack the intentions of the artist. In the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not unlike the National Socialist Party's (mis)appropriation of Nietzsche's "Ubermensch", it is possible to read the Starchild as a god figure, or perhaps a blandly consoling religious promise of what is to become of us beyond our corporeal suffering. This is a perfectly reasonable interpretation, if argued intelligently. The key word here is "interpretation", made possible by the bold ambiguity of the text. Fanboy gushing and angry backlash are rendered equally irrelevant in the presence of the wellspring of true debate. Love it or hate it, 2001: A Space Odyssey has substance enough to furnish conversations for centuries to come.
For all its grandeur and its intellectual rigidity, this is a warm, often amusing, deeply human film: a celebration of Man's practically infinite synaptic potential.