"Take a stress pill and think things over"

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2011)

Since its release in 1968, this has been a movie which divides its audience into lovers and haters. Sometimes (often?), those who love it will dismiss those who hate it as simply "not getting it". This attitude is not only snobbish, it maybe even misses the point of the picture. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not really a picture that one must "get". Its plot is not exactly labyrinthine, and while its meaning is obscure it is deliberately so, as Kubrick himself shied away from being philosophically explicit. In other words, if someone tells you they know what Kubrick was trying to say with the movie, they are wrong.
So what exactly is the problem then? Contrary to what some might assume, it is not the slow pace of the picture that I find alienating. Certainly there are dozens of pictures with faster paces and shorter runtimes that I find far more boring because they are unconvincing, too wordy or just generally poorly executed. In fact it is the methodical pacing that gives Space Odyssey many of its best points. Take the early scenes with the apes - not a shot is wasted there. It is in fact an extremely efficient summary of the brutal and dangerous lives of these creatures, all told with an atmospheric quietness, building up to the eeriness of the monolith's appearance and the stylised bone-smashing scene. The following spaceship sequence, "choreographed" to the Blue Danube waltz is graceful, balletic and quite beautiful to behold. Later, the scenes with HAL and Keir Dullea become a kind of space horror, with the long shots and mechanical noises adding to the creepiness. There's also great tension built up by having the scenes of Dullea trying to get back on board through the airlock played out in painstaking real-time. And it is the achingly slow process of HAL being shut down that helps to make it such an intensely poignant sequence.
So 2001: A Space Odyssey is, for the most part, an expertly rhythmic motion picture, and from its rhythm comes its power and its emotion. Where the problem comes, and I think the point where most of the audience is lost, is in the final act. When we are sitting through a ten minutes of lights zooming past, colour-filtered landscapes, and weird avant-jazz noises, the picture has lost its sense of aesthetic beauty, and gone into the realms of artistic pretension. No-one can really enjoy this sequence. Some might claim to "appreciate" it, and yet it is clearly a tonal piece with little actual meaning, so there is nothing really intellectually pleasing about it either.
I have to admit though, a lot of my dislike for this picture is only relative to the adulation lavished upon it by its fans. It irks me that the match-cut with the bone and the spaceship is so widely applauded, when there is an almost identical (and far neater) cut in the Powell and Pressburger picture A Canterbury Tale, and besides there are better (but more subtle) match-cuts in Space Odyssey, such as the one from the monolith against the sky to the shadow on the plain. And I'm a little cynical about the fuss made over the scientific accuracy of the space flight stuff, when the picture is so unscientific about Darwinian evolution. Don't get me wrong; I'm not citing the match-cut or the scientific inconsistencies as problems in themselves, only pointing them out as examples of the sometimes misguided way in which this movie is seen as being exceptional. Perhaps then what 2001: A Space Odyssey suffers from is its own reputation. Considered in itself, the picture has a great deal to love about it and only a little to hate.