my little insignificant summary of 2001

Rating: 10/10 (1 November 2001)

I will admit right away that I'm one of those idiots that hadn't seen Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY before this re-release in occasion of the real year 2001. I was very surprised by the film in the way it wasn't boring at all like some people I knew had told me. It is a truly thought-provoking, awe-ispiring work, always intriguing and unpredictable, standing head and shoulders above almost every other sci-fi film ever made. No other film I have ever seen captured my sense of wonder and my subconscious so deeply. I still can't keep it away from my thoughts. It is without a doubt Kubrick's most accomplished work to date (I have seen most of his movies). Using tremendously impressive effects portraying the starkness and silence of space, Kubrick made an unparalelled masterpiece, that immensely rewarded those with attention spans longer than five seconds.
After a majestic opening title scene showing the sun rise up from the moon and using the enchanting 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' tune by Richard Strauss at maximum volume, the film opens with a 20-minute sequence showing the lives of a tribe of prehistoric man-apes. In typically Kubrickian fashion, the film calmly watches those animals, which are just about a few dozen thousand years away from becoming human, defending themselves from leopards, fighting another ape tribe for the waterhole, sleeping. Just when you think you're watching the wrong movie, something really unexpected and weird happens: the family that we've been watching finds a big black stone of some unknown material standing rooted in the ground. It is a thing of extraordinary geometrical precision, something totally out of place in this primitive world, suddenly appeared there with mysterious purposes. We see the apes slowly approaching the thing in fear and wonder; eventually they will find the courage to touch it. As all this happens we hear a menacing background music with ominous voices, a classic example of Kubrick paranoia music, which will be heard everytime mankind comes in contact with a monolith, as the black thing is called later in the film. After that the movie cuts to what seems to be the next day, and as we see one of the apes toying around with some bones on the ground, we hear Strauss' famous tune slowly coming up again: we know that something important is about to happen. The ape finds a way to use one of the bones as a weapon and starts thumping enthusiastically on the other bones, detroying them. The film assumes that we understand that this is because of the monolith: it is helping the evolution of the apes, pushing them to become more intelligent. This ape, who seems to be the leader of the tribe, then leads them to the waterhole to once again face the other, stronger tribe, this time with something they had never had before: weapons. The others come unarmed and their leader is killed by 'our' tribe's leader, who is armed.
After this comes one of the most famous shots in movie history: the ape who has just killed with the bone throws it in the air and after following it for a while, the camera abruptly cuts to about four million years into the future. It is the year 1999 after Christ and man, in Kubrick's vision in 1968, has by then conquered space (unfortunately we now know that he was too optimistic about progress in space travel). Finally you understand a bit of where the movie is going, and finally the 'Space' in the title makes sense. The movie doesn't tell us it's 1999, but we find out later. With more classical music Kubrick shows us his unique, stark, and meticulously realistic vision of space. The camera lingers over spaceships and a space station, where we meet the first human characters and we hear the first dialogue. The man we meet is one Heywood Floyd played by William Sylvester. Something typical of every Kubrick film is that every character remains distant, boring, and hard to connect with; here the character development is even less important than in any other film he has done. We never find out anything about him, although he does have an important scene where he talks to others about an epidemic on the Clavius moon base: the people he talks with are similarly vague characters, who serve only to advance the plot. This criticism of flat characterization actually isn't really a criticism: part of the film's point is that machines like HAL, who we will meet later, have more interesting personalities than humans. Humans are supposed to come off boring. Anyway, Floyd goes to a meeting where he finds out that the hubbub on Clavius is caused by a dug-up black monolith that has been buried there for, you guessed it, about four million years. Humans were attracted to it because it sent out powerful signals. The thing looks exactly like the one the apes found earlier in the film. In an hypnotic, enchanting sequence we watch Floyd and his team approaching the monolith with the same sense of wonder the apes felt. Once again we hear that haunting music with those scary voices singing in the background. Floyd and the others gather around the monolith to take a picture, but a few seconds later they are startled to hear a piercing shriek coming out of the monolith. We see those men writhing with pain in their ears, and it's almost unbearable for the audience too. After that we see a shot we have seen before: the sun rising up on top of the monolith. We saw it before, after the apes had found the monolith, but I haven't figured out the meaning of this shot yet. Perhaps a signal was sent out of the monolith on the moon because it saw the light of the sun for the first time, and wanted to let its creators know about it somehow.
After this sequence the film takes another leap forward in time, though not one quite as huge as the first one. The year is now 2001 and the title card says "Jupiter Mission: 18 months later". In another classic sequence, we hear beautiful classic music as the camera pans across the spaceship Discovery, and the film's central act begins. Everything that happened before is a setup for this part. First we see one of the astronauts running round in the circular control room of the ship to keep himself fit. Once again these people remain unknown and distant to us. They are Mission Commander David Bowman (Keir Dullea), who will play an important part in the story, and astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood). The film lacks any comedic punch in its dialogue, but that's just the point. In the Discovery ship we meet the most intriguing character in the film (and one of the most intriguing characters in any film), and he's a computer. It's the famous HAL 9000 computer which controls the functions of the entire ship, and he is given a chilling, appropriately soulless voice by actor Douglas Rain. In the first scenes on Discovery we find out that HAL is supposed to be a fool-proof computer, incapable of commiting error. Soon later while HAL is chatting with David Bowman about his doubts on the mission's purpose, he mentions a fault that he's picked up in the AE-35 antenna on the ship. Here's where the trouble in the film starts: it turns out that the antenna is perfectly fine. That HAL has committed a mistake is alarming to Bowman and Poole, because he could now make mistakes about anything in the mission. They close themselves off in private to discuss the situation. They ultimately decide to shut him off and continue the mission by themselves. Little do they know that HAL is reading their lips and so knows about their intentions anyway. So when Poole has to go outside the ship to check the antenna again, HAL becomes evil and doesn't let him in again. He floats off into space and dies. And in the most suspenseful and dramatic scene in the movie we see Bowman struggling to get back into the ship from the space pod he's in.
In case you don't know what happens next, let me tell you that the movie actually becomes moving and dramatic. All the following scenes have gone down in movie history, but the final 20 minutes, where the main character is taken on a dizzying 'journey beyond the infinite', definitely belong among the most confusing, strange, enigmatic, and ultimately astonishing endings ever shown. Kubrick has so much to tell the audience, so many messages in his big final revelation that many audience members will be lost on it. I was too, and after being dazzled by its complexity I did eventually 'get' it, or most of it anyway. This is a rare movie that has the courage to skewer with our perceptions about life and our place in the Universe. It's too soon to say for me, but I think it will change my way of looking at life. It is easy to see why it was initially rejected by critics and audiences and later gained a huge cult following, ran in theatres for many years, and was eventually considered universally as a classic. It's a film that you might have a hard time understanding the first time around, but later buries itself into your subconscious and doesn't leave you. It's definitely the closest-to-perfect film if there ever was one, and it might even change your mentality and perceptions as it did with me.