Symphony of Evolution

Rating: 10/10 (4 February 2011)

Today I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the second time and therefore decided to write a little essay-like review. There seems to be three kinds of people with regards to 2001; people who bash the film for being boring and slow-paced, people who praise it as a masterpiece and the greatest science-fiction ever made and people who are somewhere in between. It's a film about futurology, evolution and the cycle of life. It deals with the progression of man when he faces the unknown and creates new devices to research it. Kubrick had collected an enormous amount of knowledge of past and presence to create the perfect illusion of future.
2001: A Space Odyssey is built on traditional conventions and dramaturgical structure. It's divided into three acts, as most films are, and it follows an usual pattern. But in the name of thematics Kubrick had abandoned the conventional plot. But the film is not an eternal riddle that can't be solved. The biggest reason why the film comes across with such criticism is because people see it on lists of 'the best science fictions' and so on. People don't know what they are about to see and after being brainwashed by mindless modern Hollywood; don't understand a thing. There still are much more trickier philosophical science-fictions out there, for instance, Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpieces Solaris and Stalker -- which I warmly recommend. Especially Solaris has been compared with 2001 dozens of times. If western science-fiction, which Kubrick here represents, researches the physical boundaries of man and mankind; eastern sci-fi researches mental limits -- Tarkovsky studies a situation where man should act humanely under inhumane circumstances.
The first act starts with a prologue sequence where prehistoric men, apes, live and try to survive -- the dawn of man. There's a huge leap of time taken from the first part to the second; from four million years ago earlier to the year of 2001. But then the leap from act two to act three isn't so far at all - 18 months. This seems to reinforce the idea that Kubrick wasn't interested in time, ironically in a film about progression, but in state, 'mise-en-scene' and space -- and, for Kubrick, film is much more of a visual form of art than a narrative.
One statement of the film is that man is still the same which is told to us through the three part structure. In the beginning -- the dawn of man -- an ape found a bone of another animal and learned to use it as a weapon. Then we go through this brilliant shift to the year of 2001 where man has created technical devices with his superior brain that at the same enslave him, and this cycle culminates to the rebirth. This three part structure is experienced again, in the end, when the man travels forward in time. He sees images of him going through the cycle of life; he gets older, dies and is born again. The rebirth, the final image of the fetus, is powerful and spellbinding. It makes the cycle of life perfect. The baby is its own world, its own reality and it is ready to learn, progress and research -- looking down on Earth and us.
2001: A Space Odyssey consists of nothing but images of the spaceship, with the exception of the first sequence. The cold, white steel walls, the blue shades and chambers of the spaceship represent inhumanity of man. One particular scene is a good example of this, science and technology turning man into an inhumane creature, where the man gets a birthday video message from his parents. He doesn't care to reply, just asks the computer system HAL to lift up his seat, and when HAL wishes him a happy birthday he instantly replies "thank you." Techonology has become man's best friend and all humane relations have disappeared - another clue can be found from the laconic conversations between the spacemen.
It's also a film of contrasts; cold steel and the warm ground of the prologue, the humming sounds of the spaceship and the distressing silence of outer space, the blue shades and the blue color which is all around the ship; the only dose of red, love and warmth, seems to be coming from the computer system HAL. In the surrealist sequence also the complementary colors of blue and red meet each other; the mountains and the gorges. In the spaceship the crew eats food through a pipe but, in the end, in the Rococo room the man eats a normal meal -- on a plate. Man has went back to the old times: Rococo furniture, paintings and the food. But is still the same.
The monolith has occurred a great deal of discussion and will do so in the future as well. It's clearly the motive of the film and collects symbolic meaning to itself as time goes by. First in the dawn of man it is an unknown object which the apes research with great fascination. In 2001 it once again appears just as unknown to the man as it did to their prehistoric grandfathers. They research it and discover that it is a new, and the first, artifact to be found by man from outer space. Towards the end, where the film starts turning into surrealism, the monolith floats in space -- far away from the hands of man. For once more it appears in the Rococo room where the man sees images of his life. It's in front of the man's bed as he tries to reach it, but can't. The monolith; the unknown is so far away and unreachable.