2001 - A Space Odyssey commentary

Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2005)

2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968) offers a far more optimistic, if ambiguous, vision of man's future. Kubrick's most expensive film (costing over 10 1/2 million dollars), and it is at the same time one of his most personal. Though the novel subsequently published by the co-scriptwriter Arthur. C. Clarke makes clear that the film was worked out in conventional narrative terms, the film version eventually released four years after the scripting began lacks the customary Kubrick commentary over the images and avoids all dialog for half an hour at both beginning and end. The avoidance of verbalization is totally in keeping with the film's mythic content and does not preclude a tightly worked-out structure. The film is build up of four separate episodes, each tracing a crucial leap forward in the development of man seemingly triggered off by the appearance of a black monolith (the sign of intervention by extra-terrestrial beings of greater intelligence?) and occurring at a time of "magical alignment" of earth, sun and moon or their equivalents (the symbol of a predestined fate?). After an opening sequence, the Dawn of Man, showing the birth of the intelligence among the primitive ape-man of the Pleistocene era, the film proceeds through one of the most audacious transitions in film history from a bone tossed up into the air to a spaceship on its way to the moon four million years later. This section, accompanied by the music of "The Blue Danube", traces in almost documentary fashion a mission to investigate a second monolith, which sends off a message into space when struck by the first rays of the sun. A Jupiter Mission eighteen months later is dispatched into the solar system to track the destination of this message, but 'en route' the voyage of the spaceship 'Discovery' is almost destroyed by a conflict of a man and machine as the computer HAL 9000 tries to destroy the crew and take over control of the mission. After a further appearance of the monolith, the sole survivor Bowman is catapulted 'Beyond the Infinite' in a sequence of dazzling special effects. He ultimately arrives at the film's most enigmatic setting - a mysterious Louis XVI bedroom - where he ages rapidly before the final appearance of the monolith heralds his transformation into an embryonic form, a Star Child, whose image concludes the film. The ending is by intention an open one and much of the film's meaning is ambiguous, but it derives its enormous power from the combination of an examination of the nature of intelligence (in rising order: ape, man, machine and extra-terrestrial being) and its hypnotic visual style, formed of recurring patterns of circular and rectangular features and dominated by fetal and uterine imagery.