Great film - even if technology gets dated

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2000)

Spoilers!
Great film, from one of the cinema's great directors (whatever one thinks of his posthumously overhyped excuse for a film, this is still the guy behind FMJ, Clockwork, Dr. Strangelove, and just look at the list here on imdb). It holds up, sort of, even long after the heyday of new in-the-round Century dome theatres with the surround sound and audiences, as today, clamouring for something new on the screen. They got it, back then. A film ahead of its time, clearly, stuck in the styles of the day - in various ways.
There's two main threads - the obelisk, and HAL. The obelisk/monolith suggests . . . ? well, we don't know, for sure. But we're surely told to infer that it represents alien intelligence (was deliberately buried there, Dr. Floyd, he says, early on - and then confirmed by the 'secret' message at the end of part III). HAL is the nightmare of machine intelligence taking over the world, as in The Matrix, here just the spaceship (but for all the 'best' of intentions - same old story, whatever 'intelligence').
The look of the thing is like any good movie. They fawn over the effects, the velcro shoes, the floating pens (hey look, everyone, it's fun . . wow .. it's a threatrical release - which is fine). Poor old Dr. Floyd spends much time eating, or figuring out the zero-grav toilet (try putting up a sign like that in the lav on your average 747, today - oh, fight attendant?). He spends as much time doing that as he does acting all condescending towards everyone. You saw corporate, plastic interiors, new jet liner fashions in outer space (except for the shiny clothes, same jet liner fashions as today - not a lot of development since the 60s). The trend of the day was maybe men in space by 2000, futuristic shuttles, and so on. Little did they know . . . And also the trend in filmmaking was European, more so then, than now. Fellini, the French directors, Death playing chess, and so on. That was the 'high style'. And that lack of 'narration' is clearly found here, too. You could argue it's just Phantom Menace, from the '60s, special effects vignettes tied together long after the shoot with a poorly thrown together 'arc'. But the book, here, actually came first. Kubrick clearly DID have some sort of disconnected views, visual looks and scenes, in mind. There's a bit of the quickly stitched together movie, here. But, again, given the style of the day, I think it wasn't a desperation job as it was intentionally designed like this.
Another trend of the day seems epitomized by the view of mankind as some violent ape dirtying up the beauty o Mother Earth (perhaps, maybe as seen in the pull away from the famous transition to the Blue Danube Waltz - oh, if only it weren't for people). Maybe in a post-post-modernist time, the failures of people are weighed against their virtues, more so today than in the elitist ethic of the perfectionist 60s (but who knows?). But I should say, too, that where in the past I thought the mythical 'dawn of man' sequence overdone, on later viewing I have to say Kubrick leaves in only the scenes that establish that view of man that he wanted. Just the essentials. This essential scene direction is almost a problem, as just suggested above, when Dr. Floyd and company get hit with that annoying amplified tone and we wind up looking at the Jupiter Mission, suddenly. Maybe it would NOT have been appropriate to add a short scene after the Clavius 'attack', bridging the two and establishing the Jupiter Mission. But . . . it might have helped, after all the years. Don't know.
It's an epic film. It seems like four short stories tied together, but again perhaps more because of the 'essentialist' style, rather than it being four separate stories thrown together. The final story doesn't hold up so well, obviously because the effects look a bit dated. And where are the Roswell/X-Files aliens with the big eyes - right? It's all metaphor and illusion. It could mean anything, taking the movie just by itself. Could mean nothing, really - just Bowman's final delusions before he burns up. People had to leave the theatres with the big baby in space fresh in their minds saying - wow, what a great film, I didn't understand it AT ALL! The third has the classic - openapodbaydoorshal, repeated a few times, before HAL freaks out with the 'I know you were planning to 'kill' me' bit. It's really the heart of the movie, Frank and Dave in outer space, speaking in disinterested monotones, looking and acting kind of bored and shut in - the quiet of space - a little beeping here, a little whirring there - then the monster HAL strikes when they least expect.
But, again, don't get me wrong. It still works, today, for whatever legitimate flaws it has, and had. The plastic models are necessarily going to look better than all but the best CGI, just as latex beats computer modeling, unless it's the best computer modeling (as in a few scenes from the original Jurassic Park, for ex.). The stars in space looked a little sparse, as we'd see them from earth, not in space - but, no problem. The opening shot of the sun not merely rising on the horizon, but over the limb of the earth, still looks good, today. And the weightlessness seemed pretty well done with a few cables and rotating sets. Have to be just top, expensive CGI to be as convincing.
As for the story, of course, it gets hurt as time goes by. It looks more and more almost like an heroic effort that Kubrick managed to make it look as reasonable and believable as he did. He didn't have much to work with, perhaps. But he did give the world an interesting film, with maybe some tired old 'messages'. Lots of weird questions, even. Few answers, if any. But if it's not utterly irrelevant, then those concerns about possible life elsewhere, or more likely the threat of technology gotten away from us (the little nightmare of the toy radio car zipping over the hill and out of the ability to still control by sight), are still relevant. Some of the lines are still clever. And you can always pop out the DVD or cassette before the fourth act gets going.