Kubrick and Clarke's pharmaceutical brain massage

Rating: 8/10 (23 July 2005)

2001 is either confusingly profound or profoundly confusing. Either way, I suspect, what we have on screen is due largely to the massive, widespread drug-use of the swinging sixties when this was conceived.
I'm not kidding. When Kubrick and Clarke sat and watched the star baby scene, in the final few frames of their film one can almost imagine the exchange:
Kubrick: "Far out, man."
Clarke: "Dude...I'm seeing colours..."
etc.
Drugs can maybe also explain Kurbick's infantile fascination with every spacecraft docking sequence, and why as a result we are forced to watch things unfold almost in realtime.
For instance, when Dave pulls out the apparently faulty component. What amounts to probably one sentence in the script translates to five minutes plus of screen time. Is this effective? Necessary? Maybe, and maybe not.
The film - as a whole and its individual sequences - are strangely hypnotic. If it was boring then I'd simply turn it off. It isn't. It's compelling in a way that I can't explain. Even completely superfluous and excessively long sequences somehow kept my attention. I suspect, with the aid of drugs they'd transcend "compelling" and become enthralling.
Make no mistake - gear's the reason 2001 exists. Not just Kubrick and the like, but the executives at MGM who greenlit this. Can you imagine some poor sod trying to pitch this to an executive today?
"Yeah, well, like, we start on earth with a load of apes who learn to beat each other around the head, then we jump to 2001 and this dude goes to the moon - takes him about forty minutes of our time but by God he gets there in the end. Then we jump to the Jupiter mission, a computer goes mad and then we get all psychedelic. Money please!"
Eh....I doubt it.