Being Stanley Kubrick

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 1999)

I first saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in the fall of 1968. I was fifteen years-old. This was only months after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There had been a police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Richard Nixon was about to be elected President of the United States. The Vietnam war seemed to be getting worse -- the year had opened with the infamous Tet Offensive.
I needed an escape from the grim headlines. (The only good news seemed to be the NASA Apollo mission that would orbit the moon in December.) Oddly enough, the director of Dr. Strangelove would provide that escape in the form of 2001. (Thanks to my viewing of Dr. Strangelove four years earlier, I believed that I would eventually be incinerated in a nuclear war.)

I had read about Kubrick's meticulous attention to detail, but I still wondered why it had taken half a decade to produce this new movie. Entering the theater, I had great expectations, but I would not be disappointed by what I experienced that night.
I got to see 2001 in the old Cinerama format which used three synchronized projectors to display the movie on a wide curved screen. The effect was less impressive than today's IMAX, but it DID make things larger than life. The special effects were impressive without detracting attention from the story. The idea of humans achieving a higher plane of existence intrigued me. I would ponder the philosophical and theological implications of that alien-assisted evolution for years to come.
I emerged from the theater feeling profoundly optimistic even though I wasn't quite sure what I had experienced. It was as if I had seen and touched the black monolith.
It may have been 1968, but, for the record, I was clean & sober. Whatever I felt was the effect of the film, not any foreign substances. In retrospect, I can say that I was happier than someone who had been John Malkovich for 15 minutes.
A few months later, I read Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel" because I was interested in the story that inspired the movie. Then, I borrowed a classmate's copy of Clarke's novelization. I preferred the original short story. From that experience, I learned to avoid novels based upon screenplays.
I've seen 2001 dozens of times since 1968. Three decades later, I can see the flaws in the ape suits. I can understand younger viewers' impatience with Kubrick's slow-but-deliberate pacing. I also admit that I do not always enjoy the film's score. I wish the DVD version could have offered Alex North's original score as an alternative. (I suspect there are legal issues preventing this.) However, I still believe that this is Kubrick's masterpiece.