The Favorites - 2001: A Space Odyssey (#54)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968/USA/dir. Stanley Kubrick) appeared at #54 on my original list.

What it is • The best films are often improbable. 2001: A Space Odyssey towers over the cinematic landscape fifty years later, but step back from that familiar reputation and what remains is as strange and sui generis as that smooth black monolith in the midst of the craggy desert. What can explain the existence of a film that manages to straddle both genre filmmaking and the avant-garde? A film that embraces state-of-the-art special effects alongside esoteric storytelling? A film that embodies, transcends, and transforms notions of cinema? Well, to start with, many can (and do) say the film is cold and alienating; others categorize it as an overwhelmingly powerful aesthetic experience. It's a film with what seems to be a humanist message but its approach is anything but humanist; as many have noted, the most likable character is a murderous computer. This quintessential "future" film (which from today's standpoint, of course, is set in an alternate past) begins millions of years ago with apes developing their first "technology": a bone wielded as a weapon to defend against predators, vanquish prey, and attack one another. Flash forward to 2001, and we have, actually, an anthology of sci-fi stories to tell; interrelated, but with different aims and often different characters (yet somehow the movie feels all of a piece). The overarching thread involves a sleek monolith, like the one that triggered the apes' breakthrough, discovered on the moon, while another has been detected further out in the solar system, with two astronauts (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) assigned to make contact with it. The most memorable section of the film is, superficially at least, a sidenote to the rest of the story - the breakdown of HAL-9000, a placid-toned, deeply neurotic machine that refuses to believe in its own vulnerability. Finally, our interstellar journey that began in a prehistoric desert ends in a timeless white room, proving that images which initially seem incongruous end up lingering in memory, and becoming the most iconic images of all.

Why I like it •

There's Something Happening Here... 1966 - 1968 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 17

The seventeenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 17: There's Something Happening Here..."

There's Something Happening Here...

We begin exactly where we left off yesterday, actually a split-second earlier, repeating that gunfire as if reliving the Big Bang for one brief, unexpected moment. And then it's on to the future - a girl tosses an apple in the air, holds it in her hands, and takes a big forbidden bite. With that the world bursts into glorious color and catches fire. Today black-and-white starts to disappear: most of these clips are in color and from now on, just like that, color will be the default for every chapter. This is only the most obvious aspect of gigantic swerve.

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick

The Story: Monkeys kill each other. Millions of years later, a murderous computer is dismantled while singing a vaudeville tune. An astronaut travels through a wormhole, ages rapidly, and is reborn as a gigantic fetus floating amongst the stars. Sleek, black monoliths appear intermittently. Lots of ships and satellites and stations float through outer space.

The plot both is and isn’t the point of 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the one hand, its rather sketchy (and on paper, ridiculous, as the above indicates) plot is easily overwhelmed by the cosmic light shows, the long demonstrations of space travel technique and ritual, the passages featuring the apes who can’t talk and the bloodless bureaucrats who can but probably shouldn’t, and of course the lavish visual effects (which hold up so much better than CGI from two years ago – or for that matter, from this year). On the other hand, if the overarching plot seems haphazard and thin, the narrative arc – spanning millions of years as the human race progresses from a mindless ape to a cosmic star child – is all-important. Composing the arc are several generally separate stories, four in all: the prehistoric men, the trip to the moon sponsored by Howard Johnsons, the showdown with HAL, the mystical and mystifying finale.