Viking Night: 2001: A Space Odyssey
By Bruce Hall
June 1, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Case in point - not only is there no dialogue for almost half an hour, but the first half of THAT is all about the harsh underworld of monkey politics, circa eight million BC. Just to be clear, I am saying that the first 20 minutes are poo flinging monkeys, followed immediately by two spaceships docking to classical music. Seriously, you could project it on the wall at a hipster wedding reception and every pretentious jerk in the room would consider it genius. Your bespectacled, vociferously gluten-free friends are right of course. It IS genius, but it’s got nothing to do with you.
It’s all about the man behind the monkeys.
Kubrick, along with famed writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated what would become 2001 over the last half of the 1960s. Their goal was to create the definitive science fiction experience - something that meant a lot more at the time than it does today. Back then, most science fiction was either frivolous escapism like Fantastic Voyage or high minded allegory, unrelated to science, like Planet of the Apes. While those are both entertaining films, 2001 was conceived from the start to be something different. I can’t stress enough the audacity of trying to release a serious, thoughtful authentic looking movie about space travel - three months before astronauts actually landed on the moon.
But 2001 is more than just an aesthetically satisfying film. So was the original Star Wars - but that would be the movie that redefined the spectacle of film, while never straying too far from its pulpy roots. 2001 quietly proposes many interesting questions about life, the universe and everything. And it does so in ways that no American film had up to that point, and precious few have since. This is a movie about the eddy and flow of human evolution, and the risk/reward ratio involved with human exploration. That’s some pretty deep material, so imagine the way a lot of people feel ten minutes into the Monkeypocalypse.
When you set out to make a film people will talk about for decades, you no doubt have some goals in mind. But what if one of them was to express all these big ideas using a minimum of dialogue? By far the most controversial aspect of 2001 may be its reliance on nonverbal storytelling. In real life, most people don’t sit around explaining to each other everything that’s happening around them so that the theater full of people watching them can stay up to speed. And when you were six-years-old and found Goldie the Goldfish floating upside down in her bowl, Morgan Freeman didn’t appear behind you and tell you what it all meant, did he?
Unless of course, you’re one of Morgan Freeman’s kids, in which case I guess this probably did happen. But for the rest of us, life is more complicated than that, and we have to figure things out for ourselves. There’s a school of thought that says it’s okay to make a movie this way, if that’s what you want to do. This is exactly what Kubrick did, and the result is a film that feels as meaningful and as open to interpretation as anything else that happened to me this week.
Which brings us back around to the monkeys.
If I took anything away from this film, it was the stark reminder that knowledge can be considered a toll or a weapon, depending on who wields it first. In this case, a mysterious alien monolith appears in the midst of an ape colony many eons in the past. Upon making contact with it, one ape in particular is changed, finding himself able to recognize a discarded bone as a potential weapon. Suddenly, his tribe is able to overcome their more aggressive neighbors by bashing their heads in. The world’s first society was formed on the same day the world’s first war was declared, or something to that effect.
To paraphrase a good friend of mine: “The movie is called 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the first 20 minutes is about goddamn monkeys.”
Fair enough. But if you’re patient, and pay attention, you’ll begin to realize you’re being told a story entirely through images and intellectual processing. The “apes” are actors in suits, but every aspect of their appearance and behavior throughout this sequence is meticulously choreographed and planned to the point where the message doesn’t NEED words. Match-cut to eleventy billion years later, when the United States apparently owns space. I suppose that’s for the best, since it’s really hard to goosestep in zero gravity. All the same, we apparently still let the Russians hang out at the Hilton on our big shiny space station.
It’s here that we meet Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), a government official on his way to the American moon base. NASA has discovered an alien artifact on the moon, similar to the one that (unbeknownst to them) first taught their ancestors the joy of murder. The artifact resists all attempts to study it before pointing a radio burst at Jupiter - because to these aliens, space travel is obviously a treasure hunt. Eighteen months later, a hyper advanced survey ship is dispatched to the planet, stuffed with people, equipment and one super intelligent computer named HAL-9000. HAL is a sentient, self-aware computer with a pleasant, helpful disposition and he’s responsible for running the ship on the long journey. While the science team is in suspended animation, astronauts Dave Bowman (Kier Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) keep an eye on HAL.
So far, we’ve got monkeys, a space station, five minutes on the moon, and now we’re in space, watching hunky astronauts eat baby food. I know this doesn’t sound like much of a story, and it kind of isn’t. An alien artifact bestowed intelligence upon our early ancestors. Now that we’re experimenting with space travel, they’re back, and they’ve evidently sent us an invitation to Jupiter, for reasons as yet unknown. There are no space battles, no villains in black masks, and no wisecracking heroes. This is, literally, an Odyssey across the solar system in the interest of solving a mystery. Something subtle goes wrong that puts the mission in jeopardy, but the thrill isn’t in trying to outrun video game explosions or dodging asteroids, it’s in the deliberate, purposeful way the astronauts manage the situation, and the elegant, almost entirely visual way in which the film conveys information.
What dialogue there is reveals little about the situation, or the character’s inner thoughts. As in real life, Poole and Bowman are professionals, cool under pressure and difficult to read. There are no blaring alarms, and no dramatic computer countdown to destruction. As a matter of fact, there’s so much attention to detail in the set design that the vast majority of 2001 looks like it might have been made last year. People on space planes watch TV on the seatbacks just like we do on flights today. The astronauts even have what appear to be iPad-like tablet devices - not like the phony looking ones on Star Trek, but ones that we actually see being used! Every aspect and nuance of this film - in standard Kubrickian fashion - is part of the larger whole.
It’s a grand, dramatic tapestry that amazes me to this day, and while there ARE answers to the questions raised by the film, the fact that you are required to draw your own conclusions makes the experience all the more rewarding.
Don’t mind the monkeys. 2001: A Space Odyssey is indisputably one of the finest motion pictures I have ever seen.