I had @nyanguardparty and @transingthebourgeoisie watch 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) last night and my thoughts have not significantly changed on it since my viewing last December.
When I made my post referencing “there are some films where the experience of watching them are better than what they have to offer in and of themselves”, this is what was on the forefront of my mind. 2001 opens with several minutes of a black screen with drawn out ambient music, which, if you’ve seen this in a theater, you know is for when the curtains are still drawn in front of the screen (for theaters that still do that) and this is more atmosphere setting for when audience members are still arriving. It’s a microcosm of how 2001 should be experienced, and while I take delight in seeing it on a tiny Discord window at a digitally enforced 30 fps, I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that this is one of those films where, if you have not seen it in a theater, you have not gotten the full experience (for context I have not).
2001′s 2.5 hour runtime is mostly composed of visual storytelling; only 40% or so is dialogue based, or, say, has human characters directly interacting as a means of advancing the plot. The story is broken down into four major parts: prehistoric apes becoming the first humans after coming into contact with some alien technology that resembles a monolith, a second monolith being found in the future year of 2001 on the moon, an expedition to Jupiter by a small crew for reasons classified to both the characters and audience, and finally, Dave, the last surviving crew member’s experiences with coming into direct contact with another monolith. The film spends an inordinate amount of time establishing just how much time and energy has to go into space travel. If you’re not absorbed by seeing just how long it takes for a ship to safely land at a space station or on the moon, or seeing flight attendants use velcro shoes to stay on the floor of a ship, this will not be for you. I do really admire how we get so many displays of how extensive space travel is both in how it takes weeks to get to Jupiter and how much training to even be on such travels is required. The effects work throughout is perfectly complimentary what with how ships sort of float in and out of frame, regardless of how fast they’d be actually moving.
It’s unfortunate however to say that 2001′s content is a bit lacking, and you might want to take “a bit” out of that appraisal. Stanley Kubrick is the classic reactionary, entertaining himself with concepts of how humanity at large is inherently evil and predisposed to violence. “Violence” for Kubrick has no concept of class structure or systems of power or extensions to larger motives, it’s almost chidlike, and it paints a really dour color for this film. 2001 is essentially a minimalist science fiction almost-horror film that is sandwiched between the epic story of the human race at large confronting its destiny through engaging in the course of our “complete” biological evolution. In the first segment, after the monolith has disappeared, one of the apes in contact with it successfully picks up a bone and begins standing on its hind legs. We are in essence seeing the “birth” of the first human being, appropriate given this segment is titled “THE DAWN OF MAN”. Things take a downward turn later when the apes that were in contact with the monolith fight another group over access to a waterhole, and the apes we have followed club one of their rivals to death with bones. The first application of tools in a purely inter-special context has been to murder another person, and when the ape throws the bone into the air and we get a quick cut edit where it is replaced a cylindrical space ship, we are supposed to mentally fill in the gaps that the ship functionally fills in the same role, that humanity has always been defined by this mindless violence.
Near the end of the film, Dave has to race to shut down the expedition’s ship’s AI, HAL, because HAL took a series of decisions that led to the intentional murder of the rest of the crew. Dave, for the purposes of the immediate narrative, represents the last human given his contact with the monolith causes him to evolve into some godlike entity. His last acts as a human being were those fighting for his life, so ultimately Kubrick presents to a version of humanity where violence is something that we are almost biologically attuned to, the only way to escape is to reach the next evolutionary step, something that we can no longer consider human. Between this, and the fact that the human characters we do interact are mostly two-dimensional (I don’t really mind this in theory, I enjoy just seeing people going about their day without having to engage in narrative centered arcs), I have to say that I value 2001 far more for its style rather than its substance. I really could never see myself reading the Arthur C. Clarke novel because I really would never bother with this story if it was not presented in this way. I’m responding more to sensations than any actual emotional connection, and when I say I’d need to see this in the theater, that’s more so I can respond in an absorbing way rather than in a fashion that actually engages with what the film is trying to say, i.e. “ha-ha…opera music! Ha-ha…monkeys! Ha-ha…space! Ha-ha…colors!”
I think 2001 takes up such an inordinate amount of space in the cinematic canon because most of the audience that sees it haven’t consumed a LOT of science fiction or experimental media or are subconsciously in desperate need of something different from the version of science fiction on the big screen that became the default following Star Wars (1977); permanently becoming a sibling genre to action-adventure films and never engaging with ideas this heady before. This is a lot of people’s first exposure to film as an art form. As Martin Scorsese put it, I really do not think you’ll see another film wherein, “It takes extraordinary audacity and power and guts to say, ‘Let’s just screech everything to a halt and take everybody back to prehistoric times.” 2001 becomes special in the context of Anthony Mackie’s 2017 interview where he just flatly told the audience that popular film is done for, and asked audience members to name many of their favorite films so he could shoot it down with “wouldn’t get made today.” 2001 could not have been made within the past 20 years or so, an extremely large science fiction film with barely two scenes you could consider action set pieces, that tells its story in a way where no matter who you are, you are going to say, “this makes no goddamn fucking sense”, and something that wants its audiences to respond to it in provocative nuanced ways.
So that creates an interesting predicament where I or anyone else can’t ever dispose of 2001, because we are in very desperate need of films like 2001, that boldly throw out all conventional wisdom on the subject of how films are made and presented. I can never say 2001 is a bad film in any fashion out of fear that it would dissuade someone else from seeing it and getting something out of it that I did not. I think the appropriate term would be “extremely overrated”, even though now overrated is a frowned upon word on the Internet because it represents the Xbox Achievement for “Long Way Around Saying Something Sucks and Everyone Else is a Dumbass”. I think 2001 is ultimately a good and necessary film, but when the default consensus surrounding it is “one of the best and most important films *ever* made”, I can’t help but say overrated in response to that because it’s truly not.
