I just watched the restored version of 2001 a Space Odyssey. It was in 4K made from a scan of the original 70mm camera negative. I knew that it was going to look great, but my real question was how well does this movie hold up? Is it still an entertaining movie to watch?
My conclusions surprised me. The special effects still hold up. I can not imagine they could be improved much, even with the best of today’s 3D software. I have very fond memories of it when I was blown away as a kid the first time I saw it. This is the first time I have seen the film in the quality the movie creators intended since I saw it in the theater, and it looks incredible.
That being said, a lot has changed since 1968 when the film came out. I want to first look at some of the other science fiction films that came out in the 1960s. The decade began with the 1960 The Time Machine. It is the special effects that make it so iconic. One of my actor headshots from back in the day has me holding the Academy Award for special effects from the film that we borrowed from a friend.
I did not care for the 1966 Fantastic Voyage as a kid, but it still sort of holds up. The science is atrocious, but the special effects were impressive for the time and were Academy Award winning. It was the biggest budget science fiction film ever made at the time. By the way, the story came from Jerome Bixby, not Isaac Asimov, who wrote the novelization based on the existing script. Bixby wrote It’s a Good Life, which became one of the best Twilight Zone episodes. He also wrote four Star Trek scripts, and his 1958 screenplay It! The Terror from Beyond Space inspired the 1970 film Alien.
The same year 2001 came out also saw the release of Planet of the Apes, another very important movie in the history of science fiction cinema. Rod Serling wrote the initial script. I rewatched it not that long ago, and it holds up surprisingly well, certainly better than the much later version with Mark Wahlberg. Charleton Heston (who my wife Belle worked with in the past and she really liked him when she expected not to), managed to make several science fiction movies in the 60’s and early 70’s that hold up surprisingly well. Omega Man from 1971 is still a good watch. (So is the movie it was a remake of, the 1964 Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, who turns in a realistic and very effective performance without all the camp of so many of his movies. The third remake starring Will Smith, I am Legend, which was the title of the 1954 book by William Matheson, I thought was terrible.) Soylent Green from 1973 also holds up very well and still seems relevant, with terrific performances from Heston and the final performance of Edgar G. Robinson.
All of these movies had lasting impacts, and much to my amazement, each and every one of them is a more entertaining film than 2001.
2001 had a huge impact on science fiction movies going forward. The special effects have a jaw dropping realism, especially for the time. It is filled with symbolism. Having just rewatched it in a format close to the director’s original intent, I am not sure how well it holds up as a movie.
Let’s start with the opening: The Dawn of Man. The actors were quite convincing as early man, but the scene goes on and on and repetitiously on. The story in this sequence is that man is vulnerable to attack from animals and other men. The monolith somehow conveys to them the concept of tools, and so one of them turns a bone into a weapon. This sequence takes over 15 minutes, and there is no music, just endless grunting. There is a short segment of Ligeti’s Requiem (more on Ligetti later) played during the reveal of the monolith, but I found this music annoying. Very little happens. Dawn of Man is exquisitely crafted, but I think you could tell the same story in five minutes and it would be far more effective. This opening sequence starts the movie slow, and the rest of the movie continues at what to me seemed a surprisingly glacial pace.
There is the famous transition from bone to spaceship, and then we are introduced to Dr. Heywood Floyd, riding a shuttle up to the space station. Not introduced, actually, he is asleep. After the long Dawn of Man sequence, as a kid a I remember being amazed at watching what felt like actually being in space. Sure, we had seen the real thing by then, but this was the first time I remember seeing a film that felt like it depicted space realistically. I was mesmerized.
The first dialogue is not spoken until 30 minutes into the film. Actually, the film has very little dialogue, and much of it is unimportant and inconsequential. Normal chit-chat. I could have memorized any of the character’s lines in a couple of hours (and I am slow). This movie is about visuals and ideas, not dialogue. Sadly, for me, I really like dialogue. I like the verbal interplay between characters. It is often how you learn more about them. This movie is not about characters.
One of the most surprising aspects of the film for me was the almost total lack of character development. All of the characters are flat and emotionless. We follow Dr. Floyd all the way to the moon. We learn almost nothing about him (other than that he has an adorable daughter, who contributes nothing to the story in their video chat, but at least conveys some emotion in contrast to her father’s generally flat affect). Not much happens other than the visual thrill of life in space. Through Floyd’s brief conversation with a Russian scientist we learn that there is something mysterious on the moon that is being covered up by the Americans. That is all that Floyd actually contributes to the story. It takes about 35 minutes of screen time to convey this one bit of information. Then Floyd is discarded and the movie focuses on the two astronauts.
Watching this I realized that the Floyd character has no purpose other than to serve as Basil Exposition, and he actually does very little of that. He has no character arc, does little to move the story along, and could have been replaced with any character. Can you even name the actor who played him? The answer is William Sylvester. This was his last major role and he did only minor work after this.
The last part of the movie focuses on the trip to Jupiter with Dr. David “Dave” Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood, who was Gary Mitchell in the first Star Trek aired episode). They are accompanied by the HAL 9000 computer (voiced by Douglas Rain), and these three are the only actual “characters” in the film. HAL is the only one with much personality.
Then we get to the only plot in the movie. HAL goes nuts (and yes, you might find the reason for HAL going nuts less than satisfying) and attempts to kill the entire crew. Here we get action sequences in super slow motion. Not that they were slowed down, they just move at the same slow pace as the rest of the film. Dave winds up as the last surviving crew member. Think of a male but super passive and uninteresting version of Ripley. Dave takes HAL offline, and continues on his mission.
The movie ends with sequence of optical effects done practically, as this was before digital effects, and Dave flies in the pod through a vortex that today we’d probably call a wormhole. It has long been said that this sequence is best viewed while stoned. As it turns out, I had taken a dose for pain, and it kicked in right about the time this sequence started. I do believe it is better while high, but still way too long.
That brings me to another issue I had. The use of classical music over slow moving space shots was brilliant, but not the original plan. They were used as placeholders until the final music could be added, but they worked so well that they kept them in. They used none of the original score composed by Alex North (Dr. Strangelove, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cleopatra, Spartacus, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), who did not learn that his music wasn’t used until he went to the studio screening.
The original North score was recorded many years later by a full orchestra under the direction of Jerry Goldmith, and I had the opportunity to hear it. For me, the Dawn of Man probably would have been much better with the North score instead of just 15 minutes of grunting. The entire North score is quite impressive, and in sync with the classical music Kubrick loved, but Kubrick did not want to budge on using classical music. It works amazingly well for most of the film (although I would love to see it with the North score), until we get to the final sequence. This is where he uses music from a modern composer.
The contemporary music that he did choose to use was, astonishingly, used without permission. The composer’s name is György Ligeti, and Kubrick used four of his compositions that use micropolyphony, the use of sustained dissonant chords that shift slowly. Atmosphères may be the most annoying music ever written, and it goes on endlessly during the flight through the wormhole. I don’t think all the pot in the world could make this more pleasant to listen to. Ligeti sued Kubrick and won a settlement.
There are a three women scientists in one brief scene, but they have little to do. This was the 1960s after all. This movie is primarily about men, and being the 1960’s, all of those men were white. Sexism was rather astonishingly bad in mid-twentieth century science fiction. Even for the standards of the 60s, though, women play very little role in 2001.
To be fair, Arthur C. Clarke was a gay man who never really did women characters all that well, although many of his peers did even worse (I’m looking at you, Isaac, whom women dubbed the man with a hundred hands). Clarke’s Rendevoux with Rama had more equality between the male and female characters, although the female characters do not show up until many pages into the story. Unfortunately, all of the characters are quite flat and emotionless. Still, I enjoyed the story, and it has been in development hell since 1972. It was announced late last year (2021) that it is still in active development as a feature film.
My bottom line is that 2001 is one of the most important science fiction films of the twentieth century, with the space station docking scene still breathtaking. But, as a vehicle intended to be entertaining, it lacks interesting characters other than HAL, very little happens, there is no actual character development (turning into a star child of which we have no understanding is not character development), the story is bare bones, the non-classical music is jarring and unpleasant to listen to, and like other Clarke stories, it does not really go anywhere. The journey is what is important, not the destination. We do not know much more about what is going on at the end than we did in the beginning.
2001 seems to violate so many rules of good storytelling, and I don’t think it is always successful when it does that. Now I will have to reread the novel to see if it had the same issues. Much food for thought as I explore my own characters and plotting.
