2011: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenwriters: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Legacy: 6th Greatest film of all time in the 2012 survey commissioned by the British Film Institute.
I finally caught 2001, I vaguely remember watching it a long time ago and falling asleep early on and not finishing it, this time I managed to stay awake. Kubrick's masterpiece emerged partly from a desire of Kubrick to make the proverbial "good science fiction movie" as in that time, like now, the majority of science fiction films were awful. 2001 deals with themes of human evolution, the nature of consciousness, our place in the universe, and space exploration, and does so in a more interesting way than many of its descendants like Prometheus.
A brief summary, 2001, inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel, has a 4-act plot. The first act follows a bunch of ape-men 4 million years ago, at an earlier stage of evolution where we witness the discovery of tools and weapon. The second act in 2000 deals with an interesting discovery on the moon which is being kept hidden. In the third act, a mission heads to Jupiter where the discovery is followed-up on, and this includes the famous Hal-9000 computer. Finally, in the 4th act, the repercussions of the discovery.
I give this movie my sincerest recommendation, but keep in mind it's long, will come off as boring in parts, and has an unconventional style that eschews dialogue. Kubrick (originally a photographer) was apparently sickened by the over-reliance on dialogue in most movies, and thus he tried to build the movie with as little dialogue as possible. It's a visual experience (also a great musical score). Some of the shots are really long, the camera lingers. Since the movie relied on models and sets rather than CGI, it still looks beautiful 46 years later. Honestly, I think a lot of these sets would be at home in current blockbusters, or even outclassing the other sets. I understand inflation but I'm amazed that they made this for 10 million dollars.
There's some really beautiful space-shots of Earth, the Moon, Jupiter, Jupiter's moons that were made before all of the beautiful shots we got in the late 1960s and 1970s. There are inaccuracies but they look beautiful regardless, I wonder how they drew them. I read in some commentaries that they originally wanted a mission to Saturn and not Jupiter, but they switched to Jupiter because they didn't know how to show the rings.
I've watched the movie and listened to the commentary by actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. They explain a lot of stuff ... I couldn't tell why HAL went evil in the movie. As one of the actors said, people who have read the novel, or watched the movie 50-100 times, infer that it's because HAL was conflicted by some orders he got, to keep the mission's purpose a secret, and this cased him to go insane. I didn't get that at all, but if real cinephiles need to watch the movie 50-100 times to get that, I don't feel bad.
Interestingly, the first act, of the ape-men, was shot with Kubrick not present. He didn't like to fly, he hated flying, so he directed the shooting (in Africa) by telephone from America. He had shots of the locations and had them split into maps, so he could say "point to C3" for example. I thought the costumes for the ape men were impressive, they compare well to those of Planet of the Apes which came out the same year. Apparently, when POTA won an oscar, he lamented that perhaps 2001 didn't win that oscar because the voters thought the apes in 2001 were real.
Ultimately, very little is truly original, but 2001 is possibly the most influential piece of live-action scifi. I saw a lot of Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and Babylon 5 throughout. A lot of what I thought was distinct about Babylon 5 (and still is) relative to Star Trek are actually further exploration of themes from 2001 that Star Trek and Star Wars abandoned, specifically with the "First Ones". In a way I feel bad, because now I've realised scifi has largely gone backwards. In the commentary, one of the actors said that scifi these days is just cowboys and indians, with bugs taking place of Indians... pretty much. Most scifi can't even be bothered to make their spaceships rotate.
All in all, 2001 was special, and I'm happy to finally get it now, at least on some level.
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenwriters: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Legacy: 6th Greatest film of all time in the 2012 survey commissioned by the British Film Institute.
I finally caught 2001, I vaguely remember watching it a long time ago and falling asleep early on and not finishing it, this time I managed to stay awake. Kubrick's masterpiece emerged partly from a desire of Kubrick to make the proverbial "good science fiction movie" as in that time, like now, the majority of science fiction films were awful. 2001 deals with themes of human evolution, the nature of consciousness, our place in the universe, and space exploration, and does so in a more interesting way than many of its descendants like Prometheus.
A brief summary, 2001, inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel, has a 4-act plot. The first act follows a bunch of ape-men 4 million years ago, at an earlier stage of evolution where we witness the discovery of tools and weapon. The second act in 2000 deals with an interesting discovery on the moon which is being kept hidden. In the third act, a mission heads to Jupiter where the discovery is followed-up on, and this includes the famous Hal-9000 computer. Finally, in the 4th act, the repercussions of the discovery.
I give this movie my sincerest recommendation, but keep in mind it's long, will come off as boring in parts, and has an unconventional style that eschews dialogue. Kubrick (originally a photographer) was apparently sickened by the over-reliance on dialogue in most movies, and thus he tried to build the movie with as little dialogue as possible. It's a visual experience (also a great musical score). Some of the shots are really long, the camera lingers. Since the movie relied on models and sets rather than CGI, it still looks beautiful 46 years later. Honestly, I think a lot of these sets would be at home in current blockbusters, or even outclassing the other sets. I understand inflation but I'm amazed that they made this for 10 million dollars.
There's some really beautiful space-shots of Earth, the Moon, Jupiter, Jupiter's moons that were made before all of the beautiful shots we got in the late 1960s and 1970s. There are inaccuracies but they look beautiful regardless, I wonder how they drew them. I read in some commentaries that they originally wanted a mission to Saturn and not Jupiter, but they switched to Jupiter because they didn't know how to show the rings.
I've watched the movie and listened to the commentary by actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. They explain a lot of stuff ... I couldn't tell why HAL went evil in the movie. As one of the actors said, people who have read the novel, or watched the movie 50-100 times, infer that it's because HAL was conflicted by some orders he got, to keep the mission's purpose a secret, and this cased him to go insane. I didn't get that at all, but if real cinephiles need to watch the movie 50-100 times to get that, I don't feel bad.
Interestingly, the first act, of the ape-men, was shot with Kubrick not present. He didn't like to fly, he hated flying, so he directed the shooting (in Africa) by telephone from America. He had shots of the locations and had them split into maps, so he could say "point to C3" for example. I thought the costumes for the ape men were impressive, they compare well to those of Planet of the Apes which came out the same year. Apparently, when POTA won an oscar, he lamented that perhaps 2001 didn't win that oscar because the voters thought the apes in 2001 were real.
Ultimately, very little is truly original, but 2001 is possibly the most influential piece of live-action scifi. I saw a lot of Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and Babylon 5 throughout. A lot of what I thought was distinct about Babylon 5 (and still is) relative to Star Trek are actually further exploration of themes from 2001 that Star Trek and Star Wars abandoned, specifically with the "First Ones". In a way I feel bad, because now I've realised scifi has largely gone backwards. In the commentary, one of the actors said that scifi these days is just cowboys and indians, with bugs taking place of Indians... pretty much. Most scifi can't even be bothered to make their spaceships rotate.
All in all, 2001 was special, and I'm happy to finally get it now, at least on some level.
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