TITLE: Review: 2001-A Space Odyssey (1968) AUTHOR: Joe Johnson DATE: 9:37:00 PM ----- BODY:
Dir: Stanley Kubrick

Any movie that goes twenty-five minutes without dialogue or waits an hour to get to the central characters, seems like a formula for failure. A movie with angry evolutionary links jumping around with bones in their hands, looks like a failure. A space movie with lasers and battle, must be a failure. So why is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey so successful?

I heard about this movie growing up and how my parents walked out of the theatre. And so when I finally got around to watching it, I wanted to finish - to prove that I was an intellectual, a conoseiur of films and could take whatever abstraction was being thrown at me. Having watched this a few times over the last decade, I'm continually surprised by how original, how unique this film remains. It makes me wonder what kind of person gave Kubrick permission to do this, because on paper it must have seemed like a complete mess. And that reminds me of another movie and how a studio risked everything based on the talent and reputation of a director: RKO and Citizen Kane.

This movie belongs in that conversation, on the same list with Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Passion of Joan of Arc. And if you're trying to figure out why it works, stop. It's impossible. This film violates every rule but comes together with such precision and beauty that any attempt to emulate the structure is absolutely futile. It's like trying to remember why the Mona Lisa remains such a captivating portrait.

The story is confusing and abstract - something about a monolith that ushers humanity into evolutionary stages. And perhaps that isn't important, though there's an angle to the story that makes it feel as grand as the book of Genesis.

The central and most famous section of the film takes place aboard a space ship on a mission to Jupiter. It tells of the perfect HAL 9000 computer that starts to lose it's perfection. It develops a self-awareness that transforms into self-preservation, leading the irrational act of murder. It ultimately leads to the "death" of HAL. Not just the termination of a machine, but the death of an emerging consciousness. This section is so compelling. It's placed between the bookends of obscurity and silence at just the right time, cleansing the pallette for another exploration - this time for a special effects driven journey of discovery.

Like the rest of the movie, this third section shouldn't work, but it does. Perfectly. There are a few striking things about this movie aside from the atmosphere, pacing and vision.

The first is that the special effects have more accuracy and substance to them than nearly everything that has emerged from the cgi revolution. It reminded me of why it was possible to believe the original Star Wars trilogy occured in a real place. The new trilogy felt like light and pixels. The second is that, with the possible exception of Star Wars or Solaris, no one has improved upon this story or the sci-fi epic. Granted, the HAL storyline is ultimately a re-imagining of the Frankenstein legend, but very little of what Kubrick achieved forty years ago has been exceeded.

In an evolutionary model, Stealth, Electric Dreams, Terminator and perhaps even the Matrix trilogy, should have come earlier, leading to 2001 as the ultimate word on humanity verses machine, of mankind atoning for its own attempts to replace a creator god.

But this film, like Citizen Kane, was years ahead of the evolutionary curve - almost like an act of divine intervention.

***** of *****

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