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It’s always said to be one of the greatest films of all time. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey is a long and deeply meaningful epic of the cinema. Apparently. It gets 8.4 out of 10 at IMDB, it’s in just about every top 100 list of all time and the AFI named it the 22nd best American film in their centennial poll. If nothing else it seemed like a good movie to watch on my new Blu-ray player. I added a few Blu-rays to my LoveFilm list and this was the one they sent me. Sweeping sci fi SFX goodness – what could be better for the newest shiny disc format to show its stuff and shake its ass? And – as if Blu-ray wasn’t enough cool technology for one movie – I decided to live tweet it as I was watching it. Every so often I posted a tweet on my Twitter account from my iPhone (remind me again how I survived up until a year ago?) so that the no one that is interested in what I’ve got to say could share the experience with me. The first segment – after the interminable bit where there is a black screen and noise that isn’t music yet, then the proper theme music which made me go WOOOOOOO even though I was determined not to – is the one with the monkeys. This is where I nail my trousers to the mast (as Sir Humphrey once said) and say that 2001 is a terrible film. This money business – which went on for about 20 minutes – was deeply, deeply boring. A bunch of men in monkey costumes screech at each other. Then, eventually, an obelisk appears. Touching this seems to trigger a sudden burst of evolution and this particular whoop (or is it flange?) of monkeys suddenly discover how to use bones to make (a) music and (b) war on their fellow apes. Ok, I thought to myself, the theme of this film is that these black obelisks give mankind a nudge in the right direction at pivotal moments in its journey. I’m ok with that. It doesn’t make up for the last half hour but it’s a start. The second bit is a long – arguably as long as space itself – sequence of a man in a shuttle (who is asleep and therefore not suffering as the audience is), then a man on a space station and eventually a man on the moon. The shuttle bit wasn’t bad per se – it had a good stab at a realistic portrayal of life aboard a space shuttle – but the shuttle was empty. Even Star Cops – with its BBC2 budget – filled their shuttle with extras. Then – after a videophone call which seemed to be a way to get the director’s daughter on screen – we meet the real star of the film.
They had a meeting about something and the American guy was evasive. He then fucked off to a base on the moon and had another meeting. The worst part about it is I couldn’t make out what they were saying even with the volume up. I might not have quite got all the settings right on my new machine. Either that or it wasn’t worth hearing because the film has no plot and Kubrick cranked up the background silence to drown them out.
They take some more good, authentic looking technology and go to a dig site on the moon. They've found another obelisk. Will this be another nudge in the evolution of humanity? Or will it just make a lot of noise and cause a bunch of space men to clutch the sides of their space helmets where their ears would be if they weren't in space. Is this the next evolutionary leap - no ears? It's a funny way to go about it. The third part - eighteen months later and on board a ship bound for Jupiter - is the best part of the movie. There is some stunning camera work as these chaps, denied the joys of CGI, show us people walking around the ship in a way that would be impossible except in low gravity. It really is seamless - and remember I was watching in unforgiving high definition - and makes me forgive the film for a little while. Then - as impressive as it undoubtedly is - it becomes a movie about people walking about and I'm bored again.
The point - if any of this has a point - of this part of the film is that Hal, the onboard computer, goes a bit strange. Except it is all so utterly low key - Hal makes a prediction about something that will happen in three days time. The men don't believe it will happen as the component in question looks fine. Like any workplace drama which starts out as nothing, everyone starts getting very defensive, shifting the blame elsewhere and doing their best to quietly stab everyone else in the back. I'm guessing it was meant to be a god satire but it came across as much more of a petty office dispute. But it's quite well done and an entire film exploring this particular story might've been quite good. It would've ended with Dave shutting Hal down and going off into space with no crew, no computer and almost no chance of survival under the circs. Sadly, they didn't end the film like that. They ended it with Dave going on a wacky light-show journey which looks like Bernard Lodge's tribute to Tron. At the time it was probably more colour than any human being had ever seen before. I would've happily forgiven it if it meant something. But it is just colour for colour's sake. Cinema's attempt to show TV up for the timid little box it is. These surreal, random shapes and patterns continue for ages and the end result? A bedroom. An ornate bedroom in which we see Dave getting older. He then gets turned into a baby and blasted out into space. That's not an ending. Seriously - it isn't. Blowing up the Death Star or deciding not to marry Andie McDowell - those are endings. But I'm being simple minded by taking everything literally. What of the deeper meaning and deeper significance of everything that is happening. I don't buy this. You can read lots into just about anything if you take the trouble to do so. It took me les than two minutes to formulate the idea that the Hal sequences are meant to represent humanity seeing the flaws in religion and deciding that they can manage perfectly well without god as god is proven to be fallible. The last two thousand years has been spent ignoring and excusing the obvious fact that (if you believe in god) bad things happen and a lot of them must be god's fault. By getting a prediction wrong, Hal goes from infallible to fallible and human Dave decides to switch him off. Humans are now space beings - they live in heaven and yet there is no heaven there - just empty space. God is a lie and humans finally realise that. That's the sort of thing people read into 2001. It's all nonsense of course - it's just a dull bit of science fiction which asks whether artificial intelligence can ever be a substitute for human intelligence. By making mistakes Hal is more like a human than he was before and the real humans can't handle it. Artificial intelligence is fine and dandy until it becomes too realistic because the flaws of error, irrationality and greed take over. I'm doing it again. I'm trying to excuse it by reading things into it. It's just dull science fiction. Immensely pompous and achingly dull. And no where near as sophisticated as it thinks - the space ship is meant to represent the penis and Jupiter is the egg - birthing a new type of post-human intelligence. Right - sophistication - making your space ship look like a cock. That's clever. Did you run out of toilet walls to draw on? So I'm not a fan of this alleged masterpiece. It was a real struggle to keep going and if I hadn't been able to comfort myself with the thought of writing the above I don't think I would've made it. Yes, you can intellectualise it. Yes, the minds that made it were probably thinking of higher things. And yes, it looks good in places. But it is still a terrible movie because a bunch of random set pieces happen, it is impossible to enjoy and it is left to the audience to try and join the dots later in an attempt not to feel like you've just wasted two and a half hours of your life. It screams at you that it must have deeper meaning and yet it doesn't. Not really. It just makes you think it is clever so you'll do the hard work later. By all means make a film with depth and meaning, make something multilayered and sophisticated. But it needs to work on the surface as well. Tell a good story and make an enjoyable film, then add meaning and cleverness to it. That's how you make a good film.
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