2001: A Space Odyssey

I saw 2001: a Space Odyssey as an 18-year-old in 1968 who had just graduated high school.  I was headed to college.  I was headed out into the greater world. For me 2001 was a powerful artistic and philosophical statement.  I had never seen a film like it.  It was about the future: my future, and the future of humankind. 

Stanley Kubrick, who lived from 1928 to 1999, was one of the great filmmakers of the 20^th century.  He made films at a glacial place, but it was a deliberate slowness.  He was a perfectionist who wanted each of his films to be distinct and separate from the others, who wanted to create perfect films.  Of course, there are various stories about how actors like Shelley Duvall found his perfectionism difficult.  In his film The Shining, he reshot one scene in which Duvall protects herself with a baseball bat 127 times.

Among Kubrick’s great films are The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001 (1968), Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), and Eyes Wide Shot (1999). 2001, The Shining, and especially Barry Lyndon received mixed reviews when they came out, but today they are all regarded as among Kubrick’s greatest works.  Kubrick was enlisted by Kirk Douglas as the director of the 1960 film Spartacus, which won a number of awards—Douglas had starred in Paths of Glory, but their friendship did not survive Spartacus, especially given the amount of Kirk Douglas dialogue Kubrick cut from the film.  

Kubrick worked on 2001 for four years, from 1964 to 1968.  He based it on a 1949 short story “The Sentinel” by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke and Kubrick worked together on every aspect of the film, but 2001 was Kubrick’s in every way, from screenplay to visual style to philosophical content.

Kubrick’s distinctive filmmaking techniques are all evident in 2001: a screenplay based on a literary source, reliance on visual imagery over dialogue and language, brilliant cinematography, the visual composition of scenes, intricately conceived sets, tracking shots, ultra-realistic special effects, carefully chosen music, precise editing, a dispassionate and clinical approach to his characters, and the interest in ideas.  2001 creates mysteries (like the monolith and the star child) that it doesn’t quite explain, and it raises questions that it doesn’t quite answer—these stick with you long after the film has ended.

2001 concerns issues of great importance to the present day: the evolution of the human race, our relationship to technology, especially artificial intelligence, our future as we move out into the cosmos.  Looking back fifty years after its release, we may find things this film gets wrong: the size of computers, the size of the spaceship, the all-male crews.  But one can’t fault 2001: A Space Odyssey for its skill, its ambition, and its vision. It is one of the great films of cinematic history.  It changed how we view movies, and it changed how we think about ourselves as human inhabitants of an immensely large if not infinite universe.