2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is a cinematic enigma, a cosmic dive into the primordial pool of dreams and visions of a tomorrow that may never come, but is already here. Are you satisfied yet with the mystery? Have you discovered your monolith? Kubrick called it "the most expensive religious film ever made." (He was rejoicing that MGM had yet to discover they had just financed such a film.)

It is slow and dream-like and cold and technical and wondrous--there aren't sufficient superlatives to designate exactly what this strange, rare specimen of film may signify. It perhaps has the power to push the viewer towards a new state of consciousness. That may be overstating things, but there it is.

It begins on the African veldt in prehistoric times, amid partially-evolved simians trying to survive amid plenty. They do not discover that they are, indeed, amid plenty until they discover a mysterious black slab that emits signals. Famously, this inspires the strongest, the smartest of them to pick up a bone; to slay the beasts that can provide food. And then, to dominate, to slay his brother. Thrusting the bone into the air in bloodthirsty exaltation, we flash forward to a future of floating orbital space stations and lunar colonies, a future both dominated and threatened by Soviet and American interests.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Opening Scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey

Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) is "on his way up to Clavius," ostensibly for some secret mission the Russians who press him seem to think has something to do with an epidemic that has broken out amid the lunar colonists. Mum's the word as far as that, but what he is on his way to the Moon for is to personally examine a large, rectangular black slab that has been "deliberately buried" under the lunar crust, millions of years prior.

And they've detected another on Jupiter. Somewhere, "Beyond the Infinite."

Space is cold, and icy, and dead. Our long, sleek, technological marvels move through the freezing black expanse of death, seeking, ever seeking. On the Discovery, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are traveling toward their inexorable destinies with eight scientists in cryonic suspension (they're tucked away in comfortable, white little shells, death cocoons) and an all-knowing, all-seeing, thoroughly psychotic onboard AI named "Hal." Hal seems a soft-spoken, entirely reasonable machine. Then, of course, he becomes homicidal.

The Cosmic Hotel Guest

Poole is killed, twisting through space like a white-suited insect that has been hit with a cloud of Raid or Black Flag. Bowman goes to retrieve the body in one of the eeriest scenes ever conceived of being in space--it is all silence, naturally. (Unlike Star Wars pictures, which falsely project the notion of sound in a vacuum to make the viewing experience more exciting.)

The next moments are grueling, the faceless black window of the escape pod seeming as one zombie-like eye with robot arms attached--a floating white bubble in which Bowman begs the psychologically aberrant AI Hal to, "Open the pod bay doors, Hal."

Bowman finally finds egress through the airlock. Hal ceases the life support functions of the hibernating scientists. To reveal more would ruin this ultimately dream-like, deeply mystical cinematic experience. The ending visual feast is like an inner trip through the Void into the realm of all possibilities--to witness birth, death, and rebirth on a colossal scale,

What does it all mean? The novel of 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke, had its own intellectual underpinning, a few more monolith sniffs for the educated reader. The film, as befits film, is a surface-level hallucination of a future we will one day arrive at. The Monoliths, multiple, are calling cards, black rectangular doorways--perhaps they are the cybernetic vulva of an AI revolution, one promising the biomechanical intercourse between Man and the MAchine he's built in His image. Hal may be the rapidly deteriorating forerunner of that Brave New World.

Or perhaps our extraterrestrial intelligence chooses to remain elusive as the aliens, just out of reach of human perception, who populate an imitation luxury hotel suite floating in space with a single hairless biped, descended from primates, whose Promethean Will animated his trip back beyond the stars, "Beyond the Infinite."

To define this film as "Kubrick's Masterpiece" would be to sell it short. It's a dream ripped from the sleeping brain of a vast, whirling, creative mind, forever looking outward, beyond the dark doorway of tomorrow, eyes reaching for the twinkling points of light where the cosmos leaves its calling cards.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Trailer [1968] HD

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