I won’t watch this film again. This sentence could be the most damming of reviews for a film, however, I don’t know that 2001: A space odyssey is a film created to be watched again and again. The film is famed, primarily for its ground-breaking special effects, and Stanley Kubrick is well known for creating uncomfortable watches, which this was.
In the first section, a large block suddenly appeared in the landscape, and when we move on to the future, it was hinted that this would be what the scientist was going to see, which proved to be true. However after that, the story of the monolith was never tied up, it was clear that it was some kind of alien object, but it was frustrating that we never got proper closure on that storyline.
The sets for the second section of the film were good and interesting, and the special effects were impressive. The story continued to be slow, and it wasn’t gripping, I was just waiting for something to happen. When they went to the moon to look at the monolith that had been found there, I thought that the pace of the film was about to start increasing, but as we finally got some excitement with the monolith emitting a loud, piercing noise, the film moved onto the next section of the space ship.
The section on the spaceship was a long period with little dialogue and a constant sense of impending doom. There was certainly an eeriness about the supercomputer ‘Hal’ and when a shot focused on its camera it was quite unnerving and uncomfortable. I found a lot of this section of the film very frustrating as the two astronauts made some stupid choices, particularly after Hal had thrown the first astronaut into space, and the other thought it would be sensible to leave the ship that Hal had control, including access, over.
The final section of the film can be described simply as confusing and headache-inducing. The visuals of what I assume were the astronauts travelling at light speed through space were quite hard to watch, with several minutes of speeding lights on the screen, making me feel a little queasy. After that, I don’t really know what was going on. The astronaut arrived in – I think – some kind of alternate universe where he appeared to see his older self, before becoming them and then seeing the next older version, or it was a montage of the rest of his life stuck in this place. It was a confusing end that I don’t feel tied up any of the storylines from the film, I understand that sometimes that is the intention of a film and leaves you to think about what happened, but I didn’t feel like the film gave us enough to consider.
I don’t think that the film is worthy of the hype that surrounds it, however, I do appreciate that the special effects were ground-breaking, so I don’t know if I’ll ever understand the impact of the film if I didn’t see it at the time it came out. I feel that it was a bit of a vanity project for Kubrick, and there wasn’t enough focus put on the storyline, so although the special effects were very impressive it wasn’t a brilliant watch. The film wasn’t received well at its premiere, with a sixth of the audience walking out and Kubrick’s collaborator Arthur C. Clarke supposedly in tears. A New Yorker article (linked below) attributes its success to the high viewers flocking to see the film with the trend of taking acid before, and the studio jumped on the bandwagon by adding the tagline ‘The ultimate trip’. I think if you have to be high to enjoy a film, it is maybe not a great film.
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