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The 50th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the original release of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," a seminal film in motion picture history and one that has awed millions over the years. Kubrick's title has often been credited with paving the way for science-fiction films that took a realistic approach to depicting the future. Even as "2001" has grown to become one of the most iconic movies of all time, the reception it received when it originally premiered wasn't good. An excerpt: The film's previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film's iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick's panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.
Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day's reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie "a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick's inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view." And yet that afternoon, a long line -- comprised predominantly of younger people -- extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee. The Cannes Film Festival will celebrate the 50th anniversary of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the world premiere of an unrestored 70mm print, introduced by Christopher Nolan. The event is set for May 12 as part of the Cannes Classics program. The screening will also be attended by members of Kubrick's family, including his daughter Katharina Kubrick and his longtime producing partner and brother-in-law Jan Harlan.
Further reading: Why 2001: A Space Odyssey's mystery endures, 50 years on (CNET); 50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- how Kubrick's sci-fi 'changed the very form of cinema' (The Guardian); The story of a voice: HAL in '2001' wasn't always so eerily calm (The New York Times); and The most intriguing theories about "2001: A Space Odyssey" (io9); and Behind the scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the strangest blockbuster in Hollywood history (Vanity Fair).
Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day's reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie "a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick's inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view." And yet that afternoon, a long line -- comprised predominantly of younger people -- extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee. The Cannes Film Festival will celebrate the 50th anniversary of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the world premiere of an unrestored 70mm print, introduced by Christopher Nolan. The event is set for May 12 as part of the Cannes Classics program. The screening will also be attended by members of Kubrick's family, including his daughter Katharina Kubrick and his longtime producing partner and brother-in-law Jan Harlan.
Further reading: Why 2001: A Space Odyssey's mystery endures, 50 years on (CNET); 50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- how Kubrick's sci-fi 'changed the very form of cinema' (The Guardian); The story of a voice: HAL in '2001' wasn't always so eerily calm (The New York Times); and The most intriguing theories about "2001: A Space Odyssey" (io9); and Behind the scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the strangest blockbuster in Hollywood history (Vanity Fair).
Any non-paywalled links?
I loved those scenes. For me, it was the best cinema I had ever seen as a kid and it still holds up now. It is not simply mindless entertainment as much of Hollywood films are (which I can also enjoy depending on mood). The other film I truly love is Lawrence of Arabia, but I bet you find that boring as well. I just saw it in 70mm and it was truly magnificent. I hope to see 2001 in 70mm soon too. I've seen both films dozens of times and have yet to become bored with either.
Different strokes.
It's one of the most beautiful, elegant movies ever made. The visuals are just astounding, especially if you see it in glorious 70mm. I can somewhat see the original reactions though. If you're somehow able to ignore the amazing job Kubrick did presenting the majesty and elegance of Space, you're left with just an OK story.
Combine that with the older straight-laced audiences of the 60s who want everything to fit within some narrow confines, they're going to be disappointing by the ending. Not that the ending DOES make a huge amount of sense, but at least it's beautiful. But you're not going to like it if you're not comfortable with the inexplicable and somewhat disturbing. And you're going to hate it if you want it all to make sense in some conventional, simple way.
Richard Nixon couldn't cover up an office break in. How would he create a world wide conspiracy when the Soviet Union could expose it in minutes?
it wasn't the movie, it was you.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The problem is that you were looking for a typical movie storyline, and instead got a meditation on humanity's place in the Universe. It's like complaining that Beethoven didn't put a guitar solo in the Fifth Symphony.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As opposed to the latest Star Wars where the ships land and explode perfectly? Or the version where Lucas made the Death Star explode better? Maybe if the Obelisk turned out to be a Decepticon?
There's a lot of examples of contemporary, "unwatchable" films. This one is still considered a classic even with all of it's flaws.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Actually, the use of pieces like Thus Spake Zarathustra came about somewhat by accident. There was an actual conventional film score written for 2001, but Kubrick used the classical music just sort of as filler while he was editing the film, and decided that those pieces worked so much better. As Roger Ebert once noted, unlike the use of classical music in some films, 2001 managed to enhance those magnificent works.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It left room for interpretation.
You can't blame Kubrick for seeing the reactions to Joyce and deciding: 'Incoherence is the key to staying power.' The audience will find what it wants.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I once read that the original screening was 15-20 minutes longer, and Kubrick trimmed it after the negative reception. Would love to see it.
I still find the space scenes some of the best every filmed. Like the original Star Wars films, there's just something about models as opposed to CGI which gives the visual heft and weight. There's something tangible and real moving through an actual three dimensional space. And because Kubrick and Clarke were obsessed with realism for those shots, there's no sound save whatever the astronauts can hear, and indeed Kubrick was willing to allow for stretches of silence. In fact, considering most of the dialogue is pretty much incidental to the story, much of the film might as well be considered a silent film. And the brilliance of that is that when we do get some heavy meaningful dialogue, it's when Bowman is killing HAL. That's what I love about the movie Kubrick, he saves any emotion-bearing dialogue for a goddamned AI. The humans barely show emotion at all through the film, save for Bowman when he's order HAL to open the pod bay doors, or when he's falling through the Star Gate. HAL 9000 is the most human character in the whole film.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I could have gone for a coherent meditation on humanity's place in the Universe. I've studied meditation, philosophy, and to some extent mysticism. I got nothing out of the end. I don't need a guitar solo, but finishing the symphony with random atonal music rather ruined the fourth movement.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Okay, then, forget Nixon. How could anybody create this conspiracy when it could be exposed by, forget the Soviet Union, anybody with a decent ham radio setup or a hobbyist telescope?
Right. And that's the problem.
A highly intelligent person who had read, say, Childhood's End (also by Clarke) could go into the movie and not understand what was going on. If a movie needs a large amount of written material to get a clue about, it's something of a failure.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
which were borrowed heavily from for the famous Alien soundtrack.
...The OP wrote "borrowed from for...", meaning that musical constructs were borrowed from 2001 for the Alien soundtrack.
Avoiding phrases like "from for" is exactly why you should avoid using passive voice construction.
Active voice: "The famous Alien soundtrack borrowed heavily from the 2001 soundtrack." Clear, concise, and doesn't contain "from for".
Older movies are unwatchable unless you have watched enough older movies to be used to how they can dwell on scenes and give actors time to more fully project the characters. Current movies are made for viewers that have the attention span of a fruit fly on drugs. I expect that the young consider most of an even older great movie, Ben Hur, to be unwatchable.
That isn't something to brag about.
Don't you trolled contrarians need to get back to 4chan or something?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It was the late 60's, and movies became like LSD trips. Sequence, logic, and coherency were out of style, kind of like the current White House ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
The movie was not structured around plot, but around music.
Not true, Anonymous Coward. The classical music was just meant to be 'placeholder' music, for use in the 'silent' scenes while Alex North worked on the score he had been commissioned to write. In the end, Kubrick decided he liked the classical pieces more, and that's what he went with.
That aspect has not changed much. If anything, skepticism of the findings of science have spread to climate and pollution research. The USA is "devolving" in that aspect.
Table-ized A.I.
A movie so goddamned boring it had meetings on the Moon.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The DIscovery depended on HAL though for the mission to succeed. It ran the spacecraft. Wanting to immediately shut down the entire system, tantamount to aborting the entire mission, and endangering the sleeping crew, without even discussing it with the only other active crew member means that you should not be a crew member on such a mission.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
However 2010 made 2001 make sense. I can appreciate 2001 after seeing 2010. 2010 filled the gaps that 2001 had, that made it difficult to understand and difficult to watch.
There were too many times where 2001 was directed for us to try to guess what the motive was, without any sort of direction on where to see it. After HAL malfunctioned, and it played the classified message, why would I think HAL was suffering from a paradox in commands?
2001 went a bit too much on the minimalist side in the story.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
see it's all about Man's aggressive tendencies driving him to conquest of the universe.
First with the ape-Men inventing tools and and in short order murder, and ending with a desperate struggle to the Death between Man and his AI progeny that ends with Man triumphantly murdering his creation in its crib in order to arrive at the black monolith first, gaining Ascension.
pretty obvious, ackchyually
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you liked 2001, you'll definitely love the "moon landings". The production values were much higher (some say impossible, but nothing is impossible for the world's greatest director).
There is much truth to this, if you throw out the fake irony and conspiracy underpinnings. The real moon landings were wonderfully suspenseful, and great drama, though they were also - like 2001 - very slow most of the time, and featured people who were highly trained professionals, and did not emote excessively.
To this very day 2001 still has the most realistic portrayal of space travel ever show in a film, with people acting like real astronauts, space craft acting physically like space craft, and no sounds in space. Sorry if you find that 'boring'.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I beg to differ. To me, 2001 is an example of movie that aged awesomely well. Still one of the most re-watcheable movies of all time.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Often times there is a book and then a movie is based on the book. Owing to difference in narrative style, even a wordy movie script is much shorter in length than most novels, the movie script writers and director have to find a different way to express the book. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail (cough, Dune, cough).
With 2001, the movie came first and the book was either co-written or came shortly later. It is also my understanding that the movie storyline was really Stanley Kubrick's creative product with the Clarke collaborating or advising, and Kubrick did not want to explain everything. He wanted the aliens to be a confounding mystery rather than being the cheesy guy-in-a-rubber-suit from Lost in Space or even from Star Trek.
Physicist Freeman Dyson explains this in one of his popular books. Dyson was interviewed as a "scientific authority on the possibility of contact with aliens and what that could be like and how this could differ from the typical science fiction movie." He told about how they filmed him using the IBM computer in the studio's accounting department as a movie prop, which they had to power down because its cooling system was making too much noise for the audio technicians to get a clean recording of the Dyson interview, which was a big hassle to the business office of the studio trying to get their payroll checks printed on time. Dyson also explained that his "part" in 2001 ended up on the cutting room floor, Dyson explained that Kubrick wanted the aliens to be a mystery and decided to do without a "scientific authority on the possibility of contact with aliens . . . and how this could differ from the typical science fiction movie" and let the visual imagery tell the tale. Dyson also writes that he agreed with Kubrick even if that meant that he Dyson couldn't be in the movie; Dyson argues that not explaining the aliens made 2001 a better movie because Dyson believes that our first contact with aliens will be bizarre beyond any sci-fi imagining of it.
Whereas Kubrick had a reputation for relying on the visuals to move his story forward, Clarke had a reputation in his novels for explaining everything beyond recognition. So yes, the book differs from the movie, famously having Discovery 1's continue to Saturn rather than stop at Jupiter, where famous special effects expert Douglas Trumbull didn't feel confident he could "do" Saturn's rings until later when he worked on Silent Running. So the movie only guesses at HAL's breakdown whereas the book explains that HAL never properly learned how to lie in protection of the secret regarding the Monolith and the nature of the Discovery 1 mission, which is a Star Trek trope that a computer can be messed up when Kirk reasons with it and catches it in a logical contradiction. Kubrick just shows the Star Child gazing over the Earth, playing Thus Spoke Zarathustra that is supposed to build on Nietzsche's notions of a Super Man as a next step in human evolution. Clarke goes into details regarding what the Star Child is and how the Star Child willed a premature detonation of the orbiting atomic weapons that gave the people of Earth quite a fright regarding the manner in which they were delivered from a potential world-ending war. Clarke needed the Star Child to have a purpose whereas Kubrick wanted to appeal to the viewers' imaginations.
Whether 2001 is a good movie or not, it certainly sparks a lot of geek discussion, and there hasn't been anything like it since despite attempts to imitate -- consider Mission to Mars being rendered a silly movie by having the aliens explain themselves to tie up all the loose ends rather than leaving loose ends as in 2001. .
Well, there is this thing called "free will", and humans have an incredible attraction to sin (sinning is usually fun).
Personally, I can resist anything except temptation.
I saw the movie as a very young boy, my Dad took us to see it when Mom needed us out of the house for a bit.
I followed it mostly I remember in the theater then, until the very end.
For years after, whenever it was shown on TV...I'd watch it and I got most of it, except the end.
I finally bought the book, read it, and was a bit disappointed at again at the end....didn't really explain the star child thing from what I remember.
Now....over the years, I take it to be the next step in the evolution of Man as aided by some alien form.
I dabble in video, and work in After Effects, etc. To this day, so many of the effect of this 60's movie still stand today as pretty darned good!! We didn't really see another leap in special effects till we got Star Wars in what...'76?
Over the past years, I've gotten a bit of an interest in Kubrick. I've been reading and watching those that analyze him and his films.
I'd not say I"m a HUGE fan, but more and more as I watch and re-watch his films, I must admit I watch looking for things in them.
Full Metal Jacket....wow, some parts just inspired, especially the first part.
The Shining - whatever you think of how Kubrick messed with King's story, if nothing else, the analyzation and supposed "hidden' messages in the movie by some border on the level of conspiracy theory (is it really tied to Kubrick faking the moon landings??). I don't buy into most of it, but when you know what to look for, there is some really WEIRD stuff in the movie. The layout of the Overlook hotel for instance, that quick scene with the guy in a bear costume that's been going down on another man in a room with the door open, etc.
On that one, with Kubrick usually being such a stickler for details...the things that are in the Shining, well, so different of him to let those go that many think they are there for a reason.
If nothing else, makes for fun reading and watching of analysis.
Dr. Strangelove - Im' still trying to figure that one out.
Barry Lyndon - Whew..that is LONG and hard to watch, BUT...I'm still fascinated that Kubrick basically got ahold of a customized NASA lens with a max aperture of f/0.7 , so that the scenes lit only by candle light...were lit ONLY by candle light on the set.
Pretty amazing stuff there for that alone.
Clockwork Orange - Well, I need to watch that a few more times.
I'll be honest, I'm just a novice when it comes to films, I watch all these...and of late, now I"m reading about them, and looking at them with different eyes so to speak, and well....its interesting and in some way fascinating if, for nothing else, the technical aspects of his lighting, framing and VFX of the day that were often groundbreaking.
I now like to look for all the leading lines (One Point Perspective?) in the framing of scenes.
A lot of interesting stuff, in a lot of movies that on first glance, look kinda plain.....and simple.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
According to Allah you're worshiping a false god and will rot in hell for it. Jesus can't save you from that. You will spend eternity in the hell of my religion.
But none of the people really showed anything but superficial emotion. Not Heywood Floyd, not any of the people at the moon base. The only real emotions were by the proto-humans at the beginning. I can't believe that was anything but intentional acting direction that Kubrick was giving to Dullea. The emotion-bearing dialogue was saved strictly for HAL.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The people who saw it when it came out were used to the movies of its era, and many of them considered it unwatchable. It's one thing to give actors time to project a character, it's another thing to spend five minutes where one would do while not developing a character. There's a lot of lingering over the special effects and the tech, which didn't really add anything to the movie.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes