Babes, Robots, and Spaceships: What More Could You Want?

One of my favorite movies, and also one of the greatest film experiences I’ve ever had, is that of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The other night I got to experience this film on the big screen at the “famous” Neon movie theater in Dayton. They’re doing a Stanley Kubrick series right now, and for this movie, they projected the widescreen film to the lowest part on the screen. Seeing how great of an advantage this was, I sat in the second row, and let the movie immerse me.

This was a truly amazing experience. It makes the “Dawn of Man” sequence a lot more vivid and involving. While viewing the twenty minute “space pan” on a television, you feel merely like an outsider; here I felt like I was really floating through space. And you simply could not beat the wormhole experience towards the end, because obviously, that really felt like I was going through the wormhole. It was hypnotizing.

Kubrick is my favorite director, I haven’t quite decided which film of his is my favorite. It feels like a battle between �” and “Eyes Wide Shut”, with “A Clockwork Orange” coming in behind. I adore nearly every one of them, excepting Lolita. They all just blow my mind away, to a very large degree, and never take away my interest. He is a director that is not nearly as acclaimed as he should be (just look at his Academy record, and you’ll see what I mean).

One must understand something before going into this movie: for a large part, it’s without a plot, and no one in history seems to have completely figured it out. Honestly, I think Kubrick chose to make that an impossibility- you could think about this movie forever and ever, but the lack of background to what’s going on leaves it insolvable. Even the protagonist in the film doesn’t completely understand it by the end. Because we experience the movie with him, we’re just as lost as him.

The film starts, after what I consider a breathtaking title scene, with the Dawn of Man, which occurred millions and millions of years ago. In this “Dawn”, we’re all still monkeys, just a bit humanized (we can walk upright and what not). Though I’m not so much a fan of the theory of human evolution, I like this scene for what it means later in the film, and even if you don’t so much get that, it’s entertaining at least for the story that comes along with it. You get to see monkeys scream at each other, beat each other brains out, discover tools, kill each other with tools, bark a monolith, and eat very raw meat. It has entertainment value (I think I was laughing the first time I ever watched it).

After this considerably long sequence, we experience a very lengthy pan of modernized space in what is either the year 1999 or 2000. We see Earth, stars, the moon, and the space stations that men have placed around all of these bodies (actually, they haven’t quite yet reached the stars). And I would personally go to say that even today, the stations and ships look very real (Ebert says even more so than CGI would have). You can took a look at them and see how they could merely be drawings, and at the same time, you could see them as real models (and some of them were).

Kubrick’s use of music in this film is perhaps the most remarkable part of it. The Overture at the beginning uses Giseti, a composer whose music I can’t find anywhere, and because of that music, you have your eyes fixed on this pitch black screen the entire time. You feel the triumphant with the ape-man as the music (Beethoven? I don’t know) plays over. The music played during the space pan is its greatest enjoyable aspect, and the lonely, isolated composure that plays during the Jupiter mission so well suggests what’s going on.

The entire Jupiter mission is a completely intense sequence. After the monolith is discovered, we’re allowed a recovery time by watching Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) run around in a constant circle. We understand the distance of their mission when we see how it takes seven minutes for radio transmissions to reach Earth, and the only friend these two men on the mission have (while the others are cryogenically frozen) is a robot which has emotions programmed in. Kubrick pulls the whole scene off so well- we’re already creeped out by the HAL-9000’s intelligence, even as he does show himself to be very much a robot when he repeats the words “Just a moment”, and when Kubrick shows the close-ups of HAL’s “eye”, you really are intimidated. When Bowman and Poole (Gary Lockwood) get suspicious of HAL, a certain something happens which Kubrick so perfectly cuts off with an intermission. The intermission was gone through with in the theater, and even though I’d seen the movie several times already, it felt so much like a Reloaded-esque cliffhanger, and I really couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen.

Kubrick and his team even do well, for the most part, in following the laws of physics. The most notable thing is how they don’t make sound in space- ever see Star Wars? Notice how you hear explosions when the ships explode? That’s not even physically impossible, and I actually think the Star Wars movies could have possibly very well shown the shock of death with silence. �” does just that. You really feel the impact of death in space. The only rule in this movie that Kubrick doesn’t so well follow is once when a man is drinking, in a no-gravity zone, out of his meal, he stops abruptly, and the liquid falls back in the carton instead of floating out. Other than that, its all pretty much perfect.

Even Kubrick's actors have great performances. William Sylvester, as Dr. Haywood Floyd, depicts a man who loves his family but has some interesting, and possibly even disagreeable, views on how to handle things. He's very humanized in this movie. Dullea's performance as Bowman is amazing- you see the contempt he has for HAL towards the end, and you feel it with him. And whoever does the voice of HAL... its just chilling.

This is a nearly flawless film- the dialogue isn’t even erred on; nothing feels cheesy, and everything feels right. Even when you don’t know the characters, you care about them, and you feel the intensity of their situations- such as during a conversation about a broken space law between a man and four strangers. You laugh at the irony that is displayed, especially during HAL’s last scene. And though the film ultimately leaves no conclusion, you walk out of it knowing that some movies just don’t need one.

Rating: A+

Note: I forgot to explain the word "babes" in my review title. Towards the beginning of this movie, there are babes. Babes in space. Hot babes in space. So please, if you're not in this for an art movie, at least watch the babes.