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MOVIE
REVIEW – 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Rating: PG
Year of release: 1968
Time Length: 139 minutes
Cast: Keir Dullea
A rectangular monolith, impassive, enigmatic, black: The central image
of "2001: A Space Odyssey" is a symbol chosen to be evocative
but reticent. Biblical tablet? Giant microchip? Interdimensional gateway?
Whatever it is, you will talk about it as you leave the theater.
"2001" is beloved for many different reasons, including
its scrupulous scientific accuracy, its vast reach from "The
Dawn of Man" to the next stage of human evolution, its unrivaled
integration of musical and visual composition, its daring paucity
of dialogue and washes o silence, its astonishingly creative psychedelic
sequence and its still-gorgeous pre-digital special effects.
As predictive futurism, to be sure, "2001" is pretty spotty.
Attention has been focused this year on the film's vision of the HAL
9000 computer; HAL supposedly went online in January 1997, and that
has been enough, in this computer-obsessed era, to inspire magazine
covers and scholarly conferences noting how little "2001" got "right." As
our calendars race toward the film's date, we also note that our steps
into outer space have been far more timid than "2001" imagined.
At best, the film's predictions remind us that the future never unfolds
as we dream it.
Predictions, fortunately, are the least interesting and most disposable
aspect of "2001." The chief reason the movie still holds
-- no, demands -- our attention, long after a million bad science-fiction
epics have deservedly faded from memory, is its respect for its own
mystery. Its vision of what science-fiction authors call "first
contact," the first brush of Homo sapiens with some other intelligent
species, remains disturbingly and enticingly spectral. There are no
bug-eyed monsters here, just profound questions to ponder.
"2001's" ambiguities are not, as is so often the case today,
a by-product of sloppiness or last-minute editing-by-committee; they
are a deliberate choice, a preference for open-ended speculation over
the pat satisfactions of tying up loose ends. Do the monoliths actually
spark the stages of human evolution, or simply witness them or beam
information about them back to its alien creators? Why does the supercomputer
HAL turn on its human companions? What exactly happens to astronaut
Dave Bowman on Jupiter? And what does the apparition of the fetal "Star
Child," floating in space at the film's finale, portend? "2001" is
stubbornly -- and, to some, distressingly -- unwilling to spell out
its secrets. (I know that Arthur C. Clarke's "2001" novels
have offered detailed answers to virtually all the film's questions;
that's why they should be avoided.)
The film's willingness to entertain unanswerable questions is a function
of the era in which it gestated. The 1968 collaboration between director
Stanley Kubrick and science-fiction master Clarke took place in a
time unlike any other in American film and American history. Old formulas
were no longer working. Here and there, artists responded by abandoning
formula entirely. But the window of opportunity didn't stay open long,
and once "Star Wars" demonstrated that the old themes and
characters and devices could be spiffily and profitably resuscitated,
Hollywood, relieved, returned to form.
Still, the power of that historical moment remains strong. I first
saw "2001" as a 9-year-old in the year it was released.
Somehow I assumed that this was what all movies ought to be: treasures
for moral and aesthetic contemplation that did not provide all their
answers on first contact. Today's Hollywood not only would never make "2001," it
has forgotten even how to aspire to such a movie. At this stage, it
would take the ministrations of a "2001"-style monolith,
discovered high atop the Hollywood Hills, for the movie industry to
leap again into such marvelous, uncharted voids.
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
March 21, 1997
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