|
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
+ Back to
Movie Reviews | + Top
|
