AG Monday: 2001
Praise for and debate over a classic film.
One of the best SF movies ever made. Directed by one of the greatest directors ever. Co-written by said director and one of the most respected “hard” science fiction authors of the classic era. The movie that, in the last Sight & Sound poll, other film directors rated as their top movie, period. How have we not covered Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey before now? Perhaps we had not evolved enough…
Journey back with us when we were scratching our heads, trying to figure out this movie the way the Australopithecines were trying to understand the monolith. Jump forward in time to how we now see this classic film, and how we understand its meaning (including the final sequence). 2001 inspired a lively debate between us, so strap into your shuttle pod!
Monoliths! Murderous machines! Moon bases! Manipulating aliens! Progress from monkey to man to…My God, it’s full of stars! It’s all here.
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I rewatched it a few years ago, and posted some impressions here. So, rather than launch into another rant, I’ll say something else.
2001 was one of the first SF books I read. I first saw the movie in 1980 or 1981, on a VCR tape. I may still have the tape somewhere (but not a VCR any more). At the time, I thought it was visually stunning, but that the book was far better. Why? Because the book told a story, whereas I thought the movie didn’t quite.
I still can’t say I like the movie, but it has the distinction, still, of the most realistic depiction of routine spaceflight. And I regard the Blue Danube sequence as one of my favorite movie sequences of all time.
It strikes me that Kubrick’s best decisions for this film was using Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Blue Danube in the movie.
Then there’s the sequels. I thought 2010 was narratively superior, both book and movie versions, but the next two, and I hope those were all, I can’t even recall clearly. 2061 features Dr. Floyd, again, and a voyage to Halley’s Comet. 3001 features a reanimated Frank Poole, and a shoutout to the movie Jurassic Park.
@Kathy: I never read 2061 nor 3001.
Agreed about the music.
I think you and I have a similar view of the film.
Not that I don’t like the music and the use Kubrik puts it to that Kathy mentioned, but I particularly have my attention drawn to the use of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna
Lux Aeterna was composed in 1966. You know, two years before the film came out. It is the soundtrack to the visit to the slab on the Moon. It is so organically related to this moment that the completely modern and not-quite-atonal nature of it works in its favor, rather than against it as might typically happen in a concert hall of the day.
We have been watching/listening to soundtracks do this kind of thing for the last 50 years so it doesn’t sound nearly so unnatural to us. I haven’t done a lot of homework on this, but it seems likely that this is the film that inspired a lot of other film scores and composers to do something similar.
I am quite fond of this scene. Though “fond” doesn’t quite seem like the right word. The moment humanity learns it is not alone is depicted – the mundane sandwiches and the sublime slab as well as the eerie creepiness of something alien.
Edit: I just listened to Lux Aeterna completely through and conclude that some of the other credited pieces of Ligeti are used in the scene as well.
@Steven L. Taylor:
On the topic of hard science fiction, we never see how people move from Earth surface to Earth orbit in either movie.
I’m not sure about the novels, but there’s a space elevator in 3001.
Oh, if anyone’s interested, late in life Clarke wrote a related work. It’s a trilogy written with Stephen Baxter and termed A Time Odyssey. I was pretty underwhelmed by it. Especially following another Clarke and Baxter collaboration, Light of Other Days, which was impressive.
@Kathy: My (very very small and very indirect) connection to Arthur Clark: In 1980 I was an intern at Comsat, the company that launched the first telecommunications satellite. Because the idea was first popularized in a Clark novel, they gave him the first share in the company and he remained in contact with them. Fast forward to 1980 and my job was to plot the degradation of the next generation solar array/battery backup system as it was bombarded with solar radiation, cosmic rays, and the stresses of alternatively heating while it was in the sun, and near zero degree Kelvin cooling in the relatively short period of the day it was in the earth’s shadow. Being an intern I had no experience with such stuff, although I could write code pretty well, so I searched for an employee who could help me. Back then, it was normal for the most prestigious high tech companies (IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox) to have “Fellows” on the payroll, sort of geniuses without portfolio who were free to work on whatever took their fancy. I connected with the one associated with my department and in the times we weren’t discussing my work, we would talk about what else he was working. on – calculating the stresses on the cable of a space elevator and working out what kind of theoretical material could work. But it wasn’t a project for Comsat, instead being to help Arthur Clark with his next novel. Since I wasn’t much of a Clark fan, I didn’t think that much about it – until you mentioned the space elevator. I don’t think the work involved the one in “3001” but rather an earlier novel, but I could be mistaken
@MarkedMan:
How to meet a Nobel Prize winner… Arno Penzias was one of the people on a Bell Labs Ski Club weekend trip that I was leading.
@Kathy:
I remember the foreword to one of the sequels. It tells of Clarke going to the theater to watch Independence Day after he finished writing the book and seeing that it had the same ending and then basically saying “eh, fuck it.” Or maybe I was hallucinating. I’m not going to read it again to find out.
(I’ve also never finished watching Independence Day — it makes an amazing short film of various people setting up their character acts only to have them cut short when aliens come and kill everyone on Earth. Why would I watch more?)
@MarkedMan:
Clarke’s first novel with a space elevator was The Fountain of Paradise, at some time in the 70s. There’s one in 3001 as well, but it’s not central to the plot.
I think he proposed geostationary communications satellites in a paper, not in a novel. He was very active in the British Planetary Society, and they published a lot about the need for satellites, and space travel, in the 40s and 50s.
minor SPOILER ALERT!
Proceed at your own risk
empty space
emptier space.
Ok, in 2010 we learn what happened to Hal 9000. In 2061 we learn what happened in Europa. And in 3001 we learn what the monoliths are (though not why the elegant minimalist design; me, I think it was a design choice).
I can recommend 2010, but not 2061 or 3001. If you don’t mind spoilers, or won’t read the books, the answers are on Wikipedia in the plot summaries of the novels.
@Gustopher:
I wish I hadn’t seen Independence Day.
I don’t know why I was excited to see it. I don’t recall what I expected, but I certainly didn’t get it.
That said, a blurb for Pohl’s Eschathon novels promoted them as The Thinking Man’s Independence Day. I did not read them because of that.