REVIEW - 2001: A Space Odyssey

REVIEW - 2001: A Space Odyssey

Despite of it being created long before my birth my first watch went as well as it could have, having the opportunity to watch in all its glory on the big screen it’s fair to say I was not ready for it. With it having lengthy sequences without sound or dialogue to the last 20 minutes leaving me in just awe. I had always put myself off from watching it purely on a bases that I never really found myself a good time to watch it as I’d want to focus on what’s happening, but after seeing it and discussing with friends of mine I wanted to do a review for it. 

Writing a review on it might be looked at as unnecessary, given that when searched on the internet there are dozens of articles, reviews, dissertations on just about everything you need to know about A Space Odyssey, so odds are much about it has been said already. Regardless with it being its 50^th anniversary just passed this May and with it being my first time of watching it there’s a lot I would want to say, baring in my mind that this will not be a review of me explaining it but more of my reaction and what I felt about the movie. Of course I’ll discuss my thoughts of meanings of certain scenes within the movie.

I suppose its story could be explained in many different ways, our evolution being one of them. Through a quick series of scenes we learn how early stages of man are preyed on and live in fear that is until the arrival of this mysterious monolith, terrifying them at first before slowly enticing them. Pretty soon we start to see one the apes playing around a pile of bones before using it as a tool, soon enough some start to walk on two legs scarring away another group of apes and even killing one of them. This all transacting from our discovery for tools to how we use those tools as weapons, this of course leading to perhaps the most famous edit in film history, cutting from man’s first primitive weapon to its most advance and deadly. There’s a lot of speculation as to whether we cut to a weapon or a satellite but regardless to see how our species evolved in a matter of seconds on the screen is quite profound. 

It’s interesting how the evolution of man runs parallel to how we colonise space; learning to walk, how to eat and how to use the bathroom for the first time in this new environment. Speaking of space I think what really caught me off guard the quality of effects that were used, for something that is 50 years old it’s astonishing how well it’s aged, and to think it would take George Lucas to accomplish something similar 9 years later with A New Hope. You wouldn’t think of it but at the time and even to this day there are people who still believe that Kubrick faked the moon landing.

We cut to a ship with Dave, Frank and the HAL 9000 on a mission to Jupiter. HAL informs them that one of the ships satellites will fail to which leads Frank to repair it only to discover there doesn’t seem to be a fault to it which HAL puts blame down to human error, upon which Dave and Frank share their concerns over HAL’s functionality and considering shutting him down. When HAL discovers this he decides the crew isn’t up for the mission and takes over by killing the crew, this is a cautionary tale of how we can become so powerful that we lose control of our tools, all of our knowledge and advancement to be controlled by something we created. These are the implications that Kubrick explores which I think make the movie more unique at the time. Something else I want to mention is how times the film can be almost hypnotic. A lot of shots taken are quite methodical but on top of that it’s also the sound design as well, with the combination of music composed by Richard Strauss to even the use of breathing in really silent moments when in space it all puts in a feeling of being pulled in like a trance. Even the first 5 minutes of the movie giving us nothing but the eerie sound of an orchestra leading up to the reveal of an almost African landscape immediately gets you hooked into a sense of wonder.

In the final 20 minutes we see Dave entering what looks like a star gate which transports him into a room that is prestige in every way, cutting us to a series of cuts of Dave watching himself as he ages before finally seeing the monolith for one last time. I speculate that he had been transported to another dimension, one that is beyond comprehending so the room to which Dave has been placed in is an environment for which Dave can relate to or to understand his surroundings. We end the movie with Dave being reborn as a star child, the final stage of our evolution of an entity that doesn’t need technological devices to survive uncharted space giving away new life with new possibilities ahead of it.

You may argue that with it viewed from an entertainment perspective it’s understandable that some will find 2001 to be overhyped along with scepticism, but personally I found it to connect us with a deeper message with the films warnings of man’s folly and how it’s still relevant even to this day. Even if you put a side all the metaphors and deeper meaning its technical achievement is still awe inspiring on how much of an impact it’s had on our culture and that something like this will never be recreated.

By James Cook