A simple film, a dumb film, a useless film is one that wraps everything up in a tidy little bow with a neat little moral at the end. A smart film, an impactful film is one that raises questions without simple answers. A film that makes you dwell on those questions, a film that makes you think about and come up with answers to those questions yourself. That's a life altering film. That's a film that sticks with you for life. That's a film that colors your whole perception of life and the Universe.
And that's what 2001 is. It's not a morsel to consume, be done with, and move on from. It's a piece of sand, an irritant, that will stick with you forever and will grow (as a pearl does) as you think about it and delve the depths of the questions it raises. That, in my opinion, is the highest form of art.
Maybe if I watched it again I would get more of it.
I wonder if prints of it still exist in a vault somewhere.
Peter Hyams essentially made 2010 much more along the "Clarkeian" lines suggested by Moorcock in the article, but even still some of the talky bits around Bowman's various appearances did not make it into the final cut.
It's a good enough film, but you would be hard pressed to find anyone who honestly prefers it to 2001, or who thinks adding in more talky bits would have helped. Indeed, compare the Soviet vs American "stand-offs" in the hotel lobby and in orbit around Jupiter respectively, and you can see Kubrick's subtle treatment of the cold war as a much more savage commentary on geopolitics than the overt on-the-verge-of-hot-war geopolitics in 2010. The climax of 2001 was the result of the cold war paranoia, whereas the climax of 2010 were events that overturn the less-cold war paranoia of the sequel.
2001's Kubrick-ness is reflected in that sort of subtle political satire that was one of the recurring themes in his films; Clarke by contrast favours an optimism based in technological leaps, which we see in full in 2010, but also in the novelization's elucidation of the film's ending.
Maybe the most famous transition in film history -- the bone thrown into the air -- exemplifies the difference: Kubrick takes a "you can take a violent ape out of the savannah and dress it up in business clothes, uniforms and space suits, but..." view while Clarke thinks the new environment transforms humans for the better.
As you say, it would be fascinating to have fuller documentation of the film-making processes for 2001, to at least the level of detail that we get for major films made in this millennium so far. However, as with 2001 itself, we have a large vacuum to speculate about.
It still wouldn’t be 2001; in has the bones of a very different film. But as a rare example of a hard SF movie with a terrific cast and largely excellent writing, it could certainly stand on its own.
To me, the universe of 2010 was just barely within stretching distance for society in some forseeable future, whereas Star Wars and Star Trek were unreachable. That somehow increased its appeal to me as a child, as I could envision living in the world of 2010 in a way I could not with other sci-fi universes. The universe of 2010 was my universe, in other words.
I've been afraid to rewatch 2010 as an adult, because I know I will see it differently.
The hot dog scene by itself is a classic bit of screenwriting.
On one hand, you have a filmmaker who is really hitting his stride as an artist. Kubrick in the late 1960's not only had developed a solid command of his medium, but he was also a serious commercial proposition for Warner and was granted every resource at his hand.
On the other hand, culture still had quite a modernist sensibility around space. We hadn't entered into the cynicism of the 70s that continues to color our perceptions today. 'Space' was this gigantic cultural construct that really captured people's imaginations. Perhaps a fair parallel may have been the romanticized expansion to the Old West.
So I've always thought that this very fertile material, paired with peak-Kubrick, was always going to result in something ambitious and confounding for audiences.
When I walked in, for reasons both mysterious and comical to me, the TV was tuned to a cable channel showing 2001. It was the start of the psychedelic wormhole scene.
The room was decorated, as it had been since I was a kid, in a style I'll call organic American kitsch. Her caregiver and my aunt were in the room. My grandmother was half-sleeping. She smiled when she saw me. Then she fell back to sleep. The others left the room. Standing next to her bed, I watched the movie to the end as my grandmother snored lightly beside me. I don't remember if there were commercial breaks. When it was over, I said goodbye to my grandmother and left her sleeping.
I still can't figure out who turned on 2001. The caregiver usually turned the channel to Fox News. I think my aunt preferred to turn the TV off. If my dad had been there, it might have made sense. He hadn't. It was a very uncanny experience.
Something I've noticed about '2001' in the meanwhile is that its aesthetics seem very future-proof. It doesn't seem dated or plastic-y like other stuff from that era.
An interesting article about the setting and social environment: 'HAL, Mother, and Father: Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien.' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-an...
It's only a couple of months since I last tried - and gave up on - watching 2001 to the end. Probably my own shortcoming entirely - I see nothing but pretentious late sixties posing from the stargate and onwards.
Interestingly, this isn't actually said in 2001. It is in the novelization but its only said in the sequel 2010. It surprised me re-watching 2001 in the cinema a few years ago to not see it said, so I thought I might be watching a weird recut, but no. How the mind plays tricks.
By the way, as touched upon in Moorcock's article, Clarke would not have appreciated you calling his novel a novelization.
The worst part about the movie is Roy Scheider's fatherly internal monologue narration, which tediously explains-like-i'm-five for half the movie.
So maybe that gives us a hint, about what Clark's narration would have done to 2001.
That little sound bite also chimes in over and over again, sounding forced, poorly performed and with a corny distortion effect layered on top, in some presumptive attempt to resonate an idea with the audience. Maybe to remind you once more that the movie is supposed to be a sequel, despite an almost total discontinuity with 2001.
It draws a lot of parallels with Stephen King and The Shining, which had provoked Stephen King to exert more creative control over movie adaptations, often with laughable (or maybe unintentionally comedic) b-movie results.
I still enjoyed it though, and rewatch it occasionally.
There'a lot of Kubrick I don't get. I have actually read A Clockwork Orange, the novel, and liked it despite its Burgessian lapsed catholic babble, but I intensely dislike the movie.
And don't get me started on The Shining.
Anyway, I gave up on deeper meaning in Burgess' work a long, long time ago. I still read him with great pleasure, but that's for the linguistic fireworks and his steamrolling, gutpunching flair for telling a story so you hear the sounds and smell the smells.
I envy you the progress you'll make when you get around to re-examining some of your faulty assumptions (as we all eventually must, or at least should). Most of us don't have that much room left for personal growth and discovery in our lives.
In that case, other people on rec.movies were patient enough to give me some good advice, which was to set the Clarke book aside for the moment, give the film another try in a better viewing environment, and move past my prejudices and knee-jerk first impressions.
It sounds like HN's goal is somehow to create an even less open-minded environment than 1990s-era Usenet, which will be quite a trick. But if anyone can pull it off, it'll be you guys.
If you were going to cut material from 2001 that made it unbearable to watch, the film would be 5-10 minutes long.
And that's a legitimate problem for many people. I have lots of friends (and family) who find it unbearable. Even today, my dad and I will watch it together, but everyone else will leave. "BOOORING!"
(I read the book as a kid so I could figure out what was going on and explain it to my dad. No one else wanted to know.)
I think it could have given me all the things I loved about it AND been less artsy about lack of explanation, but I wouldn't have wanted to spend less time enthralled by a slow, graceful docking maneuver or observing daily life on the centrifugal deck, or witnessing the full interaction between HAL and Dave. Lots of people get very bored by these and want to see more forward movement in the plot, more action, but I just sit there fascinated. (Less so today, but that's only because the content is now somewhat dated, and I'd rather watch an updated equivalent.)
I suspect the kind of movie that appeals to people like me may not get made again.
2001 doesn’t do that. More than anything Kubrick was a photographer, and it’s possible to enjoy 2001 just for the visuals - the colour, the composition, the geometry and perspective.
It’s like a moving coffee table book that happens to be making a point about the far future of humanity.
I’ve probably failed to explain that very well so here’s a well known example.
The story about the shooting of Barry Lyndon has been covered on HN before. In short Kubric got the fastest lenses he could and had old camera specially adapted so that he could film by candle light. Of course he also knew that such a wide aperture would give him a tiny depth of field, conveniently rendering the scene like a flat period painting come to life.
I suspect he may have worked backwards from that simple idea to the rest of the film but that just speculation on my part.
His use of newly invented steadycam in the Shinning for dream like scenes with the kids is another example.
Watching his films seems to be about more than just the plot and the story. I lack the vocabulary to adiquately explain myself, I’m just a fan, but it’s kind of like watching an art installation that happens to be a block buster film.
Not just any lenses! Lenses designed for NASA to capture the far side of the Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7
In some circles, admitting that you find anything by Kubrick "boring" is considered uncool, so nobody will admit to it. It's like Blade Runner (also mentioned in Moorcock's essay, not coincidentally): their cultural and historical significance for genre development means that cinematographical critique will always be forced to take a back seat.
Personally, I'm a child of the late '70s and I just cannot watch 2001 without falling asleep. Sure, I admire the photography and the realism; the second half of the movie is occasionally exciting; but among Kubrick's work, it's definitely not one I'd rewatch. Part of the reason is even willfully acknowledged: Kubrick actually meant to show how space-travel was very boring, Moorcock mentions it. So there is no shame in admitting that the message was efficiently driven home.