Mind Odyssey

Exploring the moon and the ultimate meaning of life - Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter

Stanley Kubrick

Before reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’d like to briefly mention the director, Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick was a cinematic mastermind who left a small, but outstanding legacy of movies in markedly different categories – Lolita, Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining. The son of a Jewish doctor in Brooklyn NY, Kubrick was a modest, unpretentious young man and is said to have been a mediocre student grade-wise. In a bio passage similar to other super-accomplished people (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), Kubrick was restless in school – he quit NY City College after less than one year. He became a well-known photographer and from there he phased into making films. He was known as a stern perfectionist in his later directing career. He would require sometimes 50 takes of one scene – he incurred the ire of many actors due to that. He’s generally considered one of the greatest film directors of all time and many of his movies rank in top indexes for various film institutions and critics. He’s considered one of the lucky, “unfettered” directors who held almost total artistic control of his projects while getting the financial backing of major producing studios. He was also a workaholic who is described by peers as working himself to death at age 70, on Eyes Wide Shut.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I watched 2001 on Apple TV last night. The last time before that was in 1969 at the Air Force Academy Theater when I was 11. I have to admire the fact that I could grasp some of what was happening at age 11 – an adult RTF / Philosophy major might have trouble deciphering the final scenes of the movie.

Act I

The movie was delivered in a quiet tone with little dialog and stunning classical music as a backdrop in several scenes. It basically plays out in 3 “Acts”. In Act One, prehistoric ape men stumble upon an alien monolith – a black rectangular box planted by a superior civilization. They touch it and suddenly acquire the knowledge to make tools, and also war. The first act just covers this one phenomenon but it sets the stage for subsequent appearances of monoliths.

Act II

Act Two is really the main body of the movie and is truly enthralling. What I like is the “near-term” sci-fi it conveys. There aren’t yet any Death Stars or Starship Enterprises. It shows humans making regular space plane flights to a permanent lunar city, Clavius. It shows lunar buses, space meals, interplanetary phone calls and mundane activities as they might really play out in a few decades. The writers ambitiously thought we might have reached this technology point by 2001 – a scant 3 decades from when the movie was made. Humans are way too selfish, self-involved and disorganized to do anything so grand, so soon. We do have iPhone 4 which gives us Facetime – that’s about the closest contrivance we have. Else, 2011 looks depressingly similar to 1968 when the movie was made. In fact, our NASA program is being gutted as we speak. Let’s hope that Richard Branson gets his Virgin Air “space port” up and running some day soon.

But I digress – back to our synopsis. In Act Two it’s revealed that a monolith (identical to what we saw in Act One) has been found on the moon, near Clavius. It’s clearly been planted by an alien intelligence and is sending a strong radio signal to Jupiter. Two young astronauts are sent on a mission to Jupiter to see what’s at the other end of the signal. They’re on an advanced ship which is piloted and monitored by the amazing HAL 9000 supercomputer (called “Hal”). The writers imbued HAL with human motives and emotions – something we are nowhere near at the moment. HAL becomes suspicious that the astronauts intend to unplug him. This is justifiable – they are. They think that HAL is making some wrong calls, technically. HAL preemptively (and vindictively) removes life support for the 3 hibernating astronauts on board. He cuts off oxygen to Astronaut Frank who’s on a space walk. This leaves Astronaut Dave as the sole human survivor, in an outside space pod. Dave outmaneuvers HAL and slips back into an open portal. He summarily disconnects HAL's circuits causing HAL to sound drugged and dying as he sings “Daisy” – a test tune he was initially programmed with. Dave assumes command and successfully guides the ship to Jupiter.

Act III

Act Three is so bizarre, I can synopsize it a little but not a lot. Even Kubrick said that the 3rd act might mean one of several things to the viewer. The space ship encounters another monolith orbiting Jupiter. The monolith directs the spaceship into a “Star gate” or “Worm hole” depending on who does the telling. You see the ship race though a strange series of brightly colored, shifting landscapes. Dave loses consciousness and upon awakening his pod has landed in an elegant, surreal luxury hotel room. Here I’ll recount what I thought I saw … He sees an old version of himself eating at a table, dropping a wineglass on the floor. He appears to merge into this older self, who is aging in a matter of seconds. He’s next lying on a death bed, looking at a monolith that’s appeared before him in the bedroom. A beam connects Dave to the monolith and suddenly Dave is transformed into the “Star Child” – a giant embryo floating in space next to the Earth.

Conclusion

2001 was based on a short story, The Sentinel, by renowned sci-fi writer Arthur C Clark. Clark was a pantheist who thought that what we see as God might in fact be a superior civilization that started out like us and achieved a bodily form of “pure energy” over millions of eons. Kubrick was on a similar page with Clark and favored sci-fi allegories over conventional religious stories. I, the blog author, don’t really understand what is meant by terms such as star child or pure energy. I can’t officially join a bandwagon which bandies what to me is nonsensical jargon. I’m open to new ideas and interpretations – maybe at some future point I’ll become enlightened about Clark’s ideas but maybe not.

2001: A Space Odyssey is considered the absolute best sci-fi movie ever made by many enthusiasts. Acts One and Three will possibly elude you – they may even bore you at points. But Act Two is stunning for the incredibly elaborate, realistic technology props. Some of these were actually custom-created by a British aircraft company. I have to count myself as an avid fan of such a dramatic, thought-provoking movie.

© 2011 blogSpotter