Movie Review Thread

[Puzz3D]

I hate to be down on another imdb favorite, by 2001:A space odyssey was unimaginative and extremely boring. Except for HAL. HAL was really cool, well worth fast forwarding through the rest of it. It starts with 3 minutes of blank screen with horrible "kubrick-music" and then 10 minutes of monkeys and then 10 minutes of spaceships floating. Jesus. Apparently the obelisk thing made the monkeys evolve into men, and then we were watching men evolve into giant space babies. Wheee.

It's a philosophical movie, but it doesn't translate visually to the small screen. I saw this in the Cinerama Theater three times when it was originally released. That theater was like a concert hall and had the widest screen in existence which was also curved and thus engaged your peripheral vision, and they had an Altec Voice of the Theater sound system which has never been equaled except possibly by IMAX theaters. IMAX screens are flat and not nearly as wide as that Cinerama screen. Nothing that spectacular had been seen in sci-fi before, and no movie had ever shown existence in space that realistically. As I recall, there were 27 special effects shots used which was unprecedented, so historically it's an important picture in that respect. People did get stoned in the theater for the colorful psychedlic sequence near the end.

I find the ape sequence very moving. Possibly the monolith caused the ape to evolve, but the monoliths are also beacons pointing to the next evolutionary step for intelligent life on the planet. The mechanism of this evolutionary process isn't explained, but it's clear that an advanced civilization visited Earth and in abstentia is helping intelligent life to evolve. It's probably doing this where ever it encounters life in the universe. Philosophically, it's akin to the absentee landlord theory for God. The baby at the end is symbolic of the next evolutionary step. Homo-sapiens will become extinct and be replaced by a new species.

In the mist of this is a warning against giving artificial intelligence too much control over human destiny. HAL (which is IBM one letter removed in the alphabet) wants to maintain the status quo between humans and itself, and tries to sabotage the mission. HAL believes it is intellectually superior to humans because it doesn't make mistakes, but it can't evolve. The sole surviving astronaut gets into a situation where he has to do something practically impossible in order to prevail against HAL, and come up with the courage to take the risk.

The modern music used in the film is by the highly regarded Hungarian composer György Ligeti who just died last year. He was initially influenced by the composers Bartok and Kodály.

From the Sony classical site:

"The success of Apparitions (1958-59) was confirmed by Atmosphères (1961) and the organ work Volumina (1961-62), making it clear that Ligeti was forging for Western music a powerful alternative to post-Webern serialism. A key feature of his style was the use of extraordinarily dense polyphony, which he called "micropolyphony", resulting in complexes of musical colour and texture so rich and intense that they virtually dissolved the distinctions of melody, harmony and rhythm. At the same time, Ligeti extended his experiments in polyphony in a different direction, to include a kind of fabricated, colouristic language, built on the kaleidoscopic use of articulate speech sounds and inflections." "The Requiem (1963-65) and Lux aeterna (1966) add a contrapuntal complexity to Ligeti's evocative sound-world." "Two years after its premiere, Lux aeterna - along with Atmosphères and the Requiem - reached a mass audience when an excerpt from the score was used on the soundtrack and the best-selling soundtrack recording of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey."

I now consider the use of The Blue Danube Waltz by JohannStrauss which accompanies the docking of the shuttle with the space station as indicating the obsolescence of that technological and biological level of existence because man was about to take a giant evolutionary step.