Despite anything you may have heard from Heywood Floyd, there is no outbreak at Clavius Base.
I’m moving to Clavius.
On the next Roy’s Tie Dye Sci Fi Corner, we’ll be joined by my cousin, and Roy’s lifelong friend, Joseph R. Metz, for a discussion of one of Joe’s favorite films, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).
Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece is visual, cerebral entertainment of a kind that defies description. It is that rare film that lives up to the overused adage “seeing is believing.” Boundary-pushing special effects, an unconventional story arc, and a ruminative structure that, like the mysterious Monolith that propels mankind’s development, takes a very long view – it’s a vision so ambitious that it could only be conveyed in Cinemascope.
It’s not every film that can make a cultural superstar out of György Ligeti. Ligeti, in retrospect, perhaps the most significant figure of the 1960s musical avant-garde, takes his place in the interplanetary pantheon alongside Johann and Richard Strauss.
Amazingly, Kubrick gets just about everything right, except for the year – presumably selected because it signifies a new century, but also no doubt predicated on the assumption that the space program would continue to develop at full 1960s steam. And for the “product placement.” Every corporation cited in the film has long since gone out of business! And what’s the deal with those red Djinn chairs? But to the best of our knowledge, from our current perspective, and without a time machine, “2001” is about as credible as it gets.
I understand the deliberate pace and “show-don’t-tell” narrative may not be to everyone’s taste, and that Kubrick’s approach would probably seem as alien as any extraterrestrial intelligence to someone coming to the film for the first time from the punched-up digital age of sensory overstimulation. But returning to it now, after many years, I have to say “2001,” for me anyway, has only gotten better, and somehow faster. It is so refreshing to rediscover a film that is so… cinematic.
Put your narrative expectations aside, take a chill pill, or drop some acid (as some did, back in the day), and marvel at the slow burn that is “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We’ll be riding a bicycle-built-for-two with HAL-9000 (with a sidecar for Joe), on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. All our bones will be but stepping stones to a rendezvous with the moons to Jupiter. Leave your tapir meat in the comments section, as we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!
