(Warning, this whole review is one long spoiler.\u00a0 In my defense this movie is 49 years old.)<\/p>\n
The only good thing about The Academy Awards is that for the whole month before, TCM plays many good (and not so good) old movies.\u00a0 Last night I watched 2001.\u00a0 As the exit music was finishing it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost fifty years that I had watched the movie from beginning to end.\u00a0 Back in 1968 I attended the film in a large theater in Manhattan as part of a class trip.\u00a0 At the time I was a sci-fi fan but I distinctly remember becoming incredibly bored during the \u201cInfinity\u201d sequence.\u00a0 And sure enough, last night I found my eyes glazing over as I waited for Keir Dullea to stop making funny faces and show up in Versailles.\u00a0 And then it also occurred to me that it was actually a very, very good movie.\u00a0 So, let\u2019s talk about it.\u00a0 You already know I don\u2019t like the \u201cInfinity\u201d sequence.\u00a0 But I find the rest of the film is excellent.\u00a0 Not everybody cares for Kubrick\u2019s style in film-making.\u00a0 There is a great deal of stylization and idiosyncratic imagery that bothers many people.\u00a0 And without a doubt it is highly un-naturalistic.\u00a0 In fact, the ape men were the most realistic as personalities.\u00a0 The other characters are decidedly wooden.<\/p>\n
But without a doubt this movie is an amazing spectacle.\u00a0 The matching of images to the musical soundtrack is perfect.\u00a0 The sequences of space ships landing and maneuvering are shown as if they were dancers in a ballet.\u00a0 The \u201cDawn of Man\u201d sequence is riveting.\u00a0 I could believe that the actual event was very much like the portrayal (minus the monolith of course).\u00a0 It captured the essence of human ingenuity.\u00a0 The desperate and sordid circumstances of that ingenuity ring true.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s HAL.\u00a0 I hate HAL.\u00a0 I always have.\u00a0 But he is the perfect Frankenstein Monster.\u00a0 And the arc of his crime and punishment is, for me, a thing of hideous beauty.\u00a0 His relations with the astronauts are as creepy and dishonest as some Dickens villain, something like Uriah Heep.\u00a0 Some people feel sadness when Dave lobotomizes HAL and reduces him to the level of a two-year-old singing \u201cDaisy.\u201d\u00a0 I never shared that sadness.\u00a0 I guess I\u2019m more Old-Testament.<\/p>\n
So, that brings us back to the \u201cInfinity\u201d sequence which sucks.\u00a0 But following it we have what I call the \u201cVersailles\u201d scene where I guess Dave lives his life out as a captive of the monolith makers.\u00a0 This is weird and I guess necessary to set up the conclusion.\u00a0 Dave dies and is reborn as the next stage of human evolution.\u00a0 And he is returned to our solar system and the picture ends with him floating above earth to the sequence of \u201cThus Spake Zarathustra\u201d and \u201cThe Blue Danube Waltz\u201d playing us out.<\/p>\n
In sum we have a fifty year old movie that is still visually stunning, that addresses the inexplicable advance of savage animals to the brink of interplanetary travel and the frightening prospect of facing our masters in artificial intelligence.\u00a0 What\u2019s not to like?\u00a0 Well he could have added a few good-looking space babes but nobody\u2019s perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Warning, this whole review is one long spoiler.\u00a0 In my defense this movie is 49 years old.) The only good thing about The Academy Awards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237,4,243],"tags":[696,266,699,698,43,44,265,697,700],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-696","tag-arthur-c-clarke","tag-blue-danube-waltz","tag-hal-9000","tag-movie-review","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-thus-spake-zarathustra"],"yoast_head":"\n