2001: A Space Odyssey (Henceforth 2001) is probably the most famous of all the science fiction films. Notice I use the word “famous” and not “most popular.” It is nowhere near the most popular movie because it leaves everyone who watches it wondering: “what the hell did I just watch?!” I first saw it when my fiancé took a class on Stanley Kubrick (who directed the film). Before he started the movie, the instructor warned us that there is no plot: this is a concept film about human evolution (reminds me of Childhood’s End , another Arthur C. Clarke book).
Knowing that, I braced myself for a long, boring, pointless movie that would last about four hours. I was disappointed on all counts, because I found the movie to just be long (and at times boring, but it is so interesting). The movie is separated into five parts: precreation, the Dawn of Man, the trip to the moon, Jupiter Mission, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. The Dawn of Man is the famous 25-minute sequence with the ape-men (the book calls them ape-men), where they discover a giant black monolith that imparts the knowledge of tools upon them. The movie does an excellent job establishing how harsh life is for the ape-men, it shows them unable to sleep at night because they are afraid of jaguars, and they have to fight off other tribes of ape-men for water. Then they discover the big black monolith. In the book, it is a big crystalline monolith that actually takes control of them and makes them do some rudimentary tasks (like tying a knot) to see if they can do it. Then the crystalline monolith turns into a sort of video screen that shows fat ape-men, to taunt them. Once they figure out how to use tools, the ape-men are able to kill the jaguar that is scaring them (at least in the book they do), and they fight off another tribe of ape-men. After the battle, one ape-man triumphantly throws his tool into the sky, and it transitions to the moon sequence.
It’s at the moon that the movie actually loses a lot of its momentum. I really enjoyed watching the ape-men, and now we have all these scientists and some kind of epidemic on the moon. They eventually find a moon monolith, and it redirects them to Jupiter (Saturn in the book). I think this part is so long so as to emphasize how people will lose control of their environments in space: it shows a woman who just relearned how to walk, it has a long list of instructions for the bathroom, and there is a pen floating around. We have left our cradle and are learning to walk again.
The Jupiter mission is the famous part where the computer (HAL 9000) goes crazy and kills everybody except for Bowman. The book goes into a lot of detail, but what I like about the movie is it leaves HAL’s motives open to debate, and you can come up with your own reason for HAL to kill everyone. The same goes for the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite sequence: you can decide for yourself what you just saw. Objectively, what you’ll see near the end is a twelve minute sequence of trippy light tunnels and strange noises, and then a bizarre ending that seems to make no sense at all. It’s really whatever you want it to be, unless you read the book.
If you read the book, Clarke spells everything out for you in very clear terms, and I think that takes a lot of the fun out of it. He also goes into meticulous detail about the mission and the astronauts daily routine, which gets kind of boring after a while since I don’t really care. The biggest problem with Arthur C. Clarke’s works is that he goes into too much technical scientific detail, and it becomes much less accessible non-science people. That’s what makes the movie 2001 so much better than the book: Kubrick had all the scientific details too, but it just makes the movie seem realistic, whereas in the book it just makes it hard to read. Overall, I think this story works better as a visual experience rather than a written experience, which is good because it will only take you just over two and a half hours to experience it rather than 236 pages.
The Book:
ISBN# 0-451-45273-9
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Film:
ISBN# 1-4198-5308-2
2001: A Space Odyssey
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