POP FILTER

VS.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

 

Man what a waste of decades-long adoration. 2001: A Space Odyssey is clearly one of those vague and artsy movies that people lie about understanding and say they liked to make themselves seem smarter. I know I’m of the ADD generation used to quick cuts and witty dialogue so I won’t be as receptive to a non-verbal story largely told through sight and score as audiences in the sixties, but come on it’s just two and a half excruciating hours of space ships coasting. Yes there’s some story in there too with the tiniest bit of action and dialogue ever, but the bulk of the movie reads like a vanity piece orchestrated to show off Kubrick’s ability to shoot slow moving spacecraft and people walking up walls in zero gravity.

The Dawn of Man opening is fairly interesting but the story makes more sense as a Planet of the Apes prequel, it’s just barely connected to the rest of the movie. When the monolith appeared to the monkeys, with its ever-accompanying score of moaning ghosts, and inspired them to fashion weapons for hunting and general mayhem I assumed there would be a connection to the violence of man. Nope. The only other violence shown is done by a computer, and while we can possibly make the connection that the computer was created by man and trying to emulate man so in some sense it is violence perpetrated by the hubris of man, it still doesn’t make the monkeys in any way necessary to the rest of the film.

Kubrick should have cut out the beginning two segments completely and opened with the sequence featuring everyone’s favorite calmly homicidal computer HAL. That’s the portion of the movie that’s stuck out in society’s collective consciousness, the thirty minutes most referenced and parodied from the entire clusterfuck of a narrative.  And Kubrick even found a way to make the terrifying concept of machine turning on man in the infinite abyss of space mind-numbingly dull. Ten minutes at a time of no sound but hissing and breathing, sloooooooow moving space pods turning this way and that, long shots of Dave the astronaut’s face in deep concentration and the most boring man killed by machine scene ever.   Even the final takedown of HAL is agonizing; while the computer pleading for his life in monotone is pretty funny do we really need to watch Dave turn the key 25 full times before finally ending the madness?

At this point there is only half an hour left and I just want the pain to end.  And that’s when you get hit with the twenty minute acid trip that’s basically an extended version of Willy Wonka’s boat ride without the good times, it’s like watching a screen saver.  It ends abruptly and Dave finds himself what appears to be a room in Versailles where he watches himself get progressively older and older until he is so old he’s a fetus.  And then the fetus is floating above earth and as you exclaim “what the fuck?” the movie ends and you’re left feeling cheated and enraged. This is the great science fiction masterpiece we’ve grown up hearing about? Sure the visuals were stunning for their time but unless you masturbate to cinematography there is absolutely nothing of value here.  Do yourself a favor and watch the Hipster’s in Space parody on YouTube instead, it will tell you everything you need to know about 2001: A Space Odyssey and you won’t want to kill yourself by the end. – AS