What Were the Original Reviews of 2001 Space Odyssey When It Came Out 50 Years Ago
Keir Dullea played astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 flick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Warner Bros./AP hide caption
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Warner Bros./AP
Keir Dullea played astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick'due south 1968 picture show, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Warner Bros./AP
Well-nigh the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a big black monolith appears in an African desert, leaving a group of prehistoric ape-men standing at that place baffled. And that was pretty much the reaction that greeted the motion picture itself when information technology premiered 50 years agone this week.
Nobody was quite sure what to brand of it. The critics were harsh, with Variety dismissively saying flatly, "2001 is not a cinematic landmark." It's difficult to imagine being more incorrect.
You meet, even if you lot don't like the picture show — and I don't, particularly — the i matter that's undeniable is that it'south a cinematic landmark. Not only was information technology the No. 1 box office moving-picture show of 1968 — young people flocked to information technology to have their minds blown — but in international polls, 2001 routinely ranks as 1 of the top ten films of all time. An advanced fine art picture dressed in Hollywood money, it unknowingly foreshadowed the future of movies equally effects-driven blockbusters.
I saw information technology again a few days agone, inspired by Michael Benson'south terrific new book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece. Though Benson is afflicted with what a friend calls the "Stanley syndrome" — he never stops telling you that Kubrick is a "genius" and "a perfectionist" — his book is filled with peachy stories. My favorite is when the control-freak director asks Lloyd'due south of London if they could insure him in case NASA spoiled 2001's plot by discovering extraterrestrial life before the flick came out.
Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece
Hardcover, 497 pages |
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Watching 2001 again, I was startled anew that, in nigh 2½ hours, at that place'southward so piffling dialogue or dramatic storytelling — the characters barely annals. Rather, in an attempt to brand what Kubrick called "the proverbial 'really good' science-fiction motion picture" — non something hokey — he and co-writer Arthur Clarke thought big. Visionary big. They concocted nothing less than a poetic myth of man evolution, a vaulting appetite appear by the music from Richard Strauss' "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," which everyone knows largely because of this movie.
Clarke and Kubrick comport usa from the origins of man beings in those desert apes to the climactic birth of an advanced new life class: a star babe, engendered by extraterrestrials. In betwixt, we follow two astronauts, played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, whose journeying to Jupiter runs afoul of their ship's supposedly infallible figurer, known equally HAL, the prototype of countless motion picture computers to follow.
Similar many classics, 2001 isn't always a good movie. Some bits are boring or superfluous, and Kubrick was clearly more fascinated with the film's sleekly designed spaceships than its ideas nigh human evolution, which are thin and arbitrary.
Yet the moving picture is carried past images yous'll never forget: the monolith, the space stations waltzing to Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube" and the long "Star Gate" sequence, featuring a hurricane of lights and images that were once thought trippy. The film'southward effects were all the more astonishing because Kubrick had to pull them off without CGI.
Kubrick's example inspired later directors, who felt that he had both upped the technical ante and made science-fiction films respectable. They genuflected before Kubrick'southward courage in refusing to tell a conventional story — though, of course, they themselves never dared to do that in their own science-fiction films like Star Wars, E.T., Bract Runner or Avatar.
The movie also tapped into a key aspect of the '60s: the counter-cultural belief in expanding consciousness. Though Kubrick was vehemently not a drug user, he wanted 2001 to open the doors of perception, to show us a college level of being. That dream seems similar something out of the past in these days of shrinking consciousness filled with false news and the hatred of science.
Indeed, watching 2001: A Infinite Odyssey at present is like opening a time capsule. And it can bring on a melancholy nostalgia for the era that spawned information technology, an optimistic time in which Americans believed the hereafter was limitless. The Kennedyesque confidence that nosotros had the strength and ambition to travel the cosmos seems long gone in this era when even getting our roads repaired feels impossible.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/599121542/50-years-later-2001-a-space-odyssey-is-still-a-cinematic-landmark
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