2001/2010

Today we’re going to look at a classic outer space movie that is a classic to this day, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” released in 1968. Seeing how this may not be considered a Halloween movie, it has quite possibly the scariest performance in motion picture history. Let’s get started.

Roger Ebert started his review out by saying, “It was e. e. cummings, the poet, who said he'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. I imagine cummings would not have enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," in which stars dance but birds do not sing.” What’s interesting about this film is that it’s not good on the human level but “is” on how it looks.

Director Stanley Kubrick’s space, and the spaceships he made to go on this mission, were pretty innovative at the time that no one had done before. The ships are great, cool machines which travel from one planet to another, and if men are sleeping in their bed champers, then they also get to the destination.

However, the success are credited to the machine. Also, Kubrick’s actors appear to know this. They are realistic but without emotion, like, how Ebert put it, “figures in a wax museum.” However, the machines are needed because man would not be able to know what is going on in space.

Kubrick starts the film with a segment where one society of apes find how amazing it is to actually hit some other society with one of their weapons. As a result, what we believed we were our ancestors start using tools.

At the same time, an odd pillar appears on Earth. Ebert noted, “Until this moment in the film, we have seen only natural shapes: earth and sky and arms and legs. The shock of the monolith's straight edges and square corners among the weathered rocks is one of the most effective moments in the film. Here, you see, is perfection.” The apes look around it carefully, go to touch it, then move away. Many years after this moment, humans will go into outer space with the same uncertain feelings.

Who put this pillar there? Ebert said, “Kubrick never answers, for which I suppose we must be thankful.” The movie fast forwards to the year 2001, where astronauts on the moon discover another pillar. This one draws signals toward Jupitar. Seeing how man is confidant on the machines, they boldly follow the beam.

At this part the story starts to form. The ship piloted by two astronauts, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. Three scientists (William Sylvester, Leonard Rossiter and Robert Beatty) are on the ship in cryogenic sleep to save supplies. The pilots start to question the computer, the “Hal 9000” (Douglas Rain), which runs the ship. However, they behave suspiciously – Ebert noted, “talking in monotones like characters from "Dragnet"” – that we’re not invested.

There’s not really character development in this film, so we don’t get much suspense. What stays interesting though is the thought of how Kubrick built his machines and succeeded the special effects. There is not one minute, in this lengthy film, when the audience can see through any of this. The stars look like stars and outer space is empty and great.

Some of Kubrick’s effects have been complained as boring. Ebert said, “Perhaps they are, but I can understand his motives. If his space vehicles move with agonizing precision, wouldn't we have laughed if they'd zipped around like props on "Captain Video"?” This is how it should actually be, you think to yourself to believe.

At any rate, every machine and computers are forgotten in the surprising last half-hour of the movie, and humans in some way comes back to their mindset. Another pillar is found past Jupitar, aiming to the stars. It looks like it gets the spaceship into a universe where time and space are abnormal.

What appears to be Kubrick’s message, in the final scene, is that to give humans time to not be too dependent on machines, or be sucked into them by some space-like alertness. He will become an infant again, but a baby of way more intelligent, more extinct race, just as apes were before, to their own shock, the baby form of man.

And the pillars? Ebert said, “Just road markers, I suppose, each one pointing to a destination so awesome that the traveler cannot imagine it without being transfigured. Or as cummings wrote on another occasion, "listen -- there's a heck of a good universe next door; let's go."”

Definitely see this film, if you haven’t. It is a good movie, but if you get tired by looking at the effects for too long, I completely understand. I actually got through this movie by fast forwarding through the slow moments because it was late, and as much as I liked the look, it was nighttime and I needed to watch the movie quickly. I liked the film though, maybe not as much as everyone else, but I do acknowledge that it’s a classic.

This might come as a surprise to everyone, but in 1984, Peter Hyams directed the sequel to this film titled “2010: The Year We Make Contact.”

Roger Ebert started his review out by saying, “All those years ago, when "2001: A Space Odyssey" was first released, I began my review with a few lines from a poem by e.e. cummings: I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.”

Ebert goes on to say, “That was my response to the people who said they couldn't understand "2001," that it made no sense and that it was one long exercise in self-indulgence by Stanley Kubrick, who had sent a man to the stars, only to abandon him inside some sort of extraterrestrial hotel room. I felt that the poetry of "2001" was precisely in its mystery, and that to explain everything was to ruin everything -- like the little boy who cut open his drum to see what made it bang.”

The time that “2001” came out, Ebert noted it was “that legendary time when yuppies were still hippies, and they went to see the movie a dozen times and slipped up to the front of the theater and lay flat on their backs on the floor, so that the sound-and-light trip in the second half of the movie could wash over them and they could stagger to the exits and whisper "far out" to one another in quiet ecstasy.” With “2010,” the sequel of the Kubrick movie, directed by Peter Hyams, whose back is, as Ebert said, “in more pragmatic projects such as "Outland," the Sean Connery space station thriller. The story is by Arthur C. Clarke (who, truth to tell, I always have suspected was a little bewildered by what Kubrick did to his original ideas).” “2010” is in every way a 1980s film. It doesn’t have the same level of what made the original so memorable, but it does continue the story, and it gives dialogue, realistic explanations for a lot of look and space look in “2001” that had everyone thinking so much around the 1960s.

Ebert mentioned, “This is, in short, a movie that tries to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. There were times when I almost wanted to cover my ears. Did I really want to know (a) why HAL 9000 disobeyed Dave's orders? or (b) the real reason for the Discovery's original mission? or (c) what the monoliths were trying to tell us? Not exactly. And yet we live in a most practical time, and they say every decade gets the movies it deserves.” What we see in “2010” is not a milestone in special effects, but it is an effect of computers, of look, of great, exciting filmmaking. This is a movie that pays tribute to George Lucas more than Stanley Kubrick, and Ebert said, “more to "Star Wars" than to Also Sprach Zarathustra.” It has and ending that is irritating, not only in its effortlessness, but in its shortage to succeed the feeling of hope, the feeling of ponder we had at the end of “2001.”

However, the truth is this is a good movie. Once we’ve gotten the points, once we’ve processed it fully that “2001” continues to be as one of the greatest movies ever made, once we have no longer compared “2010” with Kubrick’s film, what we are left with is a good-looking, sharp-edged, entertaining, exciting space flick – a superior film of the “Star Trek” genre (especially when you look at the first one).

Because “2010” relies a lot on its story, it would not be right to describe more than the basics: A joint Soviet-American journey travels out for the moons of Jupitar to look at the fate of Discover, its crew, and its computer Hal 9000. There is trouble on the ship between the American astronaut (Roy Scheider) and the Soviet captain (Helen Mirren), and it looks worse because on Earth, the militaries are on the verge of nuclear war over Central America. If Kubrick sometimes looked like he was making a non-war film with unknown characters, Hyams pays a whole lot of attention to story and personality. However, only of the best moments in this movie is out of character (the great part where a Soviet and an American hold each other’s hands in the fear of dying). The other great parts are special-effects extravaganzas: a spacewalk in danger by faintness, the awe-inspiring look of Jupitar, and an eye-candy flight through the planet’s upper atmosphere.

It is possible that no ending to “2010” could be in anyway satisfying, especially to those who still remember the head-scratching, great ease of the Star Child looking at us to inform at the end of “2001.” This sequel really has a lot going for it. Also, the screenplay works the difficulty by repeatedly telling us that “something wonderful” is going to occur. After we’ve been told countless times about that amazing fact, we’re ready for something really amazing, and we don’t get it. Ebert said, “We get a disappointingly mundane conclusion worthy of a 1950s sci-fi movie, not a sequel to "2001." I, for one, was disappointed that the monoliths would deign to communicate with men at all -- let alone that they would use English, or send their messages via a video screen, like the latest generation of cable news.”

As a result, you have to make up your own mind. On the one hand, “2001: A Space Odyssey” stays innovative, one of the greatest films to be called a true masterpiece. On the other hand, “2010” does get nominated to be a superior entertainment, a movie with more of skill than rhyme, with character than with suspense, a movie that explains too much and leaves too minor to leave questions in our heads, but a good movie in the end. Ebert ended his review by saying, “If I nevertheless sound less than ecstatic, maybe it's because the grave eyes of the "2001" Star Child still haunt me, with their promise that perhaps someday man would learn to teach ten thousand stars how to sing.”

In the end, “2010” is still a good movie that is worth checking out. I know it focuses more on character than on the look, but it was a different director with a different style of filmmaking, so I say to give it a chance. Check it out and see for yourself. The only reason why I consider this a Halloween film is because of how frightening the Hal 9000 was. Seeing how it was a man-made machine is scary enough for it to watch around Halloween.

Wow what a rush. Check in tomorrow to see what I will end “Halloween Month” off with. I’m thinking that I will do two separate posts since this was a lot to talk about, so we’ll see.