Kubrick's flawed genius

2001: A Space Odyssey
Director: Stanley Kubrick

The crew of Discovery One consists of five men and one of the latest generation of the HAL-9000 computers. Three of the five men were put aboard asleep, or to be more precise a state of hibernation. They were Dr. Charles Hunter, Dr. Jack Kimball and Dr. Victor Kaminsky. We spoke with mission commander Dr. David Bowman and his deputy, Dr. Frank Poole. Well, good afternoon gentlemen, how is everything going?

Perhaps this question is meant for us, the viewers. A good question. A very good question, indeed, that. 2001: A Space Odyssey must be one of the most bizarre movies ever made. It is an oxymoron of a film, leaving the viewer with such conflicting views about it that it is hard to sum up the movie. Good? Bad? The one thing one can say quite unequivocally about this strange experience is that it certainly isn’t mediocre. No film made on this scale can be conscientiously bedevilled by tagging it “mediocre”. It belongs to an extreme, the unmistakeable characteristic of a “cult” product.

This particular movie, in fact, seems to vacillate between extremes throughout its storyline. It is at once dull and engaging, harrowing and amusing, tedious and fascinating. One can feel the flawed genius at work behind it; this is evident in the painstaking attention to detail, the scientific accuracy and realism, the prophetic vision, coupled with scenes so interminably drawn-out and dialogue so unbearably banal that the screening becomes an ordeal of sorts. Yet 2001: A Space Odyssey is too vast in its conception to subject it to such trite phraseology. What, essentially, is the movie about? It is, at the basest level, a glance into the possible future of mankind, as viewed in 1968. From this aspect, the movie scores so many points that it is almost immediately secured the status of greatness. Kubrick and his crew of technical wizards have sculpted a world so flawless, so brilliantly and meticulously rendered through their famously groundbreaking and pioneering use of special effects that it is hard to believe this movie is a 1968 production. There are scenes of strong surrealism accentuated by eerie background music, and large parts of the movie are characterised by a complete lack of any dialogue whatsoever, replaced by an interesting score that takes the place of narrative; is this where the movie fails? An inability to establish contact with Earth on a human level? Or can this be viewed as another example or facet of Kubrick’s genius for the unconventional? Perhaps it’s a combination of both, eh? After all, genius works on a different plane than the rest of us bourgeoisie.

Contrary to the impression one has of the film on its completion, it does have a plot of sorts. The plot revolves very loosely around a cuboidal black monolith that is presumably an indication of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Apropos of this, the movie seems yet again to swing back and forth; between scenes that give us hope of some discernable point behind all the visuals, and scenes that continue for so long without consequence that one is disabused of the notion of an existent “plot” once again. The movie begins with a 17-odd minute shoot of ape-men struggling to survive in the African desert during what is captioned as “The Dawn of Man”. The black monolith makes its first appearance here, its arrival coinciding with an ear-splitting and eerie score that haunts the monolith throughout the movie. Following this encounter, in a somewhat disconnected and abstract scene, an ape-man is shown creating what is probably the first “tool”: an improvised club, chanced upon while scavenging through a pile of bones. The ape-men use this “weapon” to scare away other ape-men encroaching on their territory. This scene is notable for the interesting manner in which the film editor has linked it to the scene that follows; using an editing technique known as the “match cut”, he converts a tumbling bone into a man-made satellite.

Thus the movie swivels to 2001, by which time man has made gigantic technological advancements. Kubrick’s creativity acquires hegemony, and the viewer is enraptured by his vision of space travel as something commonplace, complete with transit space stations that double as hotels with tourist facilities. Gravity is defied and brought to heel, entire meals are sucked out of straws, and telephones seem to have become obsolete, replaced by audiovisual screens. The origins of biometric identification and in-flight entertainment, in fact, can in all probability be traced back to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And finally, after many minutes of simian and satellite choreography, the beginnings of a plot manifest themselves. A group of Russians at a space station diplomatically express their suspicions regarding the activities at the Moon base at Clavius crater to Dr Heywood R Floyd, who is travelling there himself to investigate, as is later revealed, a potentially shocking and sensational discovery made at the crater by American scientists. Floyd maintains silence, citing security reasons, and once he arrives at the location, we learn of the discovery: it is none other than the black monolith itself, shrieking away to glory into the scientists’ radio receivers.

Cut. Fast forward: “Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later”. We have seen spaces stations and extraterrestrial colonisation and moonbuses, now we acquaint ourselves with suspended animation and artificial intelligence. Spurred by the discovery of the black monolith, the search for life in outer space is on. On board the Discovery One are astronauts Dave and Frank, along with 3 scientists in cryogenic hibernation, headed for Jupiter in a craft whose every function banks on the reliability of the supposedly flawless HAL 9000 supercomputer. The sense of mystery that has pervaded the movie ever since the first monolith viewing is heightened when HAL, a sentient machine of sorts, expresses its own uncertainties regarding the mission. However, these uncertainties fade into the background as an entirely different drama begins to play itself out on the spaceship: HAL makes an error. Not only does this endanger the 5 lives onboard the DO, it jeopardises the mission. Dave and Frank surreptitiously discuss the pros and cons of disconnecting HAL, HAL finds out by reading their lips, and the movie becomes a mini-battle between man and machine. Be not misled, however. It is still moving at an excruciatingly slow pace.

During the “battle”, Dave happens upon the real objective of the mission, in a pre-recorded message hidden in HAL’s Logic Memory Centre. Needless to say, the black monolith is at the bottom of everything; the scientists aboard the DO had been entrusted with the task of investigating the signal sent by it (the monolith) to Jupiter. Interesting, but hardly a bolt from the blue.

Now comes Book Three of 2001: “Jupiter and beyond the Infinite”. The movie so far has been weird enough in its sluggish pace and starkly objective dialogue, but this last, eye-burning sequence takes the prize. The sluggishness is discarded, as is the dialogue (which was scanty enough to begin with), but the weirdness reaches a chaotic crescendo. The DO has reached Jupiter, Dave has disembarked on a pod to investigate something or the other, and suddenly, in a disorienting maze of colours, sound and spatial art, we find him travelling light years of space, traversing an alien landscape photographed painfully in negative, and ending up in a modernistic white room furnished in Louis XVI, where Dave sees himself in various stages of aging, breaks his glasses, finds himself dying on a bad, suddenly notices the ubiquitous black monolith at the foot of the deathbed, reaches out for it and becomes a blue baby encased in a bubble. The last scene of the movie is that of the baby viewing the Earth inside its bubble.

No, I haven’t missed any crucial images that may decipher that sequence of events above. Outré? Bizarre? Outlandish? Surreal? Yes, all of those and more. If there is a profound message hidden in that jumble of eccentricities, I didn’t get it. The ending left me dissatisfied, for I realised I had just viewed a technically mind-blowing movie that could boast apart from its special effects and vision… pretty much nothing. There were only the mildest suggestions of a plot in the form of extracts that never truly came together as a whole. It isn’t clear if this was Kubrick’s intention, but all the mysteries were left as loose ends, dangling untended. We are left dangling ourselves, wondering: What the hell was that about?

So, ultimately, what’s the jury’s painstakingly-reached verdict? This: as an experience, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a transcendental conception, daring, breath-taking, pure cinematic wizardry; as a movie, the entertainment value seems to have been sacrificed to the solidification of the vision itself, and ultimately makes little, if any, sense.