I finally decided to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey

[cimorene]

Even though everybody had told me all my life that it was really boring, somehow I did not expect 4 minutes of plain pitch black that was practically silent before the production company cards even appeared.

And I’d also heard that it was very Aesthetic and I don’t think I’d ever heard that it was kinda hokey, so I was quite surprised when it started with “The Dawn of Man”, a segment featuring a lot of people wearing unconvincing Planet of the Apes suits, and among other things included the apes(?) figuring out for the first time how to use tools. But plenty of apes use tools (which has been known to science for so long that Darwin wrote about it)... and birds use tools...some insects and some fish even use tools! Sure, using them for defense and hunting isn’t quite the same as using them for murder, but they could have just gone from using a club to hunt to using it for murder without showing them apparently figuring out how to use it to hunt 1 day earlier, while the other apes groups appeared to remain herbivorous (?) due to not having thought of it yet.

The future of 2001 features shuttles to and from a space station, but space station receptionists are still women dressed in pink skirt suit uniforms with pillbox hats.

The computer’s voiceprint recognition interface in the future also is prepared for users to specify any nationality... but not for any of them to not be Christians?! I can't believe nobody caught that.

The murderous artificial intelligence was a very memorable vignette, if something over an hour long where very little happens can be called a vignette. But I kept thinking that even in the 60s somebody should have known that's not how computers work.

And after that it just became an unbearably long and uneventful psychedelic music video, essentially. It seemed like ten minutes of glowing rainbow pinwheels and swirly marbly shapes that were apparently wormhole travel and then a rococo-styled hotel suite with 2 old versions of Dave in it, and then a woo-woo bullshit ending that would've been overly dramatic and mysterious even for a music video.

I’m not sorry I watched, because now I know what people are talking about, but it was... unbelievably boring. I mean, I wasn’t as bored as I could have been, because I was entertained by trying to imagine what the people involved were thinking, and also I was trying to knit without dislodging the cat from my lap, but even if you were fascinated by the plot (what there was of it), you could still have been bored by the numerous scenes where nothing really happens and you just listen to orchestral or atonal choral music too loud while a miniature moves a few centimeters or a painting of Jupiter appears or a woman very slowly walks in a straight line and then turns around and walks in another straight line.

Overall, there was enough aesthetic that the experience was able to keep me entertained; it was kinda like watching a really slow music video that was about 10x as long as it should have been. But the story... that was so hilaribbly pretentious that we both (and Wax only saw the last 30 minutes; the whole thing is over 2 hours) had to relieve our feelings by chortling along with a sampling of critics' reviews and shouting emphatically about the occasional encomium.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Well, I think you have to look at this as an entry in your History of SF Cinema class, and not as a 2018 film experience.

Because it was really weird and really groundbreaking at the time.

I saw it in its first run because I was very young at the time but had a grandmother who thought I should See All The Things. And I'm so glad I did see it. Various things about it stuck with me until 30 years later when I made my whole family sit through the DVD experience.

Yes, it's weird and boring. But it also was trying to do some interesting things. YMMV. Cheers.

[twistedchick]

I am told (by a friend who roomed with a film major at the time the movie was made) that there was a full-length, 4-hour version, and this was shown to film people. And then it was cut down to its current length, leaving out all of what makes sense and keeping the pretty stuff.

(I've never been able to make heads or tails of most of it other than the pretty and the music.)

[thawrecka]

I've often said 2001 has about 80 minutes of decent movie in it. Such a pity it's three hours long.

[stranger]

I don't think the movie meant it this way, but I could take the bones-as-tools bit at the beginning as the discovery of, specifically, murder, signifying evolution of hominids into humans. Grim, but sadly apropos.

Also in 1969, showing U.S.-Soviet cooperation for space travel was radical in itself. (It was featured a lot more in the sequel movie 2010, for what that's worth.) I also completely didn't notice an assumption of universal Christianity, when I was a college student in 1970, but it's very ironic given that the signature theme music was from Also Sprach Zarathustra rather than any of ten centuries of Church music. Esthetic value over content, I guess. Maybe it was meant to Other the Monolith?

In 1969, it was a fairly novel use of screen time to establish a picture of space travel to Jupiter according to that era's resources, although I am still uncertain if the expedition was sent out because the Monolith had been spotted in Jupiter orbit, or if an independent expedition to Jupiter met up with the Monolith unawares.

Then, we're left with the nonsensical Monolith plot that might be intended to signify Vast Unknowable Universe, and the light show which is, um, long. For its time it was a very stylish representation of Vast Unknowable Universe, is all I can say, and how often do popular movies, or SF movies, even now, try to do that?

I haven't seen the four-hour cut, but the theater version's ending just blatantly never made any sense.

[tripleransom]

But you have to admit, it supplied us with one of the most memorable lines in movie history: "Dave, my mind is going..."

I thought it was pretentious nonsense when I saw it back them, although visually it was pretty stunning. You have to remember, it was intended to be shown in a vast theatre with a curved screen and 360 degree stereo speakers. I imagine it loses quite a bit on a regular TV screen.