2001 is a movie that my Dad and I have bonded over for some 15 years now. He was a scifi nerd in college when the movie came out and it's stayed with him ever since. As a child I unknowingly played with his model Moon Bus and PanAm Space Clipper, effectively ruining them, but he just told about the movie and wasn't even mad. Eventually when I get into films we watched his LaserDisc copy of the film and on every format since (except VHS).
Starting last Christmas, I started buying him the Mobius Models 2001 re-releases to replace the models I broke (He's getting a new Moon Bus for Christmas). Our highlight of the year though was going to the Smithsonian to see the IMAX restoration of 2001; it was like seeing the film all over again for the first time.
I'm incredibly fortunate to have been able to bond with father over the years around this special film. My dad is the stoic engineer type, but this movie is a window into him that I’m grateful to have. All this is to say that I’m 100% a Kubrick cultist.
(I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
> (I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
Reminds me of taking a few of my friends to a screening of Blade Runner 2049. On the way there I was gushing about how the original Blade Runner is amazing and one of the pillars of cinametic sci-fi. After the movie was done I was going off on how this was an amazing homage to the original etc., one of my friends interjected with ‘I don’t understand what the hell did I just watch’ and the others were just staring at me with this ‘???’ look on their face. They even thought I pulled a fast one on them in saying that the original wasn’t required viewing as the links are only tangential.
In contrast to the other comments about how 2049 was slow etc., let me say that I took my wife and daughter to see 2049.
We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049 and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected the movie.
After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original but wished it could have been an hour shorter.
My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so possibly that's partly why she loved it.
This was the same reaction my fiancée had. While I consider the original Blade Runner the best sci-fi movie of all time (followed closely by the original Alien in which the doomed ship Nostromo feels like it departed Blade Runner earth), I do think 2049 is right up there and didn't disappoint my insanely high expectations for the film.
Other than my daughter being a writer, this was my exact experience, with identical reactions on their respective parts after taking wife and daughter to 2049. Knowing that the original Blade Runner is my favorite film, my wife gave me the 5-disc collector's edition in the briefcase for Christmas 10 years ago. Picked up the BluRay of 2049 on Black Friday. Was going to opt for the 4K version but haven't seen a review I like of a 4K player yet (and I'm not sure my eyes could tell the difference after staring at screens for the last 35 years).
I thought 2049 was a wonderful, visually appealing film with a neat small story set in a big world. Which makes it a bold movie.
Sure, it was set in a universe we probably never thought to see again. The outset was flogging a horse I thought would have been better off stay dead. But in this age of huge stories - epics even - doing a beautiful, cruel, unforgiving small, and slow-paced story takes some balls.
I wasn't entirely on board with how the universe had been treated, but even then, I liked it.
I have to agree and I think it's one of the areas that cyberpunk stories can really excel in. Telling a small story in a big world helps contextualize and ground the setting.
This is going to sound pretentious, but I think some people just don’t enjoy the artistic aspects of film making beyond plot and action. It can be the most beautiful, awe-inspiring imagery ever put to film, and if there isn’t a clear plot and a love interest and a chase scene, they just aren’t interested.
Interstellar is another movie that’s polarizing like that. To me, watching it in imax was just an overwhelming, powerful experience, but about half of the people I saw the movie with hated it because the plot is sort of a mess.
I agree with you, but I didn't find BR 2049 visually appealing at all. Part of it is just rehashing the same stuff already seen in the original- just more artificial, less dirty and chaotic, with a monotonous palette. Looking at some low res clips from youtube I'm actually wondering whether it's the movie or just a videogame.
And, as any videogame, it needs multiple levels with different environments: so the main character is wandering around, and each section of the movie is actually clearly delimited by a different palette- I guess some heavy-handed filter applied, instagram style: grey-greenish for the city, red for the desert, light orange for the interior of Wallace Corporation, blue-grey for the snowy place, etc. It's a videogame aesthetics, something that places itself comfortably in the "fantasy worlds" section of the current popular culture.
I had a similar experience after taking my girlfriend to see the original. But after watching a movie we always sit in the lobby to discuss the themes, motifs, plot, etc. (one of the things that endears me to her) and after that she began to appreciate it.
I love the original. I've seen most of its versions. I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep multiple times. I didn't care for 2049 at all. I found it overly long, tediously paced (I say as someone who loves Barry Lyndon), and needlessly sexist. :-(
I'm on your friends' side on this one: Blade Runner 2049 is completely rambling and pointless, bad and pretentious. It's a soulless product made to capitalise on the fame of the original.
> I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!"
I had a similar experience :) I gushed for years about how 2001 was one of my favorite movies and finally a few months ago there was a local 70mm showing, so I dragged her to it.
When it ended I said "wasn't that amazing?" and was met with "um... I can see how someone could like that movie"
Like you, I think I'll stick to talking to my dad about it. He loves telling me stories of when he saw it in the original 65mm or 70mm in theaters.
Just want to say that Michael Benson's Space Odyssey[0], the oral history of making the movie, was the best book I've read this year. Kubrick somehow, through a lot of luck, determination, and frankly a hefty dose of delusional thinking, managed to gather the best minds of a generation to work on what basically amounted to a crazy art project. The book does a good job of impressing that for a lot of people involved it became the apex of their professional and personal lives. In the end, they made something that truly mattered and changed culture. I left the book wishing I got to experience something as intense as that. Most of what we do doesn't matter.
One of the pernicious aspects of our culture of celebrity worship is that it leads to the feeling that if something won't be recorded in a book, or on TV, or in a movie, that it doesn't matter.
This is wrong, the instance to instance living of our lives matters, it all matters.
I've seen Space Odyssey a few times, its a cool movie.
How I treat the people I come in contact with today, will matter as much to their lives as how they spent 3 hours several years ago.
How I was treated by most of the people I have come in contact with over the past three months of my life will be forgotten over the course of the next three months.
I will never forget 2001: A Space Odyssey. And this is true for millions of people.
It doesn't have to have anything to do with celebrities or entertainment, but it's very hard and very remarkable to have a profound impact on large numbers of people. And it's exceedingly rare to do this unintentionally.
If I die at age 72, the quality of any three particular months of my life represent less than a percent of my overall quality of life. An experience that I remember or that changes my life, or an invention that I use on a regular basis, changes my life continuously from that moment forward.
Agree that Benson's book _Space Odyssey_ is great.
I just finished _Space Odyssey_ and was appalled by the way Kubrick treated Arthur C. Clarke, excluding him from receiving a percentage of the proceeds and delaying the publication of his book until after the much-delayed film was released and lying to him about his reasons.
Kubrick also abused Dan Richter, who did the choreography for the "Dawn of Man" sequence and played "Moonwalker", the leader of the hominids. Kubrick insisted he could only give Richter one credit. "I'm the only one with more than one credit," Kubrick said, according to Richter. Kubrick gave Richter the choice of a starring credit or the choreography credit. Richter chose the starring credit.
Kubrick also messed with Doug Trumbull (effects), Stuart Freeborn (makeup), Gyorgy Ligetti (music), and many others.
I understand many of the people who worked with Kubrick looked back on all they learned and how they grew professionally while working for him. But I don't understand why he seemed to be such a jerk.
Your home cooked meal, kind word or smile won't have any affect on a star going super nova across the galaxy.
On the other hand that time you were a bit grumpy and short tempered with someone or eat a McDonald's probably won't mater either.
In 1000 years I suspect that no one will know a single thing about my life. The work of Stanley Kubrik, however, is as likely to be around as the works of Cicero or Shakespeare. I take more comfort in that.
I agree that it's a matter of scale. Some people move the dial so much that they effect change in the present and in the foreseeable future. You could say these people matter more than most others.
However, to say that most of what we do doesn't matter is a denial of one's own life.
On the contrary, I think Kubrick was great on spite of his shortcomings. Most of great artists in history were kind people. I could bet that his movies would be better (or even there would be more of them), having him been a more people's person. Alas, we can only speculate.
I'm not sure there's any way to judge whether most great artists in history were "kind people" or not. We all have our short comings though and "feet of clay".
For all we know he may have wanted to be a better person, for whatever that means, but not been able to be any other way.
A home cooked meal, a kind word or smile won't change anything about a star across the galaxy, but what does anything at all about a star across the galaxy matter if it doesn't in some way help to make home cooked meals, dispense kind words, or cause smiles?
Interesting take. I've always felt his work was "art: the useless kind." Ambiguous to a T as stipulated by art guidelines. His praise is the unimaginative patting themselves on the back for sitting through an editing mess.
> In his films, Kubrick exists as a kind of deep state, while his fans are conspiracy theorists.
I love Kubrick, but does anyone else grow a little tired of the legacy management around him? With each generation of film fan, he's become the go-to-guy to project this archetype of the cinematic Godhead onto. Meanwhile, scores of equally detail-focused and enigmatic auteurs of his era slip through the cracks (eg, Visconti, Antonioni, Bresson, De Palma, to name a few).
Kubrick's unparalleled achievement will always be becoming a film-artist on studio dime (he established himself just before New Hollywood took off - and had cultivated enough of a mystique to carry-on after it crashed in the early-80s). But plenty of his contemporaries exercised the same degree of control that this article talks about, yet they're consistently overlooked because Kubrick became this meme of the cinematic Übermensch.
But that's always how it works. A Kubrick, a Gates, a Bezos is one percent their efforts and virtues (without which there'd be nothing) and 99 percent being in the right place at the right time. Malcolm Gladwell (another example of this!) is glib but has talked about that in relation to the Silicon Valley titans: they were born at a historical moment, and were part of a small cohort (you mention four directors who didn't become 'Kubrick', not 4000) and among that cohort, their talent and effort lined up with good fortune.
You can say luck so long as you understand that ONLY luck won't get you this result. But among those with talent and determination, it's really fairly arbitrary who becomes the titans of art, industry, finance. You get good enough to meet the bar, and then it's up to Fate.
This is normal. It's more about what celebrity/stardom/ultimate merit IS, rather than what Kubrick is. It's a lot like internet virality. The pool of possibles is not large, but moderate: from that point onward it's luck and self-reinforcing prophecy. And again, you can't make a nothing into this sort of total winner because they must meet the bar first, they've got to earn their spot in the pool, but anyone in the pool would do as well.
Kevin Kelly has an interesting take on this in _What Technology Wants_ [1]. Essentially - that these sort of works were inevitable. If Kubrick, Gates, or Bezos hadn't made 2001, MS, or AMZ - someone else would have. Not _exactly_ the same thing of course, but something so similar as to fill the same spot in history. 2001 happened because 1968 was, in a sense, "ripe" for it. The book undoubtably explains it better. :-)
(Weird. This is the second book recommendation I've made on HN today... I swear I'm not a bot!)
I think yours is the sophisticated view of progress rather than the naive "great man" theory. I subscribed to the "great man" theory that the great man pushed society's progress. Now I think that it is society's progress that creates the great man.
We are taught to think that there was something special or even superhuman about newton, turing, etc. But the reality is that they were one of many highly intelligent people working on the same problems created by society's progress. Even if they didn't succeed or achieve, someone else would have. But humans have an innate myth making imperative and a desire to hero worship so we create heros. But reality and history is far more complicated than the idealized myths we create. Without newton, we'd still have calculus ( leibniz, et al ). Without turing, we'd still have computer science ( Church, et al ).
> If Kubrick, Gates, or Bezos hadn't made 2001, MS, or AMZ - someone else would have. Not _exactly_ the same thing of course, but something so similar as to fill the same spot in history.
I'm willing to grant that this is true in one sense: having the right surrounding environment is necessary for the creation of some "great work". What I question is whether it's sufficient.
If some other filmmaker made the zeitgeist-equivalent to 2001, or some other entrepreneur made the zeitgeist-equivalent to Microsoft or Amazon, they would have done it differently, and differently enough that those differences, in and of themselves, would have had tremendous impact.
I think you really knock Kubrick without giving proper respect to his work ethic. And sure, luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but Stanley had the preparation part in spades, in a way that even many other successful "titans" probably do not.
You presuppose that individual determination is blind. How can you honestly look at an Amazon or Microsoft and say their impact on the world was essentially indeterministic chance? Amazon, especially, has had ample competition, yet the disparate decision making within each organization has resulted in disparate success.
Absolutely, I found especially annoying the statement in the article that says "films are never the work of an individual: they are products of a collective, and children of compromise." Well, Hollywood blockbusters for sure, there's scarcely a hint of directorship in those. But smaller or independent productions, which are not directed to the masses, are another thing.
Maybe what Kubrick did was to make movies that look like big Hollywood productions, with the big budgets and the polished look, but at the same time keeping the type of control and freedom that usually only small independents have. His movies are at the same time beautiful, extremely original, and very approachable- things that rarely go together.
As someone working in film I think that quote is quite good. Director is hugely important, but it really is about the team. Good director picks the players and aligns everyone, but it takes lot of people to come up with the creative decisions and solve all the aspects of the film.
Director is constrained by the input of the team and resources of the budget etc. those are the compromises which make the art.
Tbh, Stanley Kubrick is vastly overrated. Yes every one of his movies has great cinemotography, and is technically excellent, but many of his movies are not excellent as movies. Eyes Wide Shut, full metal jacket, and the shining are not 10/10 movies, and David Fincher, Harmony Korine, Charlie Kaifman have all created movies better than all those movies listed. The problem with Stanley Lubrick is because he has a style that is very attractive to viewers, and his movies are very accesible also, he gets massively overrated by a lot of casual film watchers, which is fine so are a lot of directors, but his hype has leaked even to actual film critics with years of experience. It also doesn't help that movies like Room 237 come out that jack of Stanley Kubrick and draw meaning out of things that had no meaning. Sad that people glorify Kubrick but don't even know who Charlir Kaufman or Harmony Korine are, even though both directors have created movies that are just as good as a lot of Kubricks films.
This is the first time I've ever heard Kubrick's work referred to as "accessible." If anything, the standard knock on him is that his movies are too distant and clinical for the average moviegoer; people admire2001: A Space Odyssey, but they loveStar Wars.
Well, they are sort of accessible- 2001 is particularly cryptic and slow paced, but it's still a high budget science fiction movie with spaceships and talking computers. While most people won't ever think of enduring the screening of a Bela Tarr movie.
I'm not sure I'd call Stanley Kubrick's movies accessible. Sure, there are less accessible movies out there, but also much more accessible ones. And accessibility is not a bad thing; movies are meant to be watched.
I personally find Kubrick's movies excellent. Rarely perfect, but often highly innovative in one area or another, and all completely different. They range from glacial 2001 to funny Dr Strangelove, to historical costume drama to brutal war movie, and he manages to capture the essence every time.
There are many other deserving directors out there, but it'd be nuts to not consider Kubrick among the greatest directors.
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage (and a lot of arrogance).
2010 is not a bad movie, the same way its original material is not a bad book (unlike 2061 and 3001), but it's also no 2001 and doesn't come even close. The best scenes are exactly the Bowman appearance aboard the Discovery, which kind of follow from the hotel room scene from 2001 with long silences and a Bowman that's no longer human, but still remembers what human is.
Gone, unfortunately, are the distinctive flat square screens, the careful walks in zero gravity on top of velcro strips. Hyams and the actors certainly forgot the Discovery lacked artificial gravity in everything but the carousel (and propulsion would be a lot easier if we knew how to do artificial gravity everywhere). Quite frankly, the lack of attention to detail is a big turn off for me.
I'll certainly schedule a trip do London to visit it.
> “The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated,” he said. “When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.”
I watched 2001 with some friends on 1 January 2001. Unfortunately I picked the wrong group of friends, people who couldn't settle back into to the slow pace and no appreciation of mystery - they were constantly asking me to explain everything. Later that day I watched 2010 (by myself). That movie never raises a question that it doesn't answer within about 10 minutes.
Especially with editing styles in general being much more frenetic than they once were, 2001 is tough for a modern audience. And, if don’t basically know the background plot, it’s pretty inscrutable as it was at the time.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s on my best movies list. But it’s going to be a bit tough for a first time, non movie buff audience today.
Popular audiences were just as baffled by 2001 when it was released as today.
Arthur C Clarke had written a narration explaining everything and was dismayed to discover, at the premiere, that Kubrick had opted to drop the narration entirely. Thank God Kubrick was calling the shots and not Clarke.
What really annoys me about Peter Hyams (and this is in all his movies I saw) is the constant fog. There's always some smoke on the set. I'd be seriously rattled to wake up inside a smoke-filled spaceship around Jupiter.
But I like the touch of Curnow holding Maxim's hat. Their relationship is never mentioned in any other place in the movie. It was a nice touch (even though Max doesn't die in the book).
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage (and a lot of arrogance).
2010 was a different kind of book from 2001. Its not quite as extreme as Alien vs Aliens, but its close. The movie really suffered from the lack of China in the movie which was an important part of the book. I get the feeling they really didn't have a budget or spent it all on the actor's salaries.
The China thing would add a lot of moving parts to an already complex story. I would have written it out from the movie, but I would make a malfunction or something natural get rid of the probe, without implying the Gardeners directly, but revealing that there is complex life in Europa. Maybe getting the probe destroyed by the Europan like the Tsien was.
If someone ever manages to get 2010 (and 2001) into a miniseries (I pray someone more respectful than the monsters who butchered Childhood's End), then the China story would be an important part. If I were doing it, I'd use only audio from the Chinese astronaut transmitting on the blind and the faces of the crew of the Leonov as they listen to the tragedy and cope with the fact they can do nothing to save that voice - a death every astronaut knows from their own nightmares. It'd act as a reminder that a lot of things can - and do - go wrong even when we do everything perfectly right.
Kubrick was also a fairly skilled photographer and contributor to "Look" - a widely popular pictorial magazine that had a peak circulation of over 7 million copies. The Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit of his photographic work entitled "Through a Different Lens". Unfortunately the exhibit ends January 6, 2019. There's also an accompanying book for sale.
An interesting case study that's recently had me revising my views on Kubrick's obsessiveness is one of his less-appreciated films, Barry Lyndon.
To reproduce the not-yet-electrified world of its 18th-century setting, Kubrick famously spent huge amounts of time on that project finding ways to shoot scenes using only natural light (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography). This went so far as shooting interior scenes set at night using only candlelight, since that's how they would have been lit in real life. Cameras aren't really designed to work well with such low and inconsistent lighting, so he had to go to great lengths to get usable footage.
Ever since its release, the standard take on Barry Lyndon has been that the results didn't justify all that effort. The unusually low lighting made scenes seem willfully obscure, like Kubrick was capriciously forcing the viewer to work extra hard just to keep up. This (along with a sadly weak performance by Ryan O'Neal in the critical role of the eponymous Barry) is a big part of why Barry Lyndon has languished for decades in the "lesser Kubrick" bargain bin.
But a recent remastering has produced a 4K version of Barry Lyndon, and I was surprised to discover when watching that version on a large TV that suddenly the film popped visually in a way it never had before. Where before it had seemed dark and hard to watch, now it felt more like observing a great painting, with lots of subtle detail I'd never noticed before. And then I realized that all those years of bad feelings about Barry Lyndon had come from watching it in low resolution on small screens, while Kubrick had been shooting for the big, bright cinema screen. I'd literally been watching the movie wrong all that time.
So it turns out Kubrick's obsessiveness in this case really did pay off. Those of us who'd only ever seen it on home video -- which is to say, most people -- just had to wait for the quality of the home viewing experience to catch up to his standards in order to see it.
I would agree that his films very much suit themselves to the silver screen, and watching them, e.g. on a laptop or computer-monitor sized screen is certainly not going to do it justice.
I was fortunate enough to catch many of his films during the Toronto International Film Festival during an exhibit. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was particularly fantastic.
If you're in Barcelona and even slightly intrigued by Kubrick's work I strongly suggest you spend an afternoon at the CCCB exhibition, the 6 euros are worth it: plenty of props, costumes, camera gear, some interesting documents as well.
I attended the exhibition last Friday. It's impressive. A lot of original objects from Kubrick and it's films. Truly great.
I took the guided tour, which is free. (Note that the guide is in Catalan; the exhibition is in Catalan, Spanish and English.) It was really great. The guide had read many of the books and made many interesting comments. For example explained what other actors said about Kubrick. It was like 1 hour and a half. There is also a audio guide (they provide you with a card and a headphones).
I'll have to visit the exhibition again to see it in detail. A friend said he had already seen it twice. Note that with ticket of 1 day you can visit it twice, which is nice.
Also note that the exhibition in Barcelona has content of another exhibition about 2001 Space Odyssey. So it's a '2 in 1'.
One of my favorite bars in Mexico City was this place that was sort of, Stanely Krubic themed. It was a weird but cool place.
They had a replica of the room from the final scene of 2001 Space Odyssey, in the back of the bar. You would go in there, lie on the bed. You could smoke a cigarette and enjoy your cocktail. It was so awesome.
I recommend anyone interested in Kubrick as a person check out the documentary Filmworker on Netflix, about his personal assistant Leon Vitali. (Warning that if you have a very black-and-white hero worship of Stanley, the film might disabuse some of your notions.)
Ian Watson, who was one of the writers who worked on AI, also wrote a bemused article about his experience working with Stanley:
If you enjoyed Dr Strangelove, check out Seven Days in May. It's kind of like a serious version of the former, and was made right around the same time. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's still a good, and undeservedly overlooked film.
General tickets on sale 1st Jan. Adults £16, Concessions £12 [1].
Such a shame to see yet another exhibition confined to central London. It's absurd that I can fly to Barcelona quicker, and for less money, than it takes me to have a day trip via train to London!
I mean, depends where you are in the UK. I can train from London to Leeds for ~£25 if I book sufficiently in advance. On the day it's £120. (I hate this model of train fares with a passion, but it feels overstated to suggest that Barcelona is both cheaper and quicker when neither is true for me)
London Design museum was a huge disappointment for me when I lived there.
All exhibitions were prohibitively expensive, especially the Ferrari one last year.
After watching 2001, I was completely underwhelmed. I felt like the kid in The emperor’s new clothes that yells “Mommy, the emperor is naked”. I later watched a 1 minute LEGO parody of the movie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4aQ2YbN-E and thought it covered all the basic themes of the movie in a minute instead of taking 2.5 hours.
I liked the Rob Ager video 'the meaning of the monolith revealed', along with 'Kubrick's cover story'. Although these are paywalled video essays.
The $5 version is that the monolith is the movie screen, and that the movie and actors are becoming self aware that they are in a movie. The hints are all in the details, regarding camera angles, lighting, camera positions, and all the arrows telling people to tilt their view.
What really sells it is the documentary/advertisement on how Kubrick is raising money to make the film, and all the industry people he is tapping and getting money from. People really thought it was going to be a hard core 'done right sci-fi' movie, but if you look closer you can see how much of it is stilted, and done incorrectly even though they obviously could have done better.
TL;DR Kubrick played the 'space race propaganda' hysteria of the mid 1960's to finance and make his art house film about actors being aware of how they are making a movie.
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
I think an additional factor that discriminates 2001 compared with other films was that it was made at the height of the space race when there was a lot of technological optimism about the possibilities. When the film was released, Apollo 8 hadn't yet orbited the moon.
Also, the screenwriter (Arthur C. Clarke) was a confirmed space cadet (in the nicest sense of the phrase) and didn't see a need to throw in dystopian civilisations and evil corporations (standard fare in contemporary Hollywood SF) when there was so much scope in 'just' exploring the possibilities of the universe.
Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.
I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
Check out the third season of Twin Peaks from Showtime. It's more or less an 18 hour movie, with slow, seemingly-deliberate (or not!) pacing. A truly fascinating work for this age.
I love Tree of Life, but I’ve tried and failed to get into 2001 several times. The thing I love in Tree of Life is the humanism: I can see people sorting through their feelings through their memories in real time, and the characters feel absolutely real. 2001 is more interested in “philosophy” than people, and to be honest if I want that I’d rather just read a nonfiction book.
I once saw Tree of Life, totally on a whim, no knowledge at all, bought a ticket when passing the cinema during an evening walk.
I left the movie in the middle. I thought it so bad, but fascinatingly bad. Well at home I found out it was directed by same director as The Thin Red Line, one of my favorite movies. Since then I have been puzzled, I really should give Tree of Life another chance.
Definitely give The Tree of Life another go, and watch Malick's older films too - they are wonderful. Avoid all of his most recent films unless you're feeling very, very meditative (I slept extremely peacefully through the last third of Knight of Cups, I will say).
Give it a shot, at least! A lot of people feel about it the same way I feel about 2001, though, so it may just not be your thing. I think if you can be immersed in the visuals and empathize with the characters then you're good; otherwise, it probably won't do anything for you.
2001 is also one of my favorites but I also loved Interstellar.
The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.
There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.
Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?
Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.
Yeah, that's a funny aspect of realistic accuracy, where, if you're doing it in one place, you have to do it elsewhere as well, else you'll ruin the immersion.
I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
The problem is inception crossed the line into fantasy. Antigravity paint or whatever mcguffin you want to name is explicitly changing some rule. Inception went the magic wand route.
That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.
I may be misunderstanding this but isn't the point in Inception that what they are experiencing is explicitly not real?
That because they are inside a dream-like state the rules of reality can be broken and it is only by spotting when the rules of reality are broken that you can tell you're not in the real world.
That I don't have a problem with. You can have people see all kinds of crap while tripping on LSD without issue.
It's the mechanics like 10^(layers deep) where going deeper kept increasing time compression in dreams. Dragon Ball Z for example had space ships, but the mechanics of the world where based on fantasy ideas.
The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results. If it’s a simulation then him picking up a rock and turning it into a spaceship is viable. Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world, though again same deal.
But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
> The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results.
Neo's hardware implants allow him to wirelessly interface with the machine world, which he has root access to. This is even better established when he seems to fall into a coma and ends up being in the Matrix. I don't know why this wasn't obvious to anyone else.
> Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world
Wireless connectivity isn't undefined or mystical!
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
I don't think it actually counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules, which is where "residual self-image" comes from.
Also, just as a fun fact, in one of the earlier revisions of the script of the first movie, Switch was supposed to be a transgender character who was one gender in the Matrix and the opposite gender in the physical world. This was dropped for some reason.
> counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules
It’s not that it’s a rule it’s that it’s an undefined rule. If they had said nothing then you don’t know, perhaps they are taking photos and uploading avatars off camera, or perhaps the Matrix keeps track of this stuff, or perhaps the Matrix downloads the data from your mind. Residual self immage does not answer the question.
Characters are not omnipotent. Character X explaining the rule does not mean Rule X actually applies. For example character says you need to use a plug to jack into the Matrix and need a hardline to get out. Later on you break those rules and that’s fine the character does not know what they are talking about.
But, the Sci-fi fantasy devide is not the lack of technology, as cellphones work just fine in Dresden Files and other Urban Fantasy. It’s the type of rules that exist and how they can be broken without destroying the suspension of disbelief. The cold equations is a good low budget film based around some very hard rules. The Matrix fails this, you can come up for explanations for anything that happen, but doing so is not bound by any rule in the world.
Further, it frames things in non technical terms perhaps the character just noticed he has a modem up his bumb. Perhaps he can wirelessly hack an alarm clock rather than setting the snooze button. Or maybe he has psy powers and can cause EMP’s. Undefined major plot elements under the control of the protagonist or antagonist is the hallmark of Fantasy. What can and can’t Gandalf do?
> but that means he could have arbitrarily results.
Well, he could have, if he understood the simulation well enough; even in the overt simulation, which he was coached on, he had more constrained apparent ability. He clearly goes through an awakening over a period about the nature of the “real” world and his ability within it, that in some way parallels (without the coaching) his earlier awakening to the Matrix, but at it's most advanced point (as far as his externalized use of abilities, at least) it is still obviously less complete than the point he reaches with the Matrix at the end of the first movie.
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean
That everything the humans “know” about the Matrix is curated material that is part of the system of control revealed later in the series, and is often misleading, and frequently incoherent under careful examination, which is discouraged by the quasi-religious framework of belief that is itself part of the system of control.
I am more referring to how it fits in with the story. What humans know about the Matrix is treated like what Hogwarts professors know about magic vs what starfleet academy knows about warp cores.
The fact that people jacking in can die is not treated as an open technical problem to be solved, but gamps rules of transformation. Warp cores are not nessisarily fully understood, but they are actively trying to test out and improve them. In the Matrix they don’t treat things as a theory they just notice stuff and slap a name on it. At the same time they built a loading program to bring guns into the system. Which is why I am saying it’s even a close call between science fiction and fantasy.
Oh, sure, the sequels were problematic. I actually interpreted the real world shenanigans as something of a Gurren Lagann-style wink at the audience. I misunderstood the post above.
A magic rock by some likely 100,000+ year more advanced civilization. Story wise however they could have been visiting the Grand Cannon as neither the protagonist or antagonist had access to magic. You could do the same thing with the rock saying releasing the Nanite cloud and nothing changes.
As far as 2001 is concerned it’s basicly highly advanced Starfish Aliens. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens Which seems like the most likely contact with extraterrestrials we will see. Motivation and reasoning are not going to be obvious, is this some major effort on part of their civilization or some 6th graders high school science project we just don’t know.
Again though, the Aliens are mostly irrelevant, it’s HAL human relations that’s driving things.
Maybe some people wouldn't consider it strictly sci-fi but I really enjoyed "Upstream Color" and reading what Carruth was planning to create with "A Topiary" I really hope someone gives him the funding and creative control to complete a project on the scale of that.
Its a student film. Its a classic frat-house set in space with minor gems. One guy has a home-made jamjar and scraps piano he plays to keep himself sane. the "rimmer" annoying character keeps a very sad video diary. There is a talking bomb. the Captain is semi-alive in cryo-storage.
The thing with movies like interstellar and inception is that they're ultimately action/romance movies set in a sci fi context. 2001 is the only movie that I know of which is exclusively about themes such as human evolution, alien life, etc... and dispensing of all "hollywood fluff". I'm not trying to diss interstellar or inception (I loved both of them), but they're not of the same caliber as 2001.
In my opinion, 2001 feels cold, empty, and sterile when compared to Solaris by Tarkovsky. They both use space travel to touch on themes about the human experience, but Solaris is miles ahead dealing with human psyche.
Kubrick didn't think much of humanity, it's pretty clear in 2001 and in all his movies. His gaze is naturalistic: individuals are struggling for power and sex, sometimes they climb hierarchies through cunning and violence, sometimes they fall. He didn't seem to be that heavily interested in the human psyche.
On the other hand, 2001 is precisely a movie about humans trying to transcend themselves by suppressing anything emotional about them and exhalting pure reason- this is also a factor for the sterile appearance of the movie.
Sunshine by Danny Boyle dealt with human extinction, although the focus was on reigniting the sun instead of colonizing planets. The cinematography is beautiful and it gets into some heavy themes.
Exactly, Interstellar is good. The setting is a backdrop, but it's not a bad backdrop at all. In fact, I like how sci-fi and colonization of the solar system is made to look normal, it might give future generations a feeling of "of course we are going there". While it being a good love story in its own right.
Maybe I should try the book. I like me some good sci-fi (the Hyperion series is probably my favorite read-wise). I've never gotten through the 2001 movie. Several goes at it. I literally pass out asleep. Maybe I need to try a morning viewing. I think of movies as entertainment. Trying to watch this one has become a chore.
The book is essentially the same story but has a lot more description of what is going on. It'll certainly make sense, even if it isn't a page-turner suspense.
More generally, literary critics distinguish between 'show' (reader has to figure things out) and 'tell' (author makes things very obvious) modes of writing [0]. Show and Tell styles also appear in film making. Obviously the film and the book are in different media, but I think it's fair to say that the film 2001 is totally at the 'show' end of the spectrum while the book is mostly 'tell' (in common with a lot of Clarke's writing).
I'm in a somewhat similar boat to you -- I find the movie a bit too tedious. I've seen it thrice, and enjoy specific sections of it, but it just doesn't do anything for me. I think it may be because I left it until too late to watch it, and by then I'd already encountered a LOT of 2001-influenced sci-fi. By which time, very few of the concepts or examinations within the movie struck a chord inside of me.
Having said that, I REALLY liked the book, and would recommend that you give it go!
(p.s.: it's BS that you got downvoted for stating a contrary opinion in a measured, reasonable manner -- hopefully my upvote cancels out the haters!)
This will annoy a lot of people, but: turn on the subtitles and turn up the speed. Large sections of it can be zoomed through at 4x or 8x speed, returning to normal once people are talking.
Large ares of it are basically "wow factor" shots which looked really impressive in 1968 and lack a lot of that to present-day viewers. Sometimes it feels more like an agonisingly slow pan across the concept art.
For the last part of the movie, sure, speed through.
In the early part, the slow pace of the journey into space heightens the sense of isolation. It's something a modern movie couldn't get away with, and is a unique part of 2001 that you should really experience.
I'm in my late-30s but I think I'm simply to young to appreciate the impact of the space imagery in '2001' because I grew up post-Voyager and came of age in the post-Hubble world. I'm a huge fan of Kubrick and I'm highly tolerant of slow pacing but '2001' just never really grabbed me.
I was enraged at Gravity's rendering of space, which at the opposite extreme of 2001's: a crowded backyard playground, with plenty of traffic and people wandering around and having a great time.
I believe space is black, silent, and immobile- though this might be just the lasting imprinting of 2001. I doubt you'd see anything resembling Hubble images up there.
I actually enjoyed Gravity. But it was also the first example I thought of where something like 2001's long journey could have enhanced the feeling of how far they were from rescue.
This way of thinking is common, but you're missing out. There is an entire world out there where movies are art and they can be as perspective-changing as a good book.
I never saw the film, but the book is great. A neat fact is that Arthur C Clark, and Stanley Kubrick wrote the book and the film at the same time. There are actually 4 or 5 books, and they're all pretty good.
I had to learn a little about what went on behind the scenes to appreciate it. Once I saw the making of the ship models, watching the camera pan across one for an hour wasn't as boring.
I loved Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". I know it's not everyone's favorite movie but I keep thinking about it "in a deep manner" (for lack of a better phrase) from time to time, it makes me question my essence as a human being: "Would I be able to love a robot child? Yes, I would, wouldn't I? Or would I? I know I should, robots like the ones presented in the movie are just like humans, I should love them the same, if not more" and stuff like that.
Being originally a Kubrick's project, I wondered sometimes about what Kubrick saw in it, and what's the kubrickian theme under the, well, cartload of saccharine that Spielberg threw on it.
A vague possibility is that the story is about a machine that is programmed to require love, and because of that desperately searches for someone to love it until- and that's the punchline- aliens come and build a machine for it that finally wants to love it, so they're both mechanically happy. I can picture Kubrick cynically grinning at the idea.
The aliens are not actually aliens though, they are robots which have survived after humans went extinct, and they recognize the boy as an ancient ancestor of their kind.
A lot of people hate that film, but I liked it. It got me in to the books, and I think it's a fine scifi film.. though I wouldn't mention it in the same breath as 2001.
Try "alternative edition redux" -a fan recut the thing and made ... a really good movie out of it. Unlike the official cuts, you don't need to have read the book first.
To me, "Solyaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky comes close, even though the sweep is much more limited when compared to 2001.
And let's also not forget the greatest sci-fi movie never made, Jodorowski's attempt at "Dune". Even artifacts from that aborted attempt are iconic, like the Harkonnen chair:
Tarkovsky's my favorite director, but I really did not like Solaris. For me, Tarkovsky's Stalker is the infinitely better film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.
There are many of them. they are not made by the US film industry. Check out "Mr. Nobody", check out "The Congress", "Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind"... come on now, these are masterworks.
I loved Mr Nobody as a teenager, and I still think the overall concept is great, but when I watch as an adult, I can't help but cringe at a lot of the scenes. the acting is just so overwrought. maybe I've watched it too many times.
2001 is a movie that my Dad and I have bonded over for some 15 years now. He was a scifi nerd in college when the movie came out and it's stayed with him ever since. As a child I unknowingly played with his model Moon Bus and PanAm Space Clipper, effectively ruining them, but he just told about the movie and wasn't even mad. Eventually when I get into films we watched his LaserDisc copy of the film and on every format since (except VHS).
Starting last Christmas, I started buying him the Mobius Models 2001 re-releases to replace the models I broke (He's getting a new Moon Bus for Christmas). Our highlight of the year though was going to the Smithsonian to see the IMAX restoration of 2001; it was like seeing the film all over again for the first time.
I'm incredibly fortunate to have been able to bond with father over the years around this special film. My dad is the stoic engineer type, but this movie is a window into him that I’m grateful to have. All this is to say that I’m 100% a Kubrick cultist.
(I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
> (I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
Reminds me of taking a few of my friends to a screening of Blade Runner 2049. On the way there I was gushing about how the original Blade Runner is amazing and one of the pillars of cinametic sci-fi. After the movie was done I was going off on how this was an amazing homage to the original etc., one of my friends interjected with ‘I don’t understand what the hell did I just watch’ and the others were just staring at me with this ‘???’ look on their face. They even thought I pulled a fast one on them in saying that the original wasn’t required viewing as the links are only tangential.
In contrast to the other comments about how 2049 was slow etc., let me say that I took my wife and daughter to see 2049.
We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049 and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected the movie.
After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original but wished it could have been an hour shorter.
My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so possibly that's partly why she loved it.
This was the same reaction my fiancée had. While I consider the original Blade Runner the best sci-fi movie of all time (followed closely by the original Alien in which the doomed ship Nostromo feels like it departed Blade Runner earth), I do think 2049 is right up there and didn't disappoint my insanely high expectations for the film.
Other than my daughter being a writer, this was my exact experience, with identical reactions on their respective parts after taking wife and daughter to 2049. Knowing that the original Blade Runner is my favorite film, my wife gave me the 5-disc collector's edition in the briefcase for Christmas 10 years ago. Picked up the BluRay of 2049 on Black Friday. Was going to opt for the 4K version but haven't seen a review I like of a 4K player yet (and I'm not sure my eyes could tell the difference after staring at screens for the last 35 years).
I thought 2049 was a wonderful, visually appealing film with a neat small story set in a big world. Which makes it a bold movie.
Sure, it was set in a universe we probably never thought to see again. The outset was flogging a horse I thought would have been better off stay dead. But in this age of huge stories - epics even - doing a beautiful, cruel, unforgiving small, and slow-paced story takes some balls.
I wasn't entirely on board with how the universe had been treated, but even then, I liked it.
I have to agree and I think it's one of the areas that cyberpunk stories can really excel in. Telling a small story in a big world helps contextualize and ground the setting.
This is going to sound pretentious, but I think some people just don’t enjoy the artistic aspects of film making beyond plot and action. It can be the most beautiful, awe-inspiring imagery ever put to film, and if there isn’t a clear plot and a love interest and a chase scene, they just aren’t interested.
Interstellar is another movie that’s polarizing like that. To me, watching it in imax was just an overwhelming, powerful experience, but about half of the people I saw the movie with hated it because the plot is sort of a mess.
I agree with you, but I didn't find BR 2049 visually appealing at all. Part of it is just rehashing the same stuff already seen in the original- just more artificial, less dirty and chaotic, with a monotonous palette. Looking at some low res clips from youtube I'm actually wondering whether it's the movie or just a videogame.
And, as any videogame, it needs multiple levels with different environments: so the main character is wandering around, and each section of the movie is actually clearly delimited by a different palette- I guess some heavy-handed filter applied, instagram style: grey-greenish for the city, red for the desert, light orange for the interior of Wallace Corporation, blue-grey for the snowy place, etc. It's a videogame aesthetics, something that places itself comfortably in the "fantasy worlds" section of the current popular culture.
I had a similar experience after taking my girlfriend to see the original. But after watching a movie we always sit in the lobby to discuss the themes, motifs, plot, etc. (one of the things that endears me to her) and after that she began to appreciate it.
“Like tears in the rain...”
I love the original. I've seen most of its versions. I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep multiple times. I didn't care for 2049 at all. I found it overly long, tediously paced (I say as someone who loves Barry Lyndon), and needlessly sexist. :-(
I don't know how to tell you this without hurting your feelings but it seems to me it's time to break up with those friends and move on :/
I'm on your friends' side on this one: Blade Runner 2049 is completely rambling and pointless, bad and pretentious. It's a soulless product made to capitalise on the fame of the original.
> I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!"
I had a similar experience :) I gushed for years about how 2001 was one of my favorite movies and finally a few months ago there was a local 70mm showing, so I dragged her to it.
When it ended I said "wasn't that amazing?" and was met with "um... I can see how someone could like that movie"
Like you, I think I'll stick to talking to my dad about it. He loves telling me stories of when he saw it in the original 65mm or 70mm in theaters.
Just want to say that Michael Benson's Space Odyssey[0], the oral history of making the movie, was the best book I've read this year. Kubrick somehow, through a lot of luck, determination, and frankly a hefty dose of delusional thinking, managed to gather the best minds of a generation to work on what basically amounted to a crazy art project. The book does a good job of impressing that for a lot of people involved it became the apex of their professional and personal lives. In the end, they made something that truly mattered and changed culture. I left the book wishing I got to experience something as intense as that. Most of what we do doesn't matter.
[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-Odyssey/Michael...
"Most of what we do doesn't matter"
One of the pernicious aspects of our culture of celebrity worship is that it leads to the feeling that if something won't be recorded in a book, or on TV, or in a movie, that it doesn't matter.
This is wrong, the instance to instance living of our lives matters, it all matters.
I've seen Space Odyssey a few times, its a cool movie.
How I treat the people I come in contact with today, will matter as much to their lives as how they spent 3 hours several years ago.
It all matters.
How I was treated by most of the people I have come in contact with over the past three months of my life will be forgotten over the course of the next three months.
I will never forget 2001: A Space Odyssey. And this is true for millions of people.
It doesn't have to have anything to do with celebrities or entertainment, but it's very hard and very remarkable to have a profound impact on large numbers of people. And it's exceedingly rare to do this unintentionally.
But it will have changed the quality of how you lived these 3 months,
The remembering isn’t the important part, the living itself is the important part
If I die at age 72, the quality of any three particular months of my life represent less than a percent of my overall quality of life. An experience that I remember or that changes my life, or an invention that I use on a regular basis, changes my life continuously from that moment forward.
Agree that Benson's book _Space Odyssey_ is great.
I just finished _Space Odyssey_ and was appalled by the way Kubrick treated Arthur C. Clarke, excluding him from receiving a percentage of the proceeds and delaying the publication of his book until after the much-delayed film was released and lying to him about his reasons.
Kubrick also abused Dan Richter, who did the choreography for the "Dawn of Man" sequence and played "Moonwalker", the leader of the hominids. Kubrick insisted he could only give Richter one credit. "I'm the only one with more than one credit," Kubrick said, according to Richter. Kubrick gave Richter the choice of a starring credit or the choreography credit. Richter chose the starring credit.
Kubrick also messed with Doug Trumbull (effects), Stuart Freeborn (makeup), Gyorgy Ligetti (music), and many others.
I understand many of the people who worked with Kubrick looked back on all they learned and how they grew professionally while working for him. But I don't understand why he seemed to be such a jerk.
He's the Steve Jobs of cinema.
A home cooked meal, a kind word, a smile matters.
> Most of what we do doesn't matter.
Speak for yourself.
It's a mater of philosophy and scale I guess.
Your home cooked meal, kind word or smile won't have any affect on a star going super nova across the galaxy.
On the other hand that time you were a bit grumpy and short tempered with someone or eat a McDonald's probably won't mater either.
In 1000 years I suspect that no one will know a single thing about my life. The work of Stanley Kubrik, however, is as likely to be around as the works of Cicero or Shakespeare. I take more comfort in that.
I agree that it's a matter of scale. Some people move the dial so much that they effect change in the present and in the foreseeable future. You could say these people matter more than most others.
However, to say that most of what we do doesn't matter is a denial of one's own life.
On the contrary, I think Kubrick was great on spite of his shortcomings. Most of great artists in history were kind people. I could bet that his movies would be better (or even there would be more of them), having him been a more people's person. Alas, we can only speculate.
I'm not sure there's any way to judge whether most great artists in history were "kind people" or not. We all have our short comings though and "feet of clay".
For all we know he may have wanted to be a better person, for whatever that means, but not been able to be any other way.
He is not his artwork.
A home cooked meal, a kind word or smile won't change anything about a star across the galaxy, but what does anything at all about a star across the galaxy matter if it doesn't in some way help to make home cooked meals, dispense kind words, or cause smiles?
Matter doesn't matter, consciousness does.
Interesting take. I've always felt his work was "art: the useless kind." Ambiguous to a T as stipulated by art guidelines. His praise is the unimaginative patting themselves on the back for sitting through an editing mess.
>> Most of what we do doesn't matter.
"Most of what we do doesn't impact culture as immensely as Kubrick's work."
>Most of what we do doesn't matter.
Most of what we do does matter, just not at the same scale.
> In his films, Kubrick exists as a kind of deep state, while his fans are conspiracy theorists.
I love Kubrick, but does anyone else grow a little tired of the legacy management around him? With each generation of film fan, he's become the go-to-guy to project this archetype of the cinematic Godhead onto. Meanwhile, scores of equally detail-focused and enigmatic auteurs of his era slip through the cracks (eg, Visconti, Antonioni, Bresson, De Palma, to name a few).
Kubrick's unparalleled achievement will always be becoming a film-artist on studio dime (he established himself just before New Hollywood took off - and had cultivated enough of a mystique to carry-on after it crashed in the early-80s). But plenty of his contemporaries exercised the same degree of control that this article talks about, yet they're consistently overlooked because Kubrick became this meme of the cinematic Übermensch.
But that's always how it works. A Kubrick, a Gates, a Bezos is one percent their efforts and virtues (without which there'd be nothing) and 99 percent being in the right place at the right time. Malcolm Gladwell (another example of this!) is glib but has talked about that in relation to the Silicon Valley titans: they were born at a historical moment, and were part of a small cohort (you mention four directors who didn't become 'Kubrick', not 4000) and among that cohort, their talent and effort lined up with good fortune.
You can say luck so long as you understand that ONLY luck won't get you this result. But among those with talent and determination, it's really fairly arbitrary who becomes the titans of art, industry, finance. You get good enough to meet the bar, and then it's up to Fate.
This is normal. It's more about what celebrity/stardom/ultimate merit IS, rather than what Kubrick is. It's a lot like internet virality. The pool of possibles is not large, but moderate: from that point onward it's luck and self-reinforcing prophecy. And again, you can't make a nothing into this sort of total winner because they must meet the bar first, they've got to earn their spot in the pool, but anyone in the pool would do as well.
Kevin Kelly has an interesting take on this in _What Technology Wants_ [1]. Essentially - that these sort of works were inevitable. If Kubrick, Gates, or Bezos hadn't made 2001, MS, or AMZ - someone else would have. Not _exactly_ the same thing of course, but something so similar as to fill the same spot in history. 2001 happened because 1968 was, in a sense, "ripe" for it. The book undoubtably explains it better. :-)
(Weird. This is the second book recommendation I've made on HN today... I swear I'm not a bot!)
1. https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-Kelly/dp/...
I think yours is the sophisticated view of progress rather than the naive "great man" theory. I subscribed to the "great man" theory that the great man pushed society's progress. Now I think that it is society's progress that creates the great man.
We are taught to think that there was something special or even superhuman about newton, turing, etc. But the reality is that they were one of many highly intelligent people working on the same problems created by society's progress. Even if they didn't succeed or achieve, someone else would have. But humans have an innate myth making imperative and a desire to hero worship so we create heros. But reality and history is far more complicated than the idealized myths we create. Without newton, we'd still have calculus ( leibniz, et al ). Without turing, we'd still have computer science ( Church, et al ).
> If Kubrick, Gates, or Bezos hadn't made 2001, MS, or AMZ - someone else would have. Not _exactly_ the same thing of course, but something so similar as to fill the same spot in history.
I'm willing to grant that this is true in one sense: having the right surrounding environment is necessary for the creation of some "great work". What I question is whether it's sufficient.
If some other filmmaker made the zeitgeist-equivalent to 2001, or some other entrepreneur made the zeitgeist-equivalent to Microsoft or Amazon, they would have done it differently, and differently enough that those differences, in and of themselves, would have had tremendous impact.
Have you watched the documentary "Boxes?"
https://imdb.com/title/tt1263704/
I think you really knock Kubrick without giving proper respect to his work ethic. And sure, luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but Stanley had the preparation part in spades, in a way that even many other successful "titans" probably do not.
You presuppose that individual determination is blind. How can you honestly look at an Amazon or Microsoft and say their impact on the world was essentially indeterministic chance? Amazon, especially, has had ample competition, yet the disparate decision making within each organization has resulted in disparate success.
Absolutely, I found especially annoying the statement in the article that says "films are never the work of an individual: they are products of a collective, and children of compromise." Well, Hollywood blockbusters for sure, there's scarcely a hint of directorship in those. But smaller or independent productions, which are not directed to the masses, are another thing.
Maybe what Kubrick did was to make movies that look like big Hollywood productions, with the big budgets and the polished look, but at the same time keeping the type of control and freedom that usually only small independents have. His movies are at the same time beautiful, extremely original, and very approachable- things that rarely go together.
As someone working in film I think that quote is quite good. Director is hugely important, but it really is about the team. Good director picks the players and aligns everyone, but it takes lot of people to come up with the creative decisions and solve all the aspects of the film.
Director is constrained by the input of the team and resources of the budget etc. those are the compromises which make the art.
Tbh, Stanley Kubrick is vastly overrated. Yes every one of his movies has great cinemotography, and is technically excellent, but many of his movies are not excellent as movies. Eyes Wide Shut, full metal jacket, and the shining are not 10/10 movies, and David Fincher, Harmony Korine, Charlie Kaifman have all created movies better than all those movies listed. The problem with Stanley Lubrick is because he has a style that is very attractive to viewers, and his movies are very accesible also, he gets massively overrated by a lot of casual film watchers, which is fine so are a lot of directors, but his hype has leaked even to actual film critics with years of experience. It also doesn't help that movies like Room 237 come out that jack of Stanley Kubrick and draw meaning out of things that had no meaning. Sad that people glorify Kubrick but don't even know who Charlir Kaufman or Harmony Korine are, even though both directors have created movies that are just as good as a lot of Kubricks films.
This is the first time I've ever heard Kubrick's work referred to as "accessible." If anything, the standard knock on him is that his movies are too distant and clinical for the average moviegoer; people admire 2001: A Space Odyssey, but they love Star Wars.
Well, they are sort of accessible- 2001 is particularly cryptic and slow paced, but it's still a high budget science fiction movie with spaceships and talking computers. While most people won't ever think of enduring the screening of a Bela Tarr movie.
I'm not sure I'd call Stanley Kubrick's movies accessible. Sure, there are less accessible movies out there, but also much more accessible ones. And accessibility is not a bad thing; movies are meant to be watched.
I personally find Kubrick's movies excellent. Rarely perfect, but often highly innovative in one area or another, and all completely different. They range from glacial 2001 to funny Dr Strangelove, to historical costume drama to brutal war movie, and he manages to capture the essence every time.
There are many other deserving directors out there, but it'd be nuts to not consider Kubrick among the greatest directors.
That's, just like, your opinion man.
I'm Enjoying my coffee.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, Kubrick's skills were so highly thought of that many people believe he had a key role in "faking" the moon landing.
https://variety.com/2016/film/news/stanley-kubrick-moon-land...
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage (and a lot of arrogance).
2010 is not a bad movie, the same way its original material is not a bad book (unlike 2061 and 3001), but it's also no 2001 and doesn't come even close. The best scenes are exactly the Bowman appearance aboard the Discovery, which kind of follow from the hotel room scene from 2001 with long silences and a Bowman that's no longer human, but still remembers what human is.
Gone, unfortunately, are the distinctive flat square screens, the careful walks in zero gravity on top of velcro strips. Hyams and the actors certainly forgot the Discovery lacked artificial gravity in everything but the carousel (and propulsion would be a lot easier if we knew how to do artificial gravity everywhere). Quite frankly, the lack of attention to detail is a big turn off for me.
I'll certainly schedule a trip do London to visit it.
> “The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated,” he said. “When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.”
I watched 2001 with some friends on 1 January 2001. Unfortunately I picked the wrong group of friends, people who couldn't settle back into to the slow pace and no appreciation of mystery - they were constantly asking me to explain everything. Later that day I watched 2010 (by myself). That movie never raises a question that it doesn't answer within about 10 minutes.
Especially with editing styles in general being much more frenetic than they once were, 2001 is tough for a modern audience. And, if don’t basically know the background plot, it’s pretty inscrutable as it was at the time.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s on my best movies list. But it’s going to be a bit tough for a first time, non movie buff audience today.
Popular audiences were just as baffled by 2001 when it was released as today.
Arthur C Clarke had written a narration explaining everything and was dismayed to discover, at the premiere, that Kubrick had opted to drop the narration entirely. Thank God Kubrick was calling the shots and not Clarke.
What really annoys me about Peter Hyams (and this is in all his movies I saw) is the constant fog. There's always some smoke on the set. I'd be seriously rattled to wake up inside a smoke-filled spaceship around Jupiter.
But I like the touch of Curnow holding Maxim's hat. Their relationship is never mentioned in any other place in the movie. It was a nice touch (even though Max doesn't die in the book).
There is a good comparison of both Discovery's at http://2010odysseyarchive.blogspot.com/2016/03/2001-versus-2...
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage (and a lot of arrogance).
2010 was a different kind of book from 2001. Its not quite as extreme as Alien vs Aliens, but its close. The movie really suffered from the lack of China in the movie which was an important part of the book. I get the feeling they really didn't have a budget or spent it all on the actor's salaries.
The China thing would add a lot of moving parts to an already complex story. I would have written it out from the movie, but I would make a malfunction or something natural get rid of the probe, without implying the Gardeners directly, but revealing that there is complex life in Europa. Maybe getting the probe destroyed by the Europan like the Tsien was.
If someone ever manages to get 2010 (and 2001) into a miniseries (I pray someone more respectful than the monsters who butchered Childhood's End), then the China story would be an important part. If I were doing it, I'd use only audio from the Chinese astronaut transmitting on the blind and the faces of the crew of the Leonov as they listen to the tragedy and cope with the fact they can do nothing to save that voice - a death every astronaut knows from their own nightmares. It'd act as a reminder that a lot of things can - and do - go wrong even when we do everything perfectly right.
Kubrick was also a fairly skilled photographer and contributor to "Look" - a widely popular pictorial magazine that had a peak circulation of over 7 million copies. The Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit of his photographic work entitled "Through a Different Lens". Unfortunately the exhibit ends January 6, 2019. There's also an accompanying book for sale.
https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/through-different-lens
https://shop.mcny.org/products/through-a-different-lens-stan...
An interesting case study that's recently had me revising my views on Kubrick's obsessiveness is one of his less-appreciated films, Barry Lyndon.
To reproduce the not-yet-electrified world of its 18th-century setting, Kubrick famously spent huge amounts of time on that project finding ways to shoot scenes using only natural light (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography). This went so far as shooting interior scenes set at night using only candlelight, since that's how they would have been lit in real life. Cameras aren't really designed to work well with such low and inconsistent lighting, so he had to go to great lengths to get usable footage.
Ever since its release, the standard take on Barry Lyndon has been that the results didn't justify all that effort. The unusually low lighting made scenes seem willfully obscure, like Kubrick was capriciously forcing the viewer to work extra hard just to keep up. This (along with a sadly weak performance by Ryan O'Neal in the critical role of the eponymous Barry) is a big part of why Barry Lyndon has languished for decades in the "lesser Kubrick" bargain bin.
But a recent remastering has produced a 4K version of Barry Lyndon, and I was surprised to discover when watching that version on a large TV that suddenly the film popped visually in a way it never had before. Where before it had seemed dark and hard to watch, now it felt more like observing a great painting, with lots of subtle detail I'd never noticed before. And then I realized that all those years of bad feelings about Barry Lyndon had come from watching it in low resolution on small screens, while Kubrick had been shooting for the big, bright cinema screen. I'd literally been watching the movie wrong all that time.
So it turns out Kubrick's obsessiveness in this case really did pay off. Those of us who'd only ever seen it on home video -- which is to say, most people -- just had to wait for the quality of the home viewing experience to catch up to his standards in order to see it.
I would agree that his films very much suit themselves to the silver screen, and watching them, e.g. on a laptop or computer-monitor sized screen is certainly not going to do it justice.
I was fortunate enough to catch many of his films during the Toronto International Film Festival during an exhibit. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was particularly fantastic.
Wasn't a lot of the work for Barry Lyndon borrowed from Kubrick's abortive project to make a biopic about Napoleon?
(One of the more obsessive notes about Kubrick: his notes included a daily breakdown of every documented event in Napoleon's life.)
If you're in Barcelona and even slightly intrigued by Kubrick's work I strongly suggest you spend an afternoon at the CCCB exhibition, the 6 euros are worth it: plenty of props, costumes, camera gear, some interesting documents as well.
Thanks, I'll definitely visit that exhibition next time I visit Barcelona :)
I attended the exhibition last Friday. It's impressive. A lot of original objects from Kubrick and it's films. Truly great.
I took the guided tour, which is free. (Note that the guide is in Catalan; the exhibition is in Catalan, Spanish and English.) It was really great. The guide had read many of the books and made many interesting comments. For example explained what other actors said about Kubrick. It was like 1 hour and a half. There is also a audio guide (they provide you with a card and a headphones).
I'll have to visit the exhibition again to see it in detail. A friend said he had already seen it twice. Note that with ticket of 1 day you can visit it twice, which is nice.
Also note that the exhibition in Barcelona has content of another exhibition about 2001 Space Odyssey. So it's a '2 in 1'.
There's a lot of people there tough :/
One of my favorite bars in Mexico City was this place that was sort of, Stanely Krubic themed. It was a weird but cool place.
They had a replica of the room from the final scene of 2001 Space Odyssey, in the back of the bar. You would go in there, lie on the bed. You could smoke a cigarette and enjoy your cocktail. It was so awesome.
Where, what was it called?
All about the fonts in 2001: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyss...
I recommend anyone interested in Kubrick as a person check out the documentary Filmworker on Netflix, about his personal assistant Leon Vitali. (Warning that if you have a very black-and-white hero worship of Stanley, the film might disabuse some of your notions.)
Ian Watson, who was one of the writers who worked on AI, also wrote a bemused article about his experience working with Stanley:
https://www.ianwatson.info/plumbing-stanley-kubrick/
Stanley Kubrick movies reveal some new aspects each time I watch it.
All of the movies by him that I’ve watched are brilliant.
Dr Strangelove is my favourite movie. The Shining is excellent, A clockwork orange, Barry Lyndon, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut ...
He was also a fantastic photographer.
+1 for Dr. Strangelove. Amazing movie. Way ahead of its time.
If you enjoyed Dr Strangelove, check out Seven Days in May. It's kind of like a serious version of the former, and was made right around the same time. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's still a good, and undeservedly overlooked film.
Fail Safe is the serious version of Dr Strangelove; Seven Days in May is a fictionalized account of the Business Plot.
For those in the UK:
London Design Museum 26 April - 17 Sep 2019
General tickets on sale 1st Jan. Adults £16, Concessions £12 [1].
Such a shame to see yet another exhibition confined to central London. It's absurd that I can fly to Barcelona quicker, and for less money, than it takes me to have a day trip via train to London!
[1] https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/stan...
I mean, depends where you are in the UK. I can train from London to Leeds for ~£25 if I book sufficiently in advance. On the day it's £120. (I hate this model of train fares with a passion, but it feels overstated to suggest that Barcelona is both cheaper and quicker when neither is true for me)
London Design museum was a huge disappointment for me when I lived there. All exhibitions were prohibitively expensive, especially the Ferrari one last year.
The Tate modern is my second love to hate museum.
After watching 2001, I was completely underwhelmed. I felt like the kid in The emperor’s new clothes that yells “Mommy, the emperor is naked”. I later watched a 1 minute LEGO parody of the movie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4aQ2YbN-E and thought it covered all the basic themes of the movie in a minute instead of taking 2.5 hours.
I liked the Rob Ager video 'the meaning of the monolith revealed', along with 'Kubrick's cover story'. Although these are paywalled video essays.
The $5 version is that the monolith is the movie screen, and that the movie and actors are becoming self aware that they are in a movie. The hints are all in the details, regarding camera angles, lighting, camera positions, and all the arrows telling people to tilt their view.
What really sells it is the documentary/advertisement on how Kubrick is raising money to make the film, and all the industry people he is tapping and getting money from. People really thought it was going to be a hard core 'done right sci-fi' movie, but if you look closer you can see how much of it is stilted, and done incorrectly even though they obviously could have done better.
TL;DR Kubrick played the 'space race propaganda' hysteria of the mid 1960's to finance and make his art house film about actors being aware of how they are making a movie.
Paywalled.
https://archive.fo/XpUA4
I wonder if we'll ever see a sci fi movie as deep as 2001 again...
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
I think an additional factor that discriminates 2001 compared with other films was that it was made at the height of the space race when there was a lot of technological optimism about the possibilities. When the film was released, Apollo 8 hadn't yet orbited the moon.
Also, the screenwriter (Arthur C. Clarke) was a confirmed space cadet (in the nicest sense of the phrase) and didn't see a need to throw in dystopian civilisations and evil corporations (standard fare in contemporary Hollywood SF) when there was so much scope in 'just' exploring the possibilities of the universe.
Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.
I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.
I agree with these criticisms on Interstellar and Inception. I wonder, if there's people who enjoyed them, what did they like about them?
Pro tip: If you really want to hear opinions different from yours, do not sound like you are ready to dismiss them anyway.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
Check out the third season of Twin Peaks from Showtime. It's more or less an 18 hour movie, with slow, seemingly-deliberate (or not!) pacing. A truly fascinating work for this age.
I love Tree of Life, but I’ve tried and failed to get into 2001 several times. The thing I love in Tree of Life is the humanism: I can see people sorting through their feelings through their memories in real time, and the characters feel absolutely real. 2001 is more interested in “philosophy” than people, and to be honest if I want that I’d rather just read a nonfiction book.
I once saw Tree of Life, totally on a whim, no knowledge at all, bought a ticket when passing the cinema during an evening walk.
I left the movie in the middle. I thought it so bad, but fascinatingly bad. Well at home I found out it was directed by same director as The Thin Red Line, one of my favorite movies. Since then I have been puzzled, I really should give Tree of Life another chance.
Definitely give The Tree of Life another go, and watch Malick's older films too - they are wonderful. Avoid all of his most recent films unless you're feeling very, very meditative (I slept extremely peacefully through the last third of Knight of Cups, I will say).
Days of Heaven, Badlands?
Yes - both are stunning. He directed nothing further for two decades until The Thin Red Line, which was quite a remarkable way to return!
Give it a shot, at least! A lot of people feel about it the same way I feel about 2001, though, so it may just not be your thing. I think if you can be immersed in the visuals and empathize with the characters then you're good; otherwise, it probably won't do anything for you.
I like 2001, never crossed my mind they were similar but I think I can see a resemblance somehow.
> what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
"excrement" comes to mind!
I don't see my post having any hostility or dismissiveness towards others' points of view.
Sure, I'm dismissive of the films, but, by asking for opinion, don't I implicitly assert that that's subjective?
2001 is also one of my favorites but I also loved Interstellar.
The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.
There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.
Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?
Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.
Yeah, that's a funny aspect of realistic accuracy, where, if you're doing it in one place, you have to do it elsewhere as well, else you'll ruin the immersion.
I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
They're both well made, well paced, engaging movies. I especially liked inception due to its unique premise.
The problem is inception crossed the line into fantasy. Antigravity paint or whatever mcguffin you want to name is explicitly changing some rule. Inception went the magic wand route.
That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.
I may be misunderstanding this but isn't the point in Inception that what they are experiencing is explicitly not real?
That because they are inside a dream-like state the rules of reality can be broken and it is only by spotting when the rules of reality are broken that you can tell you're not in the real world.
That I don't have a problem with. You can have people see all kinds of crap while tripping on LSD without issue.
It's the mechanics like 10^(layers deep) where going deeper kept increasing time compression in dreams. Dragon Ball Z for example had space ships, but the mechanics of the world where based on fantasy ideas.
In what sense did "Matrix" cross that line?
The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results. If it’s a simulation then him picking up a rock and turning it into a spaceship is viable. Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world, though again same deal.
But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
> The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results.
Neo's hardware implants allow him to wirelessly interface with the machine world, which he has root access to. This is even better established when he seems to fall into a coma and ends up being in the Matrix. I don't know why this wasn't obvious to anyone else.
> Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world
Wireless connectivity isn't undefined or mystical!
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
I don't think it actually counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules, which is where "residual self-image" comes from.
Also, just as a fun fact, in one of the earlier revisions of the script of the first movie, Switch was supposed to be a transgender character who was one gender in the Matrix and the opposite gender in the physical world. This was dropped for some reason.
> counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules
It’s not that it’s a rule it’s that it’s an undefined rule. If they had said nothing then you don’t know, perhaps they are taking photos and uploading avatars off camera, or perhaps the Matrix keeps track of this stuff, or perhaps the Matrix downloads the data from your mind. Residual self immage does not answer the question.
Characters are not omnipotent. Character X explaining the rule does not mean Rule X actually applies. For example character says you need to use a plug to jack into the Matrix and need a hardline to get out. Later on you break those rules and that’s fine the character does not know what they are talking about.
But, the Sci-fi fantasy devide is not the lack of technology, as cellphones work just fine in Dresden Files and other Urban Fantasy. It’s the type of rules that exist and how they can be broken without destroying the suspension of disbelief. The cold equations is a good low budget film based around some very hard rules. The Matrix fails this, you can come up for explanations for anything that happen, but doing so is not bound by any rule in the world.
Further, it frames things in non technical terms perhaps the character just noticed he has a modem up his bumb. Perhaps he can wirelessly hack an alarm clock rather than setting the snooze button. Or maybe he has psy powers and can cause EMP’s. Undefined major plot elements under the control of the protagonist or antagonist is the hallmark of Fantasy. What can and can’t Gandalf do?
> but that means he could have arbitrarily results.
Well, he could have, if he understood the simulation well enough; even in the overt simulation, which he was coached on, he had more constrained apparent ability. He clearly goes through an awakening over a period about the nature of the “real” world and his ability within it, that in some way parallels (without the coaching) his earlier awakening to the Matrix, but at it's most advanced point (as far as his externalized use of abilities, at least) it is still obviously less complete than the point he reaches with the Matrix at the end of the first movie.
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean
That everything the humans “know” about the Matrix is curated material that is part of the system of control revealed later in the series, and is often misleading, and frequently incoherent under careful examination, which is discouraged by the quasi-religious framework of belief that is itself part of the system of control.
I am more referring to how it fits in with the story. What humans know about the Matrix is treated like what Hogwarts professors know about magic vs what starfleet academy knows about warp cores.
The fact that people jacking in can die is not treated as an open technical problem to be solved, but gamps rules of transformation. Warp cores are not nessisarily fully understood, but they are actively trying to test out and improve them. In the Matrix they don’t treat things as a theory they just notice stuff and slap a name on it. At the same time they built a loading program to bring guns into the system. Which is why I am saying it’s even a close call between science fiction and fantasy.
Oh, sure, the sequels were problematic. I actually interpreted the real world shenanigans as something of a Gurren Lagann-style wink at the audience. I misunderstood the post above.
2001 did exactly the same. Some magical fantasy space obelisk made monkeys kill each other. It's stupid.
Use tools. The tool use was the point.
It was a large, black, magic rock.
A magic rock by some likely 100,000+ year more advanced civilization. Story wise however they could have been visiting the Grand Cannon as neither the protagonist or antagonist had access to magic. You could do the same thing with the rock saying releasing the Nanite cloud and nothing changes.
As far as 2001 is concerned it’s basicly highly advanced Starfish Aliens. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens Which seems like the most likely contact with extraterrestrials we will see. Motivation and reasoning are not going to be obvious, is this some major effort on part of their civilization or some 6th graders high school science project we just don’t know.
Again though, the Aliens are mostly irrelevant, it’s HAL human relations that’s driving things.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A.C. Clarke
It's (partly) a story about uplifting a species. Our species ...
Maybe some people wouldn't consider it strictly sci-fi but I really enjoyed "Upstream Color" and reading what Carruth was planning to create with "A Topiary" I really hope someone gives him the funding and creative control to complete a project on the scale of that.
> "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi.
Never heard of that one (love the atmosphere of Silent Running though), is it any good?
Its synopsis reads like it may have been part of the inspiration for the seminal sci-fi-comedy series Red Dwarf.
Its a student film. Its a classic frat-house set in space with minor gems. One guy has a home-made jamjar and scraps piano he plays to keep himself sane. the "rimmer" annoying character keeps a very sad video diary. There is a talking bomb. the Captain is semi-alive in cryo-storage.
It's tremendous and interesting for a school project. It is also referenced in many places in newer movies.
The thing with movies like interstellar and inception is that they're ultimately action/romance movies set in a sci fi context. 2001 is the only movie that I know of which is exclusively about themes such as human evolution, alien life, etc... and dispensing of all "hollywood fluff". I'm not trying to diss interstellar or inception (I loved both of them), but they're not of the same caliber as 2001.
In my opinion, 2001 feels cold, empty, and sterile when compared to Solaris by Tarkovsky. They both use space travel to touch on themes about the human experience, but Solaris is miles ahead dealing with human psyche.
It's like Kubrick sanitized humanity out of 2001.
Kubrick didn't think much of humanity, it's pretty clear in 2001 and in all his movies. His gaze is naturalistic: individuals are struggling for power and sex, sometimes they climb hierarchies through cunning and violence, sometimes they fall. He didn't seem to be that heavily interested in the human psyche.
On the other hand, 2001 is precisely a movie about humans trying to transcend themselves by suppressing anything emotional about them and exhalting pure reason- this is also a factor for the sterile appearance of the movie.
Sunshine by Danny Boyle dealt with human extinction, although the focus was on reigniting the sun instead of colonizing planets. The cinematography is beautiful and it gets into some heavy themes.
Exactly, Interstellar is good. The setting is a backdrop, but it's not a bad backdrop at all. In fact, I like how sci-fi and colonization of the solar system is made to look normal, it might give future generations a feeling of "of course we are going there". While it being a good love story in its own right.
Arrival (2016), based on a short story by Ted Chiang should work for you.
Maybe I should try the book. I like me some good sci-fi (the Hyperion series is probably my favorite read-wise). I've never gotten through the 2001 movie. Several goes at it. I literally pass out asleep. Maybe I need to try a morning viewing. I think of movies as entertainment. Trying to watch this one has become a chore.
The book is essentially the same story but has a lot more description of what is going on. It'll certainly make sense, even if it isn't a page-turner suspense.
More generally, literary critics distinguish between 'show' (reader has to figure things out) and 'tell' (author makes things very obvious) modes of writing [0]. Show and Tell styles also appear in film making. Obviously the film and the book are in different media, but I think it's fair to say that the film 2001 is totally at the 'show' end of the spectrum while the book is mostly 'tell' (in common with a lot of Clarke's writing).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show,_don%27t_tell
I'm in a somewhat similar boat to you -- I find the movie a bit too tedious. I've seen it thrice, and enjoy specific sections of it, but it just doesn't do anything for me. I think it may be because I left it until too late to watch it, and by then I'd already encountered a LOT of 2001-influenced sci-fi. By which time, very few of the concepts or examinations within the movie struck a chord inside of me.
Having said that, I REALLY liked the book, and would recommend that you give it go!
(p.s.: it's BS that you got downvoted for stating a contrary opinion in a measured, reasonable manner -- hopefully my upvote cancels out the haters!)
This will annoy a lot of people, but: turn on the subtitles and turn up the speed. Large sections of it can be zoomed through at 4x or 8x speed, returning to normal once people are talking.
Large ares of it are basically "wow factor" shots which looked really impressive in 1968 and lack a lot of that to present-day viewers. Sometimes it feels more like an agonisingly slow pan across the concept art.
For the last part of the movie, sure, speed through.
In the early part, the slow pace of the journey into space heightens the sense of isolation. It's something a modern movie couldn't get away with, and is a unique part of 2001 that you should really experience.
I'm in my late-30s but I think I'm simply to young to appreciate the impact of the space imagery in '2001' because I grew up post-Voyager and came of age in the post-Hubble world. I'm a huge fan of Kubrick and I'm highly tolerant of slow pacing but '2001' just never really grabbed me.
I was enraged at Gravity's rendering of space, which at the opposite extreme of 2001's: a crowded backyard playground, with plenty of traffic and people wandering around and having a great time.
I believe space is black, silent, and immobile- though this might be just the lasting imprinting of 2001. I doubt you'd see anything resembling Hubble images up there.
I actually enjoyed Gravity. But it was also the first example I thought of where something like 2001's long journey could have enhanced the feeling of how far they were from rescue.
To be fair to Gravity, low Earth orbit isn't exactly a great comparison to the interplanetary travel taking place in 2001.
Is it actually any different, if you don't look in the direction of Earth?
> I think of movies as entertainment.
This way of thinking is common, but you're missing out. There is an entire world out there where movies are art and they can be as perspective-changing as a good book.
You should only watch 2001 on wide screen in the cinema. I recently took my 12 and 16 yro kids to see it and it literally blew their minds.
I never saw the film, but the book is great. A neat fact is that Arthur C Clark, and Stanley Kubrick wrote the book and the film at the same time. There are actually 4 or 5 books, and they're all pretty good.
I had to learn a little about what went on behind the scenes to appreciate it. Once I saw the making of the ship models, watching the camera pan across one for an hour wasn't as boring.
I loved Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". I know it's not everyone's favorite movie but I keep thinking about it "in a deep manner" (for lack of a better phrase) from time to time, it makes me question my essence as a human being: "Would I be able to love a robot child? Yes, I would, wouldn't I? Or would I? I know I should, robots like the ones presented in the movie are just like humans, I should love them the same, if not more" and stuff like that.
Being originally a Kubrick's project, I wondered sometimes about what Kubrick saw in it, and what's the kubrickian theme under the, well, cartload of saccharine that Spielberg threw on it.
A vague possibility is that the story is about a machine that is programmed to require love, and because of that desperately searches for someone to love it until- and that's the punchline- aliens come and build a machine for it that finally wants to love it, so they're both mechanically happy. I can picture Kubrick cynically grinning at the idea.
The aliens are not actually aliens though, they are robots which have survived after humans went extinct, and they recognize the boy as an ancient ancestor of their kind.
AI was a recycled Kubrick project that he never got the chance to make, funny enough.
Dune by David Lynch. A true masterpiece.
A lot of people hate that film, but I liked it. It got me in to the books, and I think it's a fine scifi film.. though I wouldn't mention it in the same breath as 2001.
You must be kidding here. That movie is a great example of how NOT to compress an entire novel into 2 hours.
Try "alternative edition redux" -a fan recut the thing and made ... a really good movie out of it. Unlike the official cuts, you don't need to have read the book first.
To me, "Solyaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky comes close, even though the sweep is much more limited when compared to 2001.
And let's also not forget the greatest sci-fi movie never made, Jodorowski's attempt at "Dune". Even artifacts from that aborted attempt are iconic, like the Harkonnen chair:
https://useum.org/artwork/harkonnen-capo-chair-hr-giger
Tarkovsky's my favorite director, but I really did not like Solaris. For me, Tarkovsky's Stalker is the infinitely better film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.
I agree that Empire Strikes Back is good, but I don't understand why I think that.
Agreed, Stalker stays with you.
There are many of them. they are not made by the US film industry. Check out "Mr. Nobody", check out "The Congress", "Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind"... come on now, these are masterworks.
I loved Mr Nobody as a teenager, and I still think the overall concept is great, but when I watch as an adult, I can't help but cringe at a lot of the scenes. the acting is just so overwrought. maybe I've watched it too many times.