So I was watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" and found the experience painful, and yet, it has become something of a sacred cow, with people calling it "the best film ever made" and providing little objective justification for this remark. While reading its wikipedia page I stumbled across this old review by Stanley Kauffmann, film critic for the New Republic. As I was reading his critique I couldn't keep from saying "right on! right on!" at his observations:
Full Review Here.
QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Part of the trouble is sheer distention. A short story by Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel," has been amplified and padded to make it bear the weight of this three-hour film. (Including intermission.)
The movie was 148 minutes long, this is because Kubrick is so proud of the pretty pictures he creates that he holds them on the screen until they get boring. Kubrick was naturally baised towards this sort of thing, he even said in a playboy interview:
QUOTE(Stanley Kubrick)
The momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it's seen.
QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Kubrick had to fill in this lengthy trip with some sort of action, so he devised a conflict between the two men and the giant computer on the ship. It is not exactly fresh science fiction to endow a machine with a personality and voice, but Kubrick wrings the last drop out of this conflict because something has to happen during the voyage. None of this man-versus-machine rivalry has anything to do with the main story, but it goes on so long that by the time we return to the main story, the ending feels appended.
If anybody less prestigious than Kubrick had tacked on this ridiculous side plot to pad out a weak story he would have been gleefully ridiculed. But because he had demonstrated his "genius" in other good movies people couldn't accept the fact that it blew. It was just "above their heads" or "on a different level" and the reason it doesn't please like his other films isn't because Kubrick got greedy and said "to hell with the story" to focus on special effects and visuals, but because "the story is so wrapped in the visuals" that we can't find it, give me a break.
QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Take the very opening (embarrassingly labeled "The Dawn of Man"). Great Cinerama landscapes of desert are plunked down in front of us, each shot held too long, with no sense of rhythm or relation. Then we see an elaborate, extremely slow charade enacted by two groups of ape-men, fighting over a waterhole.
I think the phrase "elaborate, extremely slow charade" pretty much sums up this entire movie. It seemed like almost
all of the shots were "held to long".
QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
Kubrick has created the future with fantastic realism, we think, but he is not content with that, he is going to do something with it. Not so. Very quickly we see that the gadgets are there for themselves, not for use in an artwork. We sense this as the envoy makes an utterly inane phone call back to earth just to show off the mechanism. We sense it further through the poor dialogue and acting, which make the story only a trite setting for a series of exhibits from Expo '01. There is a scene between the envoy and some Russians that would disgrace late-night TV.
Right on! Right on! Right on! The inane phone call, the shameful acting, the trite plot! These were all things that stood out like a sore thumb. I often hear people telling me things like "it wasn't about the story" or "it wasn't about the actors". Well then why does this movie HAVE A STORY AND ACTORS IN IT?!! Why not just let Kubrick fool around with visuals and effects and then release it as an "art" film or reference material? If you take the excuses people make for Kubrick's visuals and throw them in reverse (i.e. a movie with an excellent plot but terrible visuals and camera work) they'd seem positively ridiculous. If The Lord of the Rings had been shot with a shoestring budget and crappy effects and camera work the magnificent story wouldn't have been worth beans and people would be hurling insults at it left and right. But when it's the story that blows (Aliens help monkeys evolve into man, computer attacks, aliens help man evolve again) and the visuals are terrific everybody calls it "genius". I don't mind if they call it "genius" just don't call it a film, it was a test reel for special effects and camera work.
I can already guess what people are going to say: "It was the
way Kubrick told the story man,!" That's great, but if you're going to market me a FILM and not an experiment or a project, but an honest-t0-goodness FILM, then I expect a complete package, good visuals and a DECENT story, because with a shit story, even fantastic visuals fail to be fantastic:
QUOTE(Stanley Kauffman)
[Kubrick manages] To make a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull. He is so infatuated with technology -- of film and of the future -- that it has numbed his formerly keen feeling for attention-span. The first few moments that we watch an astronaut jogging around the capsule for exercise -- really around the tubular interior, up one side, across the top, and down the other side to the floor -- it's amusing. An earlier Kubrick would have stopped while it was still amusing.
I used to think that maybe because I lived in the "ADD" generation my attention span just wasn't suited for this movie, now I know that even in the 60's, before video games and the internet and digital cameras, people found 2001 too damn slow, and too damn boring.
In my opinion, Star Wars, episode 4, deserves the rung that 2001 now occupies on the list of the greatest films of all time. I think the only reason that 2001 has it and Star Wars does not is because of snobbishness on the part of the raters.
What Kubrick had to say about the film:
QUOTE(Stanley Kubrick)
It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness
Kubrick's movie did not penetrate. I felt no emotions save annoyance, I felt no philosophical content whatsoever. Kubrick later goes on to compare his work to a symphony, and that to explain the symphony would be to demean it. Fantastic, but symphonies were composed for the purposes of entertainment, people went to them because they were entertained, attaching a deeper significance to them is a lost cause, and I feel that if this "deeper significance" was not a factor 2001 would just be known as a really lame movie with innovative special effects.
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen"
