Calm down buddy, I'm just taking the piss...
I'll explain why I loved 2001 so much, and why people who aren't film fanatics often hate it. Keep in mind, these are much the same reasons critics loved it as much as they did. (It was named by various film institutions as One of the "Top-15 films all time" (AFI), "Greatest Sci-Fi film of all time" (Online Film Critics Society) , "The world's most extraordinary film" (Boston Globe), One of the "10 Best" movies of all time (Sight & Sound magazine), and is #78 on the user-voted IMDB Top-250. (A list that is notorious for overlooking and underrating older films due to their age and the voting habits of younger voters).
For starters, and to get the parts out of the way that don't require much or any elaboration:
1) It's the most spectacular use of special effects ever put to film, considering it's age. Jurassic Park, Pearl Harbor, Titanic, and Star Wars films all obviously look more impressive, but this was 1968. This was 9 years before anyone had heard of Darth Vader and his Death Star. 1968 was a time when special effects were almost nonexistent, and certainly weren't used liberally to promote a story. Not anymore.
2) The soundtrack is
perfect3) The casting is excellent
4) The source material is fantastic to begin with
5) It
requires some thought. I realize that may be a detriment for some people, but for those who seek reward for filmgoing other than a "cool ending," it is one of the more rewarding films ever made.
To get into specifics, I could ramble about this film all day, and wouldn't want to do so via a keyboard, so I'll just point out some of my favorite "highlights" (or cinema-firsts in some cases). (In as close to chronilogical order as I can remember...it's been about 6 months since I last watched it):
1) The raccord at the end of "The Dawn of Man." Cuts like this are obviously much more prevalent and easier to implement these days, but short of some of Hitchcock's and Godard's films, this is the greatest example. In fact, I'd say that to this day, the cut from scenes one and two of
2001 is still the most famous in movie history.
2) Silence. For the first half hour of the movie. No other film I've seen has come close to doing so much storytelling with so little dialogue, except perhaps for
Cast Away or
A Scene at the Sea.
3) The sheer quality of the makeup and costuming for "The Dawn of Man." They make the creatures from Planet of the Apes (which was released to theatres the same week in 1968) look downright silly...and that's saying alot, considering the quality of
Apes' characters.
4) The two standout anti-gravity scenes. Imagine just for a moment, you are the director of a film in 2008, and you're trying to shoot zero-gravity. Now pretend it's 40 years earlier, and the term "computer generated imaging" has not been invented yet. The two scenes I'm referring to in particular are:
A) The shot of Poole jogging horizontally in the ship. How? Kubrick built a 40-foot centrifuge at a cost of $750,000 (Or 4 million dollars today). That's along the same scale as James Cameron building a full-size titanic replica to destroy for his film.
B) The shot of the waitress serving food, then walking sideways up the cylindrical wall of the hallway and into a doorway on the ceiling. How? (from
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/2001a/page3.html : "In one of the most difficult shots Gary Lockwood was strapped into his seat and had to hang upside-down pretending to eat glued-down food while Keir Dullea climbed down the ladder at an angle 180 degrees opposed to Gary. As Keir began to walk around the centrifuge toward Gary, the centrifuge was slowly rotated until Keir and Gary were together at the bottom. The camera, which was locked down to the centrifuge floor, was then at the top."
5) The attention to detail. Most specifically the instructions for using the space toilet (which would take almost a minute to read entirely, but are only on camera for a few seconds, meaning moviegoers couldn't even read them until home video was available a decade later, unless they had the actual film reel). And even more impressively, notice in the pod, there are replacement copies of the instruction sheet for the pod's explosive bolts.
6) The astounding accuracy of some of the movie's space-faring predictions. The movie contains theories on how certain aspects of space travel would be accomplished in the future (keep in mind it takes place 33 years after it was made). Many of the films solutions to space-based problems were not even solved by NASA at the time of the films release, but now, 40 years later, many of the films ideas have become reality.
(Pasted from the Wiki page for the film):
* Flat-screen computer monitors (simulated by rear projection in the film)
* Small, portable, flat-screen television sets
* Glass cockpits in spacecraft
* The proliferation of TV stations (the BBC's channels numbering at least 12)
* Telephone numbers with more digits than in the 1960s (to permit direct national and international dialing)
* The endurance of corporations like IBM, Aeroflot, Howard Johnson's, and Hilton Hotels
* The use of credit cards with data stripes (the card Heywood Floyd inserts into the telephone is American Express; a close-up photo of the prop shows that it has a barcode rather than a magnetic strip, as some present-day ID cards have PDF417 barcodes)
* Biometric identification (voice-print identification on arrival at the space station)
* The shape of the Pan Am Orbital Clipper was echoed in the X-34, a prototype craft that underwent towed flight tests from 1999 to 2001
* Electronic darkening of a normally transparent surface (Bowman uses a helmet control to darken his visor during an EVA)
* A computer that can defeat a human being at chess
* Personal in-flight entertainment displays on the backs of seats in commercial aircraft
* Voice recognition / voice controlled computing (although not as powerful as HAL) are seen today in things as simple as telephone systems and video games.
7) The ending. YES, the ENDING. Although I don't watch movies for "the payoff" as Dave mentioned earlier (movies like this, and Lawrence of Arabia, for example, are themselves the "payoff," for their duration), this is one film where the ending was absolutely
perfect. How can you expect a film that accomplished so much in the way of technical innovation and storytelling quality to tack on a cookie-cutter happy ending that even a 5-year-old would understand on first viewing? The ending is as outstanding as the film itself, and when you've read either the Clarke novel of the same title, or simply read a synopsis/explanation of the film online (There are probably more interpretations of this film than any other in movie history), you'll see what I mean. The film is infinitely gratifying once you understand:
-
why the aliens placed the monoliths where they did
-
why the monoliths were significant to the evolution of man
-
why you see so many different ages of the doctor in the final scene
- and
why you see the "star child" version of him at the end
Sorry if you didn't pick up on my nudging comment earlier, but to watch this film, not understand it, and not make another attempt at learning more about it, is to miss out on one of the greatest works of art of all time.
Take a look at either the IMDB message boards, the Wikipedia page, or one of the thousands of online blog/interpretations of the film (a great one
HERE), and watch it again. If you're still disappointed, then you are, as bsmooth said, one of those who just "doesn't get it."
As that last interpretation states: "2001 paid such attention to detail that it has been said a more realistic movie could only be made if it were filmed on location in outer space."
I think that Kubrick wanted people to THINK in another dimension and this is probably why it didn't click with most people. We're told that we must think but think on preconceived notions and stuff that already exist instead of the unknown.
I didn't like the follow-up that was made in 84 with Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren and John Lithgow. It was weird not having Keir Dullea in it and I don't think that HAL was in it either.
What I get from the film was that man cannot cross a certain threshold of spirit until he conquers the 3rd dimension of existence. This is why HAL kept warning the two astronauts. Actually, HAL could have read that only one person (Keir Dullea) had the ability to evolve into another dimension where there is no time but events. Then, Dullea finds out that there is "something wonderful" as this "Rainbow Bridge" is crossed.
Then if man crosses that threshold of time into the 4th and 5th dimension, there is a new way of life but also new challenges for that dimension.
It took a lot of guts for Kubrick to do this. He was still living when they made 2010 in 1984 and I would have loved to see how he would have expanded on the first film.
I don't think 2001 has an ending but it has possibilities and it was up for the viewers to seek answers on their own.
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