2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

What is the essence of man? To create? To fight for supremacy over all other creatures? To swirl around in the universe as he pretends to hold dominion over his creator? It's no wonder there are so many religions in the world; all of them trying to explain who we are, why we're here and "what the meaning of it all" is. Is there meaning, or is it all meaningless?

But before I get mired into a metaphysical corner here, let me talk a little about the source of what we're looking at. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story called "The Sentinel" as his own way to dissect man's intelligence, how we have evolved and how much farther we have to go.

Now, Stanley Kubrick was known as, if nothing else, a director who went far afield of his source material. Granted, the man was a brilliant visualist and created films of great passion and power, if a certain clinical detatchment. With Clarke's book, perhaps he had discovered a new avenue to display his artistry - a canvas as large as the universe.

2001: A Space Odyssey opens on the early days of our planet when apes scurried and scampered without knowledge or purpose. Then, in the stark landscape of craggy mountains and lumps of rock appeared The Monolith. And with The Monolith, knowledge. Flash forward eons later (literally) to the title year, when another (or the same?) Monolith appears on Earth's moon, sending strange waves out towards the planet Jupiter.

It's about here that the characters start talking. Up until now, it's all been about imagery, body language and Thus Spracht Zarathustra. Which is actually better than having a film loaded down with dialogues, explanations, follow-throughs and repetitions. Seeing that the script itself was by both Kubrick and Clarke, they either -

A) made a film geared towards their own intelligence and decided the audience could catch up with them.

Or..

B) went the avant-garde route and created a film with only the barest of script to just let the viewer draw their own conclusion as to "what it's all about".

(SIDE NOTE - On writing "B", I was reminded of watching Last Year at Marienbad, the grand-daddy of pretentious French art films. Rumor has it that its director had it in for art films and set out to write and direct something so outre that it would end up ruining the very genre he set out to mimic. In the end, he won the Palme D'Or at Cannes and began what is now known as the French New Wave. If this rumor is indeed true, it most surely was to the delight of Last Year's director.)

Of course, I would go with "A", since this is a very intelligent account of what amounts to man's first encounter with an alien force. And it's not met with battles, explosions or scary aliens threatening to take over the planet, as in the sci-fi plots of yore. If anything, Man is seen as the child who thinks he knows everything only to come across as a being that challenges everything he thought he knew.

Then again, this is Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke we're talking about. Certainly two such intelligent men would be able to team together and perpetrate a stilted pantomime of man's evolution, de-evolution and usurpment as "supreme power", toss in some Richard Strauss and stretch it to over two hours, building a short story into something that everyone from jaded moviegoers to stoned hippies would stumble over one another to claim as a "cerebral" and "important" film. And if that were the case then, indeed, they indeed "one-upped" all humanity.

Anyway, back to the film. On its way to Jupiter is a space craft sent to investigate, manned by two astronauts, Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood), three scientists in suspended animation and the omnipresent HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), the ship's computerized operator. And along the way, things happen that not only threaten lives but that also challenge Man's ideas of "who's in charge".

There are so many striking images here; the alignment of planets in the beginning; the first appearance of the perfect, smooth monolith in the natural, imperfect landscape of primitive Earth; the elegant movement of spaceships in the absolute silence of space, accented only by the strains of Strauss; the standoff between man and machine as exemplified when HAL refuses to allow Bowman's pod back into the ship....

I notice that I haven't spoken at length about the actors. Perhaps that was the overall idea, though; for better or worse, this isn't really a movie where you depend on the characters and their emotions to carry you through. Every human is a cipher, without inflection of voice or individual personality. Instead, this is a film about ideas, beliefs and a desire to touch the face of your Creator.

It's safe to assume that by the end of this movie, more questions will arise than have been answered. That's as it should be, since Man is a questioning creature, forever dissatisfied with the answers he gets; no matter how many answers he is given, he will have a few million more. Just as it is with any child who asks his parents where they came from.

Did Kubrick or Clarke know the answers? No. But it wasn't for asking the wrong questions themselves.