BackWhy ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ remains one of the greatest films ever made
It's fair to say that almost every film that can be classified in the space-sci-fi genre made after 1968 has directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, paid tribute to it
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Exactly 48 years ago, on 6 April 1968, a science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Arthur C. Clarke, called 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. Its influence on the whole space-sci-fi movie genre has been almost incalculable; in fact, it is fair to say that almost every film that can be classified in this category made after 1968 has directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, paid tribute to it.
Quite possibly, if there hadn’t been a 2001, there would have been no Star Wars. And the Star Wars series has earned more than $6.5 billion till date at just the box office (various spin-offs like books, comics, toys, video games etc not included).
Visually, 2001 is hypnotic. As narrative, it is bewildering yet bewitching—depending on your mindset and proclivities, it can transport you into the higher realms of spiritual speculation, or give you a drug trip without the ingestion of any banned substances. As cinema, it is as pure as it can get—clocking in at slightly less than two and a half hours, it has barely 30 minutes of dialogue.
There are sequences lasting several minutes each that are either entirely soundless, or the only sound is that of human breathing—of men inside space suits, giving you an uncanny sense of what it feels like to be out there in the far vacuum. And then suddenly, the silences are broken by rousing orchestral scores, including the incomparable ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ by Richard Strauss.
And it has arguably the most breathtakingly imaginative opening sequence ever. It begins with some ancestors of Homo Sapiens, more ape than man, and one of them throws the bone of some wild beast up into the sky. The bone whirls high in the air and as it drops, the film jumps a few million years, the bone transforming into a ship in deep space.
The plot of 2001, roughly based on Clarke’s short story ‘The Sentinel’ (he and Kubrick worked for a year on taking the premise of the story as far as they could) is, very briefly, this. Some entity, or entities, have been nudging human evolution forward by placing mysterious black monoliths in different parts of the solar system. We see the first monolith along with the ape-man. The second is found sometime in the 20th century on the moon.
In 2001, when a third monolith is sighted in space, a spaceship is dispatched to discover its meaning and source. But the spaceship’s computer HAL has become self-aware and wants to unravel the mystery first and beat human beings to the next stage of evolution. The space crew has to survive the murderous HAL, reach the monolith, where, unknown to them, a whole new universe promising a higher consciousness than ours, waits.
We are inside the locked world of the spacecraft for most of the film, with its jaw-dropping visual effects that unfold languidly, almost casually—which in fact adds to the thrill and awe. These scenes—and many other scenes in 2001, which defy our mundane earthly physics—are still as good as any that has been filmed since. And please remember, there was no CGI (computer-generated imagery) in 1968. When 2001 was made, the power our mobile phones pack today would have needed a computer the size of the Pentagon, and quite likely, if such a computer existed, it would have been deep underground, inside the Pentagon. 2001 relied on pure mechanical engineering to create most of its mind-blowing effects.
The 2014 film Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, with access to the sort of computing power to create effects that Kubrick and Clarke may not have imagined would be available to film makers (though they thought up HAL, which—who?—exists by the beginning of the 21st century) and 3D technology, was an attempt to outdo 2001. Of course, it was visually spectacular.
Nolan took the help of Kip Thorne, a scientist working at the very edge of theoretical physics, to build his story. Black holes, wormholes, time warps, quantum gravity, the fifth dimension—nothing was left out. Of course, it was very intriguing.
But, in his desperate bid to out-imagine Clarke and Kubrick, Nolan crammed in so much that very few among the people across the world who watched the film, other than maybe some brilliant post-doctoral fellows in physics, understood what on earth—rather, in outer space—was going on. Thorne wrote a book, explaining the physics of Interstellar. But, as an American critic wrote, if you have to read a 350-page book to understand a film, is the film really worth watching?
Clarke and Kubrick had used their prodigal imaginations. Nolan relied on prodigious quantities of purely mathematical physics to appear imaginative. He ended up with a film that certainly makes you want to know all the theory behind what’s going on on-screen, but after some time, you just give up and say: why work so hard? So, it remains merely unfathomable, with most people not interesting in fathoming it.
2001 is unfathomable too, especially its last sequence, where time and space behave very differently from the way we experience them. The film leaves many questions tantalizingly unanswered. But unlike in Interstellar, none of those questions have one correct provable-on-paper answer. In fact, technically, Interstellar has no unanswered questions—you just have to know enough theoretical physics, that’s all. 2001, 48 years after its release, leaves the biggest physics brains in the world mystified yet enchanted.
In other words, 2001 is the finest form of poetry in the garb of science fiction. It is a dreamscape masquerading as cold outer space. It is an experience that you immerse both your left brain—the seat of logical thinking—and right brain—the seat of creative thinking—in.
Finally, 2001 remains a mystery of that highest order for which every solution is a valid one, or perhaps there is no solution at all, and that too is a perfectly satisfying solution.
Which is why it remains, and will remain, one of the greatest films ever made.
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