A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 epic
pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation
on technology and humanity. Based on Arthur C. Clarke's story The
Sentinel, Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay is structured in four
movements. At the "Dawn of Man," a group of hominids encounters a
mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of
Strauss's 1896 Also sprach Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first
weapon, using a bone to
kill
prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st
century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of
years in technological development. U.S. scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd
(William Sylvester) travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a
strange object on the moon's surface: a black monolith. As the sun's
rays strike the stone, however, it emits a piercing, deafening sound
that fills the investigators' headphones and stops them in their path.
Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea)
and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) head toward Jupiter on the spaceship
Discovery, their only company three hibernating astronauts and the
vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship. When the
all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the
astronauts to cover his error, forcing Bowman to defend himself the only
way he can. Free of HAL, and finally informed of the voyage's purpose
by a recording from Floyd, Bowman journeys to "Jupiter and Beyond the
Infinite," through the psychedelic slit-scan star-gate to an 18th
century room, and the completion of the monolith's evolutionary
mission.With assistance from special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull,
Kubrick spent over two years meticulously creating the most "realistic"
depictions of outer space ever seen, greatly advancing cinematic
technology for a story expressing grave doubts about technology itself.
Despite some initial critical reservations that it was too long and too
dull, 2001 became one of the most popular films of 1968, underlining the
generation gap between young moviegoers who wanted to see something new
and challenging and oldsters who "didn't get it." Provocatively billed
as "the ultimate trip," 2001 quickly caught on with a counterculture
youth audience open to a contemplative (i.e. chemically enhanced)
viewing experience of a film suggesting that the way to enlightenment
was to free one's mind of the U.S. military-industrial-technological
complex.
Directed By:
Stanley Kubrick
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