Stanley Kubrick creates a masterpiece with '2001: A Space Odyssey'

Gary Lockwood is one of the astronauts exploring the unknown in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (MGM/MovieStillsDB.com)

"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Released April 3, 1968
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
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More than 50 years ago, an artifact was released into the world. It was seemingly simple, but when you focused on it, it became more mysterious and unknowing. Spectators puzzled over its existence, seeking meaning from its deceptively basic construct.

The one definitive was that after encountering it, nobody would be the same.

The monolith in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" drives human intelligence to the next stage of evolution. Still, the film itself also remains captivating well beyond whatever the next chapter in your standard Hollywood franchise is. Kubrick redefined what could be captured, imagined, and experienced on film, producing a true masterpiece of cinema.

It opens at the dawn of man when a family of primates loses territorial possession of a small pond to another tribe. The loss of a water source is catastrophic in this desolate land, but the apes wake up one morning to encounter the monolith. Soon they invent primitive weapons and use them to take back their territory. And in one of the most famous edits in film history, we flash cut to the future, and man has mastered space travel.

Viewers are treated to a leisurely view of the future. Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels to the moon colony on a trip that, to him, is mundane as a business flight to Iowa, but for the audience, gives us the promise of technological advancement. Floyd's purpose on the moon is a secret, as scientists have discovered a monolith buried in the lunar rock millions of years ago. As they examine the site, the monolith erupts with an ear-piercing signal. Their encounter leads us to another jump in time; the United States Discovery One spacecraft is en route to Jupiter as a group of astronaut scientists trace the source of the signal.

In this segment, two active scientists, David (Keir Dullea) and Frank (Gary Lockwood), are operating the flight with the assistance of their artificial computer intelligence, the HAL 9000 system. During their travels, HAL begins to behave strangely, forcing David and Frank to wonder if the system is malfunctioning, and if it is, how could they disable the A.I. without stranding them all in the vast depths of space.

The fourth segment of "2001" finds David at Discovery One's destination, where he encounters another monolith in orbit around Jupiter. Now David is pulled into a journey that he cannot comprehend, which passes through both time and space. He sees himself, again and again, giving him the strange sensation of watching his own evolution from afar into a being beyond our own enlightenment.

Far from the modern franchise model of constant worldbuilding and spinoff characters, "2001" is a complete story with themes we have been wrestling with long after viewing the film. It's an experience that calls us to the edges of our imaginations. 

"I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content," Kubrick told Playboy in a 1968 interview. "I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for '2001' that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if '2001' succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life."

As the director of films like "Paths of Glory," "Spartacus," and "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick was a respected filmmaker of some notoriety when he expressed his desire to work on a science fiction story. Kubrick wanted to examine the concept of space travel not as just a backdrop to pulp adventures but as a scientific exercise in pursuit of knowledge and understanding. He recruited famed science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke to help him write the movie.

"Stanley wanted to create a myth, and I think he succeeded," Clarke said in the retrospective documentary "2001: The Making of a Myth." "A myth should contain all sorts of levels, and different people should have different interpretations, and that's exactly what happened."

"2001" was released during one of the most tumultuous years in American history. While the space race had Americans looking to the sky, they also gazed toward Vietnam as the United States was enduring heavy casualties in its military conflict following the Tet Offensive in early 1968. A day after the release of "2001," Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Two months later, another assassination killed Democratic presidential nominee Robert Kenedy. Waves of civil rights and student protests erupted around the globe. 

At this moment, spending three hours inside Kubrick's space odyssey must have felt like a relief. This vision of the future where humanity can come together to advance space travel is a hopeful one. In late 1968, Apollo 8 is the first spaceflight to orbit the moon. A year later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. 

It's also one of the most iconic eras of science fiction that would influence pop culture for generations. "2001" debuted on the same day as 1968's other genre classic, "Planet of the Apes," making it one of the great double-feature weekends of all time. Meanwhile, on television, "Star Trek" was nearing the end of its run after three seasons of exploring space while encountering philosophical adventures. I'd consider these three productions to comprise the holy trinity of 60s sci-fi that hold up much better than the many movies and television shows that followed in the years afterward. When Star Trek finally made the leap to the big screen a decade later, it shared as much in common with "2001" as the television show that originated the franchise.

That's not to say that some people considered "2001" with more puzzlement and boredom than wonder during its release. Reading the original reviews of "2001" is like seeing critics engage with their own monolith, as the film drew mixed reviews. Banner publications like Time magazine and the New York Times complained that the movie was overly long and lacking in plot and character, little realizing that this simple thing would transform and expand the possibilities of film for a generation.

"The special effects in the movie – particularly a voyage, either through Dullea's eye or through the slab and over the surface of Jupiter-Earth and into a period bedroom – are the best I have ever seen; and the number of ways in which the movie conveys visual information (there is very little dialogue) drives it to an outer limit of the visual," wrote Renata Adler in The New York Times. "And yet the uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking – and people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost through the film. Very annoying."

Despite whatever complaints people had over its unusual structure and length, there's no doubt that the public thought "2001" was a spectacle that needed to be seen only in a theater since, at that time, there was really no other opportunity to see it. The original release of "2001" grossed $56.7 million at the box office (the equivalent of more than $400 million in today's dollars, putting it squarely at the level of a very successful modern blockbuster. It had several other theatrical runs since its debut, including a remastered edition screened in IMAX theaters in 2018. Its legacy is immeasurable, not only opening the door for an audience interested in more movies about science fiction and space (The original "Star Wars" arrives nine years later) but also firmly establishing Kubrick as one of the master directors of his generation, leading the way to movies like "A Clockwork Orange," "The Shining," and "Eyes Wide Shut."

My impressions of the movie also evolved as I watched it at different times of my development. I first saw the movie as a child, likely on television, but I can't remember exactly. I do recall thinking it was interesting (especially the end), but it lacked the fun and adventure of the original Star Wars movies that dominated child culture at the time. My subsequent encounter with "2001" was in college when I took an English course in science fiction. I joked that the movie was the only one you can watch in perpetual fast-forward and still grasp the plot, which is an incredibly shitty thing to say even for a college student. Still, on the other hand, my professor crapped on Star Wars for dramatizing sound effects in space. There were lots of room for bad takes in that class, apparently.

The boom in the DVD market heralded my third experience with "2001." Seeing "2001" on DVD made me appreciate the movie more fully, as I was now able to see the entire scope of Kubrick's vision, and, with a widescreen presentation, at last, the beauty of Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography. What was striking was how well the special effects of "2001" held up and looked better than the blockbuster movies of that era. For the first time, I recognized what everybody else saw, with a masterpiece finally revealed before me.

"2001" was restored for the film's 50th anniversary and given a theatrical re-release in 2018. I had the opportunity to catch an IMAX show of the movie, and it became one of the best cinematic experiences of my life. Seeing these pristine images blown up on a five-story screen, along with the theatrical surround sound, was utterly immersive. Imagine that iconic image of HAL with his red eye in the center of the screen, and the eye was the size of a billboard. Imagine listening to the symphonies of the score all around you. Imagine crossing the threshold at the end of the movie, as the effects almost seem to expand out of the IMAX screen into the world around you.

Every experience I've had with "2001" has been transformative, an evolution of how I think about the art of film. It is one of the greatest films ever made, one that improves upon every viewing even if we don't understand it fully. But we'll keep reaching for clarity.

Next Week: "Say Anything …"