I am upset that I am a day late with this last review, but I still saw it on the right date. The 15th and last film on my list (I have some more classics I want to see this week but I’m already back at school) is actually the third Stanley Kubrick film I’ve seen in the past 6 months. I saw A Clockwork Orange in July, The Shining in December, and now this!
The film is different from the other two in so many ways, but I found it more interesting to spot the similarities. For instance, it resembled A Clockwork Orange in that there was a moment maybe 30 to 45 minutes in the film where you go “Oh… so THIS is the plot.” And it reminded me of The Shining because there were massive amounts of time without dialogue. Both of those things are hard to pull off without losing the audience’s attention, so 2001 makes up for it with incredible visual imagery and insane special effects.
Half the time I was thinking “Isn’t this 1968? How do they do that?” It takes a conscious effort to be impressed by the visual effects in the film, because I have to remind myself just how old this movie is. 45 years before Gravity (2013), 9 years before Star Wars (1977), Stanley Kubrick is doing things no one thought possible in film. And that’s how I kept my interest, because the plot is about as slow as you can imagine.
There is no dialogue for the first and last 20 minutes of the film. The above gif is from the first section of the film, where a group of early hominids deal with the struggles of not having iPhones. Then a black monolith appears one day, and it has an impact of the evolution of the group. Flash forward a few million years, to 2000, and a group of astronauts are getting ready to go to the moon to visit another black monolith that was discovered.
The rest of the film focuses on two astronauts and their supercomputer, HAL 9000, on a mission to Jupiter. They aren’t told much about their mission, and things kind of just go crazy from there.
I was a bit more bored than I thought I’d be, but I blame that on the evolution of movies to fill every second with mesmerizing images so that our tiny attention spans don’t wander. When I put the film into the perspective of its time, what I see is a masterpiece with high critical praise and a groundbreaking use of special effects.
2001: A Space Odyssey is #110 on the IMDb Top 250, but way up at #15 for the AFI 100 Movies. It won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects, which actually is Stanley Kubrick’s only Oscar.
That concludes my 15th movie review in “15” days. I got through my entire winter movie bucket-list!
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