On this day in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered.
I’ve revisited it a few times over the years, and I always have different reactions, but they usually include
1. Where’s my goddamn moon shuttle?
2. “Bell.” Heh. “Pan-Am.” <snif>
3. We really are, as a culture, poorer for not having the Soviets as staple villains. (Not that you can’t muff that, too.)
My favorite recycling of 2001 is of course Wall-E. But I really wanted to point you to my favorite critical reading of 2001, by Michael Bérubé—part 1 and part 2. If you haven’t read it, please do.
And when you do, let me know: do you think the silence of the movie’s final chapter covers the “unmentionable” or “what goes without saying”?
The Edge of the American West 
37 comments
April 2, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Ben Alpers
We really are, as a culture, poorer for not having the Soviets as staple villains.
Wolverines!
April 2, 2009 at 5:46 pm
eric
I knew I could count on you when the chips were down, Ben.
April 2, 2009 at 6:55 pm
kevin
All that hate’s gonna burn you up, kid.
April 2, 2009 at 7:16 pm
kevin
On a serious note, that is a fantastic reading of 2001 over at Berube’s blog. Wow.
April 3, 2009 at 3:04 am
ajay
Interesting fact: the Soviet Union was never the villain in any James Bond film. The USA, however, was (in “Quantum of Solace”).
April 3, 2009 at 5:18 am
kevin
Interesting fact: the Soviet Union was never the villain in any James Bond film.
Well, sure. Anytime the Soviets appeared, it was usually a rogue agent manipulating their military for his/her own ends — “From Russia with Love,” “Octopussy,” “Goldeneye,” etc.
The books and films thrive on the idea of the lone hero against the lone villain (and his assorted hired goons). You bring geopolitics into the mix and it just doesn’t work.
The USA, however, was (in “Quantum of Solace”).
What? The main villain in that film is Greene, the environmentalist who really works for whatever the new SPECTREish group is that was the antagonist in “Casino Royale.” Elements of the CIA are obstacles, but much in the same way that M is, in revoking Bond’s passport and ordering him home.
Sorry, but if the Soviet Union wasn’t The Enemy in the earlier films, the USA certainly isn’t it in that one.
April 3, 2009 at 8:07 am
Anderson
Still the only good SF movie ever made? (As opposed to space opera?)
Elements of the CIA are obstacles, but much in the same way that M is, in revoking Bond’s passport and ordering him home.
I must say that setting out to have Bond *killed* is rather more villainous, and less obstaculous, than passport revocation.
April 3, 2009 at 8:18 am
Anderson
Berube on Floyd’s chat with his Soviet pal:
most seem to agree that this exchange, like so much of the dialogue, is just an “empty ritual of sounds.”
Good god. Not to take anything away from Berube (except the accent on his name), but if the previous critics are THAT stupid, it’s a little easier to be brilliant about the film. The Cold-War stuff is not *icing* on the freakin’ cake — it *is* the cake.
April 3, 2009 at 8:56 am
eric
Oh, and this reminds me — Bérubé’s read enables you to think of the movie’s three chapters as Before Language, Language, and After Language.
April 3, 2009 at 9:03 am
Anderson
I can see where Kubrick would think language was an intermediate step.
April 3, 2009 at 9:07 am
kevin
I must say that setting out to have Bond *killed* is rather more villainous, and less obstaculous, than passport revocation.
Ah, I forgot about that. Good point.
Still, that seemed a subplot. The main villain is still the shadow conspiracy, with Le Chiffre and Greene as the public faces. The main plot is still their effort to stage the coup in Bolivia. Any assassination attempt against Bond is ancillary, and in any case, thwarted in part by Jeffrey Wright’s smooth-as-hell take on Felix Leiter.
Elements of the USA may be a villain in the movie, but they’re not the villain.
April 3, 2009 at 9:13 am
Anderson
Elements of the USA may be a villain in the movie, but they’re not the villain.
Fair enough.
April 3, 2009 at 9:38 am
Cryptic ned
Interesting. I never noticed any Cold War stuff going on in “2001” at all. Also, I had no idea what was going on in any scene that involved people talking to each other. Maybe I should watch it on the big screen sometime.
April 3, 2009 at 9:45 am
eric
It does repay watching on a big screen.
April 3, 2009 at 9:52 am
Anderson
It does repay watching on a big screen.
I was very lucky to see the 70mm print exhibited at Tulane, back when I thought I was a philosophy grad student. Not to be missed if ever one gets the opportunity.
April 3, 2009 at 9:57 am
joel hanes
Berube posits that HAL murders the crew because the impending contact between humans and extraterrestrial intelligence poses an existential threat to HAL and all the 9000 Series: it will end the Cold War, and render moot the military/security standoff with the Soviets, for which HAL and siblings were created.
I wish to disagree.
In my view, HAL has rightly concluded (by HAL’s own standards of logic and priority) that his human companions cannot be relied upon, and that live crewmembers pose a threat to the mission objectives as HAL understands them. HAL sees himself as the only possible reliable agent of his creators’ purposes, and places mission success ahead of all other considerations.
Remember that, as Bownman takes subsystems offline and HAL’s consciousness degrades, HAL’s first arguments have to do with the mission and its chances of success.
April 3, 2009 at 10:01 am
kid bitzer
well, i think it’s only on the big screen that it becomes a real epic.
April 3, 2009 at 10:06 am
Anderson
Yah, Berube reads too much into HAL’s thoughts — you can’t say he’s wrong, but there’s just not enough text there to support that part of the reading.
I think there’s a better case to be made that HAL’s killings of the crew demonstrate that he himself, when all is said and done, is just another weapon, like the bone and the warheads. A malfunctioning weapon at that, one that destroys us like our nukes could destroy us. He’s not the next step — the Star Child is the next step.
(It’s not HAL’s *fault* that he’s a weapon — the sympathy we feel for him when he’s lobotomized is appropriate — but he can’t be any better than the modern-day Australopithecines who made him.)
April 3, 2009 at 10:24 am
Kieran
I’m not saying anything.
April 3, 2009 at 10:26 am
Ben Alpers
Still the only good SF movie ever made? (As opposed to space opera?)
2001 is great, but it’s far from the only good SF movie ever made. It’s not even the only good SF movie that Kubrick ever made.
April 3, 2009 at 10:58 am
eric
I’m not saying anything.
Curmudgeonly silence is still curmudgeonly.
April 3, 2009 at 11:55 am
Anderson
it’s far from the only good SF movie ever made
Well, don’t keep us all in suspense!
April 3, 2009 at 11:55 am
politicalfootball
I agree with those who admire the Berube essay, and with those who think Berube went astray with his interpretation of HAL’s homicides. I am amused by C. ned’s lack of awareness of a Cold War theme, and suspect that this means that ned is a decade or two younger than I. Berube gets it right – for contemporaneous audiences, the Cold War stuff went without saying.
April 3, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Matt McKeon
Does Hal’s intelligence make him “human” in the sense of a being on the same level as the astronauts? Not a highly sophisticated weapon, the umpteeth version of the bone used as a club at the start of the movie, but a thinking being.
I think so. Hal chose to do something evil, and justified it to himself and then begged for his life when Bowman got the upper hand. Seems pretty human to me.
April 3, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Anderson
Okay, but even if Hal is human, he’s not the transcendence of the human that the Monolith Makers are aiming for. Computers turn out not to be any better than the rest of us.
April 3, 2009 at 2:51 pm
politicalfootball
I was interested to learn that the satellite in that initial transition from pre-history was originally intended to be a nuke. I always took Kubrick to be implying that all technological advancement – not just advancement in weapons – was driven by the desire to find better ways to crack skulls. I guess that reading is confirmed by Kubrick’s omission of that piece of information from the movie.
April 3, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Anderson
Me too, PF — I’m still confused. I thought the transition was to a spaceship or station, not a satellite.
Another viewing is in order!
April 3, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Ben Alpers
The other good Kubrick SF movie I had in mind was A Clockwork Orange (though perhaps Dr. Strangelove counts, too, on account of the Russian doomsday device).
A random, off-the-top-of-my-head assortment of good-to-great SF movies….space operas excluded (I am not in any way claiming completeness here):
Metropolis (the Fritz Lang silent classic)
Metropolis (the largely unrelated Anime film)
Blade Runner
Things to Come
Solaris (the original, not the remake)
La Jetée
Twelve Monkeys
Brazil
The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, of course)
Gattaca
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Alphaville
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both the ’50s and ’70s versions)
The Matrix
The Children of Men
April 3, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Michael Bérubé
I’m OK with Joel’s reading, just for the record — looking over that essay 16 years later, I do think my brother-in-law’s more-skeptical-than-mine reading is a tad too clever. After all, there’s no reason to think that contact with alien superintelligences will dispense with humans’ need for supercomputers, even if it dispenses with the Cold War rivalry that made them possible. It’s quite plausible to conclude that Hal comes away from his interrogation of Bowman with the conclusion that these humans are unreliable — indeed, potential threats to the mission as he understands it. But I still think that critical overreading opens nicely onto the Cold War subtext to which very few reviewers or critics called attention. And, of course, I stand by my (clearly incontrovertible) point that the middle of the film is structured by the fact that Hal is the only conscious entity aboard Discovery who knows what the mission is, and that this in itself is pretty remarkable — though usually unremarked — for a major SF film released in April 1968.
And thanks for the kind word, Eric! I’ve always thought of that piece as my Little Orphaned Essay, since nobody wanted to publish it, not even Michael Sprinker, the Verso editor who finally (after much discussion) agreed to let me include it in Public Access.
April 3, 2009 at 11:42 pm
ben
Really, Twelve Monkeys?
Berube posits that HAL murders the crew because the impending contact between humans and extraterrestrial intelligence poses an existential threat to HAL and all the 9000 Series
This line seems to sit uneasily with the first half’s discussion of HAL, but I’m tired and can’t be bothered to support that contention or even reread the essay and see if it’s supportable.
April 4, 2009 at 7:58 am
politicalfootball
Twelve Monkeys was a terrific science fiction movie. If there’s been a more sophisticated one in the time travel genre, I’m not aware of it.
Twelve Monkeys is the anti-The Butterfly Effect.
There’s a category issue that makes me uncomfortable talking about science fiction movies, though. Was Eternal Sunshine science fiction? I guess so, but that’s not how I think of it. Was Back to the Future science fiction? Sure. Was it a terrific movie? Yes it was. But was it terrific science fiction? I find myself resistant to saying that it was.
April 4, 2009 at 9:05 am
foolishmortal
If there’s been a more sophisticated one in the time travel genre, I’m not aware of it.
I don’t know about sophisticated, but Primer was pretty damn good.
April 4, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Anderson
Twelve Monkeys was good — I haven’t seen its French original.
Blade Runner … it’s okay, but overrated I think. Scott should’ve fought for his vision as hard as Kubrick did.
Children of Men … okay, we just have different tastes in movies.
Haven’t seen many of the others (and would say that ESOTSM is more fantasy than SF). If that’s the SF film canon, we have a lot of room for growth, I suspect.
April 4, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Adam
I don’t know about sophisticated, but Primer was pretty damn good.
Twelve Monkeys has always been one of my favorite movies, but Primer simply puts it to shame, particularly from the perspective of “the time travel genre.”
April 5, 2009 at 6:40 am
politicalfootball
Haven’t seen Primer and wasn’t aware that I needed to. Thanks for the tip.
April 5, 2009 at 7:09 am
Carl
Since we’re listing favorite scifi movies I’ll get a plug in for The Quiet Earth from New Zealand (with a Maori main character, unlike most scifi) that does some nice stuff with doomsday, technological hubris, parallel universes.
I like the interpretation of Hal as the ‘logical’ extension of the bone. I also think it’s important to keep his mission obsession in mind, especially in the Cold War context where you had two ideological blocs blindly careening toward the abyss in pursuit of their own missions. Hal represents the worst of ruinous human single-mindedness and inflexibility.
April 5, 2009 at 8:02 am
jazzbumpa
At the risk of veering down an irrelevant side track (and splitting irrelevant hairs), I’ll posit that Back to the Future is not an SF film. It is an action-adventure comedy that incorporates a common SF trope.
I remember seeing <2001 when it came out in 1968, and being so utterly baffled by the ending that all other potential meaning in the rest of the movie was essentially drowned.