Rating: 20/20 (Buster: dnf)
Plot: Monkeys discover a monolith and beat each other senseless with bones. Millenniums later, mankind finds itself a lunar monolith, and a crew of five--two awake and three in hypersleep--ventures to a distant planet to find the source of a mysterious humming. H.A.L. goes apeshit.
I remember watching this the first time--post Star Wars--and thinking, "What the fuck is with the monkeys?" I think the forty-five minutes of monkeys at the beginning of this kept me from believing this movie is as great as it is. Watching it for a third time as a more seasoned cinephile, I appreciate the monkeys (or ape men or whatever they are) a lot more. In fact, there's not a single shot in that takes place on earth that isn't suitable for framing. And you have to give credit to whoever trained those monkeys because they are great.
Flash forward to space, a bone transforming into a spacecraft of some kind. And it's all so beautiful. I can imagine more-scholarly hippies and nubile astronomers furiously masturbating from the very first shots in space until the mind-melting climax with the color assault and bewildering space fetus, just blasting off and Milky-Waying sticky theater floors like geeky Paul Reubenses. In space, no-one can hear you ejaculate. At least that's what I've heard. Just check out that moon. It looks more moon than the footage of the moon landing. It's so clear and so beautiful and textured that I had an overwhelming desire to move closer to my television set. These are effects that are so good that I don't even think about how they are made--I just assume that the actors and crew are actually in space.
At 25:30, you get the first spoken word, but none of the words in this thing really matter because this film's all about the images. And sound. Kubric uses classical music--Also sprach Zarathustra, Blue Danube, the creepy Gyorgy Ligeti stuff, et. al.--better than anybody. I love the space exploration as ballet, and that combination of the Strauss with that endlessly spinning space station transforms science and technology into something a little closer to art. It reminds me of how Star Wars was originally supposed to have a classical score. Speaking of Star Wars--A New Hope was less than 10 years away when this came out, but does anybody else think the effects for this are even better than the ones in that movie? I might. Anyway, back to that music. The way the movements of the human characters and space things match the music is so beautiful, but when the music is a little more modern and experimental and almost clashes with what's happening on the screen, that's just as beautiful--beautiful in a chilling way. Of course, Kubrick knows when not to use music as well, and the loneliness of some of the scenes without music, especially the ones where Dave's buddy is propelling through nothing on his way into nothing, is almost impossible for a person watching the movie not to feel. Kudos to Kubrick for creating a palpable alienation, loneliness, claustrophobia, and paranoia through his imagery and sound.
The audience also gets to appreciate the minutia of space travel with scenes of the two astronauts sitting around, running around, and sitting around more. The shots of the astronaut exercising is just so cool. Who thinks of including something like that in a science fiction movie? There's an immediate disorientation created, and it's those little details that do help the viewer empathize with the characters and make what could be a really cold experience be a little more profound and emotionally stirring. People tell me that this movie is boring. They're the same people who probably think baseball is boring because there's all this space (pun intended) available for pondering. You really appreciate and welcome the minutia. It might seem boring because of the lack of dialogue. As I mentioned, there's no dialogue until the 25:30 mark, and we learn soon in that conversation that Howard Johnsons exist in space. But almost none of the human dialogue actually matters, and as a fan of silent movies, I love that. H.A.L.'s voice, provided by Douglas Rain, is perfect, and it's that little red light that gets the most emotional dialogue, stuff that even tops the human characters' interaction with their daughter or parents.
I'm not going to pretend what it all means, especially the bewildering last twenty minutes or so--another silent twenty minutes or so to bookend the stuff with the ape men. The anachronistically designed room, the hovering fetus, the flashing lights that would have given me a seizure had I moved closer to the television to see the moon like I almost did. Monkeys, three monolith sightings, what may or may not be aliens, luminescent space fetuses, lots and lots of space funk. It's a staggering work, one that is as mysterious as every other science fiction movie probably should be. It's one of those museum movies, an artsy-fartsy heavy-handed and bulbous movie that is long and slow enough to be boring but manages to be completely watchable and absolutely stunning.
Stanley Kubrick--that guy was pretty good.
New prank idea that I got from this movie: Set up a monolith at the foot of friend's bed while he is sleeping. Wait for him to wake up. When he touches it, hit him over the head with a bone. Laugh hysterically.
