Lonely Hero

Gonna be controversial for a moment, but frankly: fuck this movie.

Now I’m not going to be unreasonable about this— I went into watching 2001 with the best intentions. It’s consistently won “best sci-fi movie” awards, and certainly deserves any, indeed, every award it got for brilliant cinematography and effects. It’s a dazzling film from a film-maker’s perspective. That part’s important, I’ll reference it later. I finally finished 4 weeks of presentations today so I decided the best way to celebrate would be by rewarding myself with filling in this embarassing gap in my sci-fi movie knowledge.

I feel so cheated it actually hurts.

Now, before fans of the movie yell at me that I didn’t understand it: I actually do know my stuff here, I know the monoliths represent evolution, and they’re basic elements of a damned cool story. There’s  a great mystery in how the monoliths got to earth, who buried one on the moon and what will happen when they get to Jupiter— it’s pretty damned intriguing. Also, obviously, the parts with HAL9000 are magnificent, excellently performed, well paced, genuinely tense and really the highlight of the whole film.

So why am I so annoyed?

Everything I mentioned above happens within about 25 minutes in the middle of the movie. It’s a 3 hour movie. If you haven’t seen it, you may be wondering what happens in the other, significantly larger portion of the film. I’m not going to say “so would I”, I actually did my research, I get that it’s all symbolic of progress and scene setting and so on— the thing is that the rest of the film is also complete horseshit.

The whole thing unfolds so damned slowly. I can’t express this enough— Glaciers complain that this movie is going too slow. Entire mountains have formed and been eroded into dust before we get our first glimpse of the monolith which drives the plot, never mind HAL. There’s a scene in which a small maintenance pod launches from a larger ship to do repairs; it takes 15 minutes for the above sentence to happen on screen. Read that single sentence over and over again for 15 minutes to simulate the experience. Go on. Do it. How long did you last? It wasn’t 15 GODDAMN MINUTES. If it were, you’d understandably be angry at me for wasting your time. 

And even then you’d only get a fraction of the frustration I feel towards this movie. To my mind, there’s only so arty you can get before you’re just being shit. Look at Alien for example, it’s got a really strong storyline while still embodying terrifying undertones of rape; or robocop, which has a ridiculous storyline while still containing parallels to the crucifixion (weirdly but true). 2001 takes the opposite approach, in that it has lofty ambitions of being metaphorical and somewhere along the line abandoned such trivial concerns such as relatable characters or interesting plotlines— probably too busy crafting warp effects to actually pay someone to write the script. 

The end result is something similar to 20 minutes of script being written before Stanley Kubrick decided he’d rather spend the writers money on making a movie in which he masturbates into the audiences face for two and a half hours.

Cinematography: possibly unparalleled, not gonna lie

Storyline: (and I never thought I’d say this) worse than the Room.