Astronomy has always captured the fascination of mankind. The essence of the unknown taps into our inborn curiosity and the unfathomably vast and desolate area beyond the Earth’s atmosphere further ignites our intrigue. The concept of space and space travel is incomprehensible to those of us that lack more cosmic instincts, who are governed by the man-made constructs of space and time on this molecular dot, the one so insignificant that it would be comparatively dwarfed by a speck of floating dust or a drop in the ocean.
Like intergalactic exploration, although designed by human brains, technological advancements equally captivate those of us who find the inner workings of supercomputers indecipherable. A year before mankind set foot on the moon, Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, gave us an unprecedented exploration into the solar system and a futuristic, accurate detailing of life with Artificial Intelligence.
Turning 55 years old this year, the film is so ahead of its time that you’d be forgiven for thinking Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece was a product of 1990s and early 2000s filmmaking — a film that is timeless, in every sense of the word…
2001 Is a Significant Cinematic Triumph
Enveloped in the confines of Discovery One are Dave (Keir Dullea) and Frank (Gary Lockwood), sent on a mission to investigate a mysterious monolith on Jupiter. Aided by supercomputer HAL 9000, the pair’s assignment is brutally sabotaged by their once-trusted AI. The film details this visually, without excess exposition or melodrama (there's only 40 minutes of dialogue, and 100 without), and bookends the quiet suspense with radically unusually segments — the monkeys of its beginning, and the space baby of its ending.
As arguably the defining movie of the 1960s, the beauty of Stanley Kubrick’s flagship '60s film can be found in the immersive and thought-provoking combination of the visuals and audio. Over $3 million went into the CGI and special effects of the film (roughly $26 million adjusted for inflation), with Kubrick overseeing the execution of such endeavors himself. From the vast, expansive star-sequinned plains of outer space and the many orbiting asteroids, to the obscene level of detail, and the innovative reimagining of spacecraft.
Accompanied by Johann Strauss’s classical and authoritative composition, The Blue Danube Waltz, György Lieti’s haunting Requiem, as well as the definitive soundtrack that has become so synonymous with the Moon landings, the dooming percussion and the assertively compelling brass of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Together, the elements provide a deeply enriching, almost hypnotic experience, entrancing us in this idyllic sea of darkness.
Kubrick’s Vision vs. Reality
It's easy to suspect Kubrick’s vision of the birth of the new millennium was far more impressive and grandiose than what actually materialized, which is saying something. Considering humans hadn’t even made it back to the moon, let alone Jupiter, since Discovery One’s maiden voyage, it was almost timely that the legendary director popped his clogs in 1999 to save him from the inevitable despair of the lack of progress.
22 years on from when the 1968 movie was set, humankind’s personal exploration of space is yet to really take off, with 2011 signifying the completion of the International Space Station. However, as the evil supercomputer HAL 9000 coincidentally points out, the survey of outer space is perhaps best left for AI, a piece of advice NASA has indirectly used with the deployment of the Mars Rover.
Beyond its exploratory vision of space and astronomy, Kubrick was ahead of his time with the video calls used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's also the film's prophetic use of word processing, antigravity and centrifugal force, suspended animation, the space station, and other 2001 'predictions' of sorts. In some ways, the film also predicted a new way of filmmaking, one which was much more experimental and ambiguous than mainstream cinema was used to, which is epitomized in its ending.
Explaining 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Ending
The film infamously begins with the epic opening sequence of the dawn of man, when a faction of apes are driven from their watering hole by another group, only to wake up to find a monolith that gifts them the mental capacity to use the bones of dead animals as weapons to reclaim their territory. The film then jumps forward a few million years to spaceships occupying outer space, before ultimately ending in the psychedelic realm of inner space.
While the movie itself uses relatively minimalist dialogue, and a simplistic concept of traveling through space and time to make potentially life-changing discoveries, it eventually becomes narratively complex in its final scenes when the protagonist, Dave Bowman, finds himself in a neoclassical, Parisian-inspired bedroom, as he appears to inadvertently jump through time. Much has been made of the closing scenes, and their meaning has often caused quite a debate among viewers.
In a rare interview in 1980, Stanley Kubrick revealed to a Japanese filmmaker his meaning behind the film’s contentious ending. During the interview, Kubrick exclaimed that he had “Tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out," referring to giving an explanation of the ending. Kubrick explained that Dave was “taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form,” which certainly goes some way to describing the portal of color that a transfixed Dave ventures through. This “god-like entity” then places Dave in “a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time."
After the film swiftly graduates from Dave’s youthful incandescence to midlife, and then to his deathbed in merely a few sequences, Kubrick established that, “When they are finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.”
This fits into the whole idea of the indestructible black monolith; when it appears millions of years ago, it helps spark evolution by teaching the primates about tools. Its appearance on the moon is signaling then next stage in evolution, which appears to be personified by Dave as he becomes a kind of "superman" space baby. Just as the humans in 2001 have created sentient intelligence with HAL 9000, so have the god-like creatures with us.
Ultimately, 2001: A Space Odyssey documents the arc of human life, both in historical portraiture, picturing apes prior to the civilized development of mankind, right the way through to the life of man and beyond. It's simply the story of everything — how can that not be timeless?