The last time I saw 2001 was probably around seven or eight years ago during summer vacation. Everyone kept telling me it was the sci-fi movie that every geek had to see so I borrowed a copy from the library to see what the fuss was about. I think I tried watching it during the afternoon, but it was after lunch and I fell asleep after the sequence with the apes.
Of course, after that, I didn't think much of it. Big hairy deal. I returned the tape to the library and put the film out of my mind.
I haven't read any of Arthur C. Clarke's books so maybe I'm missing out on the bigger geek culture scene (then again, maybe I'm missing out on the geek culture scene entirely, I haven't read a lot of the cult speculative fiction that everyone has been blabbering about). But at least I'm going into it with a fairly fresh mind.
So when I heard about 2001 being shown in the college's relatively large theater, I thought, why not? Maybe I'll give the movie another chance and hopefully this time I don't fall asleep after the apes figure out how to make tools.
I arrived at the theater rather early and picked a choice seat in the center/front section. I ended up beside a pair of aging baby boomers who reminisced that all the people they knew who saw 2001 in the theater back when it was out had been under the influence of drugs. In front of me was a father and his young elementary school aged son. Ten minutes before the movie was about to start, "music" began to churn out from the speakers. I put music in quotation marks as this can only be termed modern and dissonant, the kind you sink into during horror movies. I personally thought something had gone wrong with the movie projector and that only the sound was coming out and not the picture.
But soon enough, the movie started with "The Dawn of Man". In the dark theater, the apes took on a rather sinister cast. It was rather obvious that the monolith had somehow opened up the animal mind for something higher, but we aren't shown how these apes make their lives more sophisticated. Instead, at the climax of the Also Sprach Zarathustra, we're given scenes of death. This did not bode well for the rest of the film's message.
It is a bit sad, though, that 2001 is already two years in the past and we have yet to have an operational space station orbiting the earth or even a moonbase. Although with China recently launching a man in orbit and breakthroughs in other scientific fields, maybe our future will be far from the strictly mechanical achievements that sci-fi visionaries of old would have predicted.
Anyway, there's a lot to be said about the corporate logos plastered throughout the film and artificial intelligence (in the form of HAL), but I think those things are besides the point--they are but mere subplot and filler as are the extended panoramic sequences cut with The Blue Danube (which I have played before several times in a live orchestra in the midst of ballroom dancing fanatics but in the film it has somehow taken on a more apocalyptic tone).
The meat of the film's message is in the last segment, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Only drugged out deadheads would have thought the psychedelic visual effects as a religiously expanding cool trip. And only bored and desensitized coeds such as last night's audience would exclaim, "WTF?!" as the credits rolled.
I will not pretend to know what Kubrick and Clarke were trying to get across. But I will guess that this is their version of what "beyond" would be like, an incomprehensible and nightmarish landscape where in the end, we are after all still in that little box concerned only with our animal needs. The monolith, which appears so ominously in so many scenes, is the carrot that is always dangling out of our reach. Like the fetus-thing dominating the screen at the end, we are still new and dumb in this universe no matter how sophisticated we may think we are.
