2001: A Space Odyssey

Valmont

I finally got around to watching this last night, it was on TCM2. I'd heard it was a strange film and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I'm always a bit healthily skeptical (not film critic skeptical) watching a 'greatest movie of all time' movie but I greatly enjoyed this film.

Anything I could say would have been said before but what really struck me was how it really inspires you think about artificial intelligence, the universe, aliens and the like. Strangely enough, I thought the issue of extra-terrestial life was handled excellently in that they kept the mystery and left it ambiguous. What other films have people found as thought provoking as this one?

markesmith

Tarkovsky's Solaris apparently deals with similar themes (never seen it, only the ho-hum Clooney remake). Close Encounters as well, I guess...

Incidentally, 2001 is on the top 10 list of movies of all time as judged by...wait for it...the Vatican.

Great show, really got me into Kubrick's movies. Have you seen Doctor Strangelove and Barry Lyndon?

mike65

Solaris was made as a riposte to 2001, ie Mosfilm wanted to show those Capitalist Pig Dogs they could do sophisticated, intellectual sci-fi as well. Noty seen it.

Mike

johnny_ultimate

Solaris has a lot of interesting ideas, but I don't think its as good a film as 2001 (in visual terms, anyway). Tarkovsky's other sci-fi Stalker is a far more affecting, thought-provoking and eerie film.

The Fountain and Sunshine are two others that emulate the style and ideas of 2001. I much prefer the former (even if the story isn't much more than a standard romance, albeit in an offbeat structure) but both are pretty visually impressive and complex sci-fi films.

Pigman II

Here's something to get you thinking about 2001 http://www.kubrick2001.com/

BTW Solaris is rubbish. Really disappointing and boring. Wouldn't recommend it even to 2001ASO fans. The only point of interest I could take from it was that some of the set design from the original Star Wars had clearly been influenced by the ship in Solaris.

quarryman

The thing i loved about 2001 (and Kubrick's films in general) was the way it took me a while to decide if I liked it. After watching it again i realised how brilliant it was.

Notch000

the seqeul 2010 is worht a look too, not quiet in the same league as 2001 but good all the same

pixelburp

I watched Solaris a few years back. Now admittedly it was at 6am & I wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders, but I found it turgid, ponderous and overly philosophical. I'm sure it had some worthy points to make, but I thought it wore its art-house credentials on its sleeve too much & I had lost interest in the characters about half way through. They were the standard emotionally-stunted robots / characters you get in these kind of movies; the apparent mistaken belief that by having your actors display no emotion you're being more ambiguous.

The remake dispensed with the heavier ideas, but I felt was a more personal treatment of the main character's story. Plus the soundtrack was quality stuff.

BenjAii

markesmith wrote: »

Tarkovsky's Solaris apparently deals with similar themes (never seen it, only the ho-hum Clooney remake). Close Encounters as well, I guess...

I've only seen the remake of this, but would thoroughly recommend the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem they are both based on.

I think it is the best depiction in SF of humans encountering aliens. This is most commonly dealt with in popular SF as having the aliens be slightly different versions of ourselves.

Stanislaw Lem has written the only meaningful exposition, I've some across in SF film or literature on life so alien to us, although we can see its outlines we cannot being to fathom its motives, intelligence or even how to communicate with it.

bnt

BenjAii wrote: »

Stanislaw Lem has written the only meaningful exposition, I've some across in SF film or literature on life so alien to us, although we can see its outlines we cannot being to fathom its motives, intelligence or even how to communicate with it.

If you like that, I'd also recommend The Mote In God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and its sequel The Gripping Hand. These are about a human-alien contact situation where all seems to be going well, and the humans think they have a handle on the situation... wrong. :eek:

About 2001: don't forget how important the soundtrack is, too. Especially the use of silence: try and find any Hollywood film where whole scenes occur in complete silence. I "watched" it again last year, only realising later that hardly watched the screen at all, yet I felt as if I had seen the whole movie.

mike65

The 1972 Solaris is on FilmFour 12:45am Sat 13 Dec

johnny_ultimate

mike65 wrote: »

The 1972 Solaris is on FilmFour 12:45am Sat 13 Dec

Yeah bit of a Tarkovsky season this week. His uber-complex Mirror is on at some point too.

Capt'n Midnight

mike65 wrote: »

The 1972 Solaris is on FilmFour 12:45am Sat 13 Dec

ah feck missed it

I remember someone's father telling me about watching 2001 in the old Adelphi in widescreen and the docking of the Orion to the space station with the Blue Danube in the background wasn't as slow as it seems on TV because it had to go all the way across the screen and you had to turn your head to follow it.

MooseJam

2001 hasn't aged at all, amazing to think it was made in the 60's

mike65

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I remember someone's father telling me about watching 2001 in the old Adelphi in widescreen and the docking of the Orion to the space station with the Blue Danube in the background wasn't as slow as it seems on TV because it had to go all the way across the screen and you had to turn your head to follow it.

Sounds like he must have seen the original Super Panavision 70 print which was shown on a curved canvas screen. Interestingly Kubrick was not a fan of widescreen formats and prefered the 4:3 ratio versions of his films and framed the action with 4:3 in mind even if the film was shown theatrically as 1.7/1.8 or in the case of 2001 in 2.20

Example



in 4:3 the foreground details are largely missing but Bowman and Poole are still both fully visible.