2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY

2001DL@WEEBLY.COM

2OO1: A Space Odyssey

Authors: Adler, Renata

Abstract:
This article originally published in 1968 by Renata Alder, from The New York Times. The themes of the
film are analyzed and well as well as Kubricks cinematic techniques. Like similar reviews upon its
release, Alder is somewhat divided in her reaction to the film, describing it as equally hypnotic and
boring. Alder also discusses Kubrick obsessive and unrelentingly detailed personality as an artist.

Keywords: Stanley Kubrick, films of the 1960s, epic films, special effects, New York Times

Adler, Renata (1968, April 4). 2001: A Space Odyssey. The New York Times. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/040468kubrick-2001.html

2OO1: A Space Odyssey

By Renata Adler
April 4, 1968
'2001' Is Up, Up and Away
Even the old M-G-M lion is stylized and abstracted in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," a film in
which infinite care, intelligence, patience, imagination, and Cinerama have been devoted to what looks
like the apotheosis of the fantasy of a precocious, early nineteen-fifties city boy. The movie, on which
Kubrick collaborated with the British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, is nominally about the
finding, in the year 2001, of a camera-shy sentient slab on the moon and an expedition to the planet
Jupiter to find whatever sentient being the slab is beaming its communications at.
There is evidence in the film of Clarke's belief that men's minds will ultimately develop to the point
where they dissolve in a kind of world mind. There is a subplot in the old science-fiction nightmare of
man at terminal odds with his computer. There is one ultimate science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir
Dullea) through outer and inner space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase by
some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.
But all this is the weakest side of a very complicated, languid movie -- in which almost a half-hour passes
before the first man appears and the first word is spoken, and an entire hour goes by before the plot
even begins to declare itself. Its real energy seems to derive from the bespectacled prodigy reading
comic books around the block. The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games,
bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like
Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday
phone calls. In their space uniforms, the voyagers look like Jiminy Crickets. When they want to be let out
of the craft they say "Pod bay doors open," as one might say "Bomb bay doors open" in every movie out
of World War II.
When the voyagers go off to plot against HAL, the computer, it might be HAL, the camper, they are
ganging up on. When HAL is expiring, he sings "Daisy." Even the problem posed when identical twin
computers, previously infallible, disagree is sentence-that-says-of-itself-I-lie paradox, which -- along with
the song and the nightmare of ganging up -- belong to another age. When the final slab, a combination
of Prime Mover slab and coffin lid, closes in, it begins to resemble a fifties candy bar.
The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical
devotion to science-fiction detail, that is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring. (With
intermission, it is three hours long.) Kubrick seems as occupied with the best use of the outer edge of
the screen as any painter, and he is particularly fond of simultaneous rotations, revolving, and
straightforward motions -- the visual equivalent of rubbing the stomach and patting the head. All kind of
minor touches are perfectly done: there are carnivorous apes that look real; when they throw their first
bone weapon into the air, Kubrick cuts to a spacecraft; the amiable HAL begins most of his sentences
with "Well," and his answer to "How's everything?" is, naturally, "Everything's under control."
There is also a kind of fanaticism about other kinds of authenticity: space travelers look as sickly and
exhausted as travelers usually do; they are exposed in space stations to depressing canned music; the
2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Renata Adler: 2001: A Space Odyssey

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viewer is often made to feel that the screen is a window of a spacecraft, and as Kubrick introduces one
piece of unfamiliar apparatus after another -- a craft that looks, from one angle, like a plumber's helper
with a fist on the end of it, a pod that resembles a limbed washing machine -- the viewer is always made
aware of exactly how it is used and where he is in it.
The special effects in the movie -- particularly a voyage, either through Dullea's eye or though the slab
and over the surface of Jupiter-Earth and into a period bedroom -- are the best I have ever seen, and the
number of ways in which the movies conveys visual information (there is very little dialogue) drives it to
an outer limit of the visual.
And yet the uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to sit through without talking -- and
people on all sides when I saw it were talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its
attention to detail -- a kind of reveling in its own IQ -- the movie acknowledged no obligation to validate
its conclusion for those, me for example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three
unreconciled plot lines -- the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period bedroom -- are simply left there like a
Rorschach, with murky implications of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra
scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, "relatively," does not really serve unless it can be
verbalized.
The movie opened yesterday at the Capitol.

2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Renata Adler: 2001: A Space Odyssey