2001: An IMAX Odyssey

Last week I was lucky enough to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX for a limited engagement to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film.  2001 has been one of my favorite movies since I was a teenager, and in the last decade or so I've seen it on the big screen a couple times.  But seeing it in IMAX was a special treat.  (More technically minded film nerds will be sad to hear that I didn't see the full size 70MM IMAX, but the smaller digital IMAX format, which for a film neophyte such as myself is still pretty impressive).

Obviously the giant screen made for a great experience.  All of Kubrick's amazing shots look a bit more amazing on such a big screen, especially the uncanny beauty of all those outer space shots and the trip through the star gate.  Whatever they did to restore the film looked amazing.  You could see the texture on the actors' outfits in ways I had never noticed before.

I also noticed aspects of the soundtrack that I had never noticed at home or in previous big screen viewings, like new layers of creepiness in Gyorgi Ligeti's unsettling polyphonic compositions. The more famous songs like Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube and Richard Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra also sounded great.

Seeing 2001 again also reminded me of everything I love about the film -- as well as why it's not everyone's cup of tea.


I understand what people hate about this movie.  It's slow.  The first 20 minutes are about apes with no dialogue, and there's hardly any human dialogue later.  Most of the good lines are from a computer, while the humans feel like emotionless automatons.  Shots linger so long they rest on the border between boring and unsettling.  The ending is... well, what, exactly?  To say it's open to interpretation seems to say too little.  The whole thing can feel a bit pretentious.

So I get it.  This movie is not for everyone.  If you don't like it, that's fine.  But let me try to explain some of what I love about it.

Inspired by seeing the movie again, I finally made a point to read an essay "2001: A Philosophical Odyssey" by Kevin J. Stoehr in the volume The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, edited by Steven M. Sanders (see photo below).  Stoehr makes some points about the film that I hadn't fully appreciated before.  For instance, those lingering shots are uncomfortable for a reason.  Whereas most films contain shots from a particular character's point of view, which is one of the ways filmmakers encourage us to identify with the characters, 2001 is mostly shot from some bizarre "view from nowhere" or at least it's not clear what the perspective is supposed to be.  Couple this with the intentionally cool and "inhuman" performances from the actors and a lot of atonal music and you get a deliberately unsettling aesthetic experience.

I have a thing for deliberately unsettling aesthetic experiences (hence, my love of horror and weird, mind-bending science fiction).  Stoehr goes on to say that these aesthetic choices allow Kubrick to introduce the idea that our attempts to go beyond our humanity via technology, space travel, etc. can make us somehow less than human.  Stoehr draws upon Martin Heidegger's ideas about embodiment and Hubert Dreyfus's Heideggerian work on the internet to make his points.  Artificial intelligence like HAL-9000 and the idea of space travel (especially the strange trip of Dave Bowman) can make us forget that the only intelligence we know here on Earth is intimately, perhaps necessarily, tied to embodied beings.

Whether this was Kubrick's intention, I'm not sure.  I hope to read a cool-looking new book that sheds light on the conception and production of the film called Spacey Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson (see photo below).  But as a long time fan of Arthur C. Clarke, I have my doubts when it comes to Clarke.

Clarke's fiction, including the novel of 2001 and its many sequels, seems mostly optimistic about a future human transcendence of our limitations of the body and mortality, not to mention the limitations of our species-level immaturity.  This theme comes out perhaps most fully in his classic, Childhood's End (see my review here).  Clarke's fiction often focuses on the idea that we as a species could evolve into something greater than our current selves, but this isn't necessarily the rosy paradise the posthumanist crowd seems to think it will be.  For Clarke, there's always a bit of melancholy in all this, a bit of -- to borrow a line from an essay on Clarke -- cosmic loneliness.

That melancholic loneliness is evoked effectively in the middle part of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  That gleaming ship slipping silently through the void. The astronauts eating space food while watching videos from Earth.  HAL calmly expressing his enthusiasm for the mission.

But I wonder if for Clarke, at least (I won't speak for Kubrick) all of this is a necessary, if a bit sad, side effect of a journey to something better.  A forgetting of humanity, perhaps, but only of an immature humanity we are better moving beyond.

Or maybe the interplay between the sort of Heideggerian "bioconservatism" and the "transcendentalism" of Arthur C. Clarke is itself part of what makes 2001 such a fascinating, beautiful, uncanny film 50 years after it was first released.

So, 2001 is necessarily unsettling, perhaps even off-putting to most viewers.  But maybe this was the point all along.

Bonus story: I was waiting in line to buy my ticket and the cashier was taking forever talking to a few people. When I got up to the cashier and asked for a ticket to 2001 she said that the people were asking her what 2001 is about. I laughed and borrowed a quip from my friend Ryan: It's about two hours long.