2001 a Space Oddessey , 50 years ago this month

[sukumvit boy]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/2001-a-space-odyssey-what-it-means-and-how-it-was-made

[dakota87]

Love ❤️ this movie. I watch at least once a year. Kubrick movies are timeless.

[buttslinger]

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece Hardcover – April 3, 2018

This new book is a best seller on Amazon. The voice of HAL was Kubrick

[Stavros]

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece Hardcover – April 3, 2018
This new book is a best seller on Amazon. The voice of HAL was Kubrick

HAL was voiced by the Canadian actor Douglas Rain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Rain

[christianxxx]

what are you doing Dave?

[Stavros]

I don't know how many times I have watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I was at one time even a fan of what at the time was a genuine technical achievement. In the years since then as Kubrick produced more films I have come to the conclusion that his interest in the technology of film, though laudable, cannot mask the worthless nihilism at the core of all his films that suggests the credo of Kubrick's oeuvre could be: I Piss on Life.

Again and again and again in Kubrick's films two halves compliment each other in their registration of the complete futility of change, Kubrick believing human beings are doomed to be violent and destructive. This credo sits in opposition to several millenia of human history, not least the technical achievements without which his films would never have been made.

In Paths of Glory the failure to take the Ant Hill in the first half of the film is followed in the second by a trial in which the officer class shifts their responsibility for the failure on the soldiers who obeyed their orders. The soldiers are defended by an officer whose moral superiority is exposed as futile in the face of fate itself, an army greater than any one man.

In the first half of Dr Strangelove we are presented with a military officer in charge of nuclear weapons who is clearly mad, and in the second half from a throng of bickering and thus useless politicians emerges the nuclear scientist partly responsible for their development who is also clearly mad, or MAD -as in the Mutually Assured Destruction that results in the bomb being dropped somewhere in the world.

In the first half of 2001: A Space Odyssey we are presented with the possibility that some form of life has been discovered on another planet, but the second half reveals there is no other life in the universe than our own, and that we could travel through the universe only to end up where we were when we started, graduated monkeys who create fabulous machines but in the end just beat the shit out of each other. The opening sequence, risibly titled 'the Dawn of Man' is somewhere between anthropological rubbish and the downright offensive.

In the first half of A Clockwork Orange a thug who rapes and kills in the second half is 'reformed' and released from prison only to become the target of revenge attacks by survivors of his previous reign of terror. What was the point of reform? There is no point. Reform is futile.

In Barry Lyndon the first half of the film charts the progress of a peasant as he moves through lies from genteel poverty to become Lord Lyndon, in the second half frittering away all his money and prestige until he ends up dying in the poverty into which he was born.

In The Shining in the first half of the film a caretaker in a summer hotel establishes a routine which in the second half appears to be the ghostly re-enactment of or re-visitation of the crimes that haunt the hotel from its past, because you cannot escape a past that is littered with human misery in which humans are condemned to 'correcting' each other.

In Full-Metal Jacket a platoon in the first half is trained to be a ruthless killing machine that in the second half is shown to be all but incapable of dealing with a lone sniper that the depleted platoon discovers to be a teenage girl.

Eyes Wide Shut posits the supposedly successful marriage against the second half opportunity of the husband to be unfaithful, only he isn't, but does he truly love his wife, and given the opportunity how many men would be unfaithful to their wives?

The last point is crucial because there are no loving relationships in any of Kubrick's films, no couples that laugh together, commit to each other, and regard each other as equals. Even the closest one gets to, in Barry Lyndon is an arrangement rather than a marriage, and family life in the film is fraught with jealousy and betrayal, just as in Eyes Wide Shut the husband is presented as, in essence, a man who is prepared to sacrifice his marriage even if, in the end, he chooses not to.

The futility at the heart of Kubrick's films is there in key scenes: in Paths of Glory the camera behind Kirk Douglas as he moves through the trenches appears to show him moving but making no advance. In 2001 the first sight of the two astronauts shows one jogging when he appears to be going nowhere at the same time. In The Shining, Danny is driving through the hotel in his toy car but as every corridor is the same he appears to be going nowhere just as at the end of the film the characters fate is mirrored in the maze they cannot escape that has trapped them in time.

Again and again Kubrick undermines hope, relegates every human achievement to a waste of time, and ridicules equality and opportunity even as he uses the same level of technical change created by absurd humans to make the movies that provided him with a comfortable life.

One concludes that for all his skills as a film-maker, when the content of his films is examined, I Piss on Life is the only verdict one can reach, and one that confirms Stanley Kubrick is a third-rate director of film.

[sukumvit boy]

Wow, Stavros, you're a tough audience ,LOL.
However , I must admit those are very interesting observations and you are probably right . And yes , I also found that 'the dawn of man' title absurd when I first saw it and even more so when I see it now.
I also remember that when I first saw the film in 1968 I was living in New Orleans and went to a theater in the afternoon on my day off ,alone, to see it.
About 1/4 of the way through the film I started to hallucinate . I didn't take LSD before I went to the theater but had taken several 'trips' in the months and years before. ( Hey, it was 1968!) And since that incident I always approached watching the film again with some trepidation, lol.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Stavros, I think the last line of The Killing is more fitting for Kubrick's philosophy:
"Eh, what's the difference?"

[MrFanti]

A film that was way advanced for its time!

[setterman]

In the first half of 2001: A Space Odyssey we are presented with the possibility that some form of life has been discovered on another planet, but the second half reveals there is no other life in the universe than our own, and that we could travel through the universe only to end up where we were when we started, graduated monkeys who create fabulous machines but in the end just beat the shit out of each other. The opening sequence, risibly titled 'the Dawn of Man' is somewhere between anthropological rubbish and the downright offensive.

I'm not sure how you come to your conclusions, and I am not going to comment on any of Kubrick's films other than 2001, but I cannot agree with your contention that 2001 shows that "there is no other life in the universe than our own". If that were the case, obviously the monolith itself is not alive, but who hid the second one on the moon, the "early-warning-system" version, and when man did activate it (by digging it up and exposing it to the stars), to whom or what did it send its ear-splitting warning? And even in our own solar system, what was the chlorophyll-based creature under the ice, if not life?