"2001: A Space Odyssey" is a film I can't possibly look at passively, it won't let me. Whenever I see the film, I am engaged with it till that very ambiguous ending that still boggles the mind as to what it all means.
I didn't always feel this way about the film, when I first tried viewing it, I found it to be a chore, I was young and impatient, I was looking for a more straight forward storyline. I didn't understand the idea of the primal beings at the beginning, nor the curious use of classical music. As a young man who was more accustomed to "Star Wars", I found "2001" a complete bore. By the time we got to the Jupiter mission with Dave, Frank, and HAL, I had gone to bed.
Years had past before I decided to give "2001" another try, this time I got through the entire film, and by the time I got the the end, I was scratching my head again wondering what it was all about. I was still not convinced, but something kept making me go back to it. I think the reason was because I was growing, and as I was doing that, I was asking more and more questions like who are we as a species, what is our ultimate potential, and where are we heading. Science Fiction is probably the best genre to ask these questions because it has the power to leap forward in time and give us potential answers to these.
I think "2001" is the most philosophical science fiction film as it probes these questions deeper than any other. The question is even put upon us to see if we can feel sympathy for a computer, and if a computer can actually have human emotion. It's ironic that the most poignant and poetic death in this film is of a computer, as HAL is slowly being ripped apart of his memory saying again and again "I'm afraid" or "I can feel it", HAL is the main villain of the film, yet he gets the most sympathetic scene of the entire cast.
On its surface, "2001" is a very exciting and suspenseful Science Fiction yarn, and put the genre light years ahead of its predecessors. Stanley Kubrick constructed the film as if it were silent, there is very little dialogue, and very long scenes of no sound at all. Kubrick was one of the most inventive filmmakers, but I think "2001" is his crowning achievement as he pulled back from convention and gave us some truly original set pieces. Take for example the opening sequence entitled "The Dawn of Man", a perfectly remarkable silent film within a film, as we are shown the first alien encounter of the mysterious monolith that appears throughout the film. The sequence is one of the most powerful filmed stories made as we see the influence of the motionless monolith on the primitive species.
Also take the extraordinary sequence where we see Dave and Frank conspiring to destroy HAL thinking he can't hear them, but then we cut to a shot of HAL's point of view reading their lips. It's one of the great displays of suspense where just enough is shown to let us know what will happen.
However, for me what makes "2001" work so well as a film and why I think it remains timeless is the questions it raises. "2001" is a very spiritual movie that dares to explore man's real potential, and wonders if we can really reach beyond the infinite. Space is the one area still left mystery to us, we still continue to explore it, and I think we are drawn to it because it represents so much we still don't know about ourselves.
The ending of "2001" is wonderful because we are left with more questions than we had before the movie began. We see the end of a man's life followed by a baffling sort of rebirth, is the meaning of life really out there? If we search for it long enough throughout space and time, will we ever find it? Are we even meant to find it? What is our destiny? I can probably say without a doubt, we won't have answers for these questions in my lifetime, but a film like "2001" inspires us that some day perhaps we will know the answers.
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