2001: A Space Odyssey: A Review
by Lester del Rey
Nobody slept at the New York press preview of 2001, but only
because the raucous and silly noise from the sound track screamed
painfully into our ears. Space was a tumult of din and the hero
breathed in his spacesuit like a monstrous locomotive at 60 gasps
a minute. It was the only evidence of excitement in the place.
Almost half the audience had left by intermission, and most of us
who stayed did so from curiosity and to complete our reviews.
The pictorial part was superb. The colour photography was
generally excellent, and the special effects and technical tricks
were the best ever done. Even the acting was unusually good. With
all that, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke should have given
us the superlative movie promised by a barrage of publicity. If
they had put Clarke's Earthlight on the screen with equal
genius, it would have been a great science-fiction movie.
Unfortunately, they didn't. Instead they gave us dullness and
confusion.
The whole affair dragged. Every trick had to be stretched
interminably and then repeated over and over again. Nothing was
explained or given coherent flow, but everything was run on to
boredom. Further cutting might help; surely it couldn't hurt.
The story staggers through four vaguely related episodes. First we get the
theme of man's humanoid ancestors being given intelligence by an alien slab
only to become murderers. Next we go to the moon to find future men have
dug up the same slab -- excellent background but no drama -- and no reason
for it being there. Then we take a trip to Jupiter because -- men think
the slab came from there.
This episode has a conflict between men and an articulate
computer. It might have been good, except for the lack of
rationality. No motivation is provided for the computer's going
mad, and the hero acts like a fool. He knows the cmputer can't be
trusted, and we've seen that the computer can at least operate a
rescue craft to bring back his dead friend. But he goes out
himself, leaving his companions in hibernation to be killed by
the computer.
Finally, we get an endless run of obvious and empty symbols on
the screen, followed by our hero in a strange room. Apparently
he's undergone intergalactic transfer and now grows old and dies
in the room, followed by a metaphysical symbol at the end. The
alien contact we've been promised is no more than a brief shot of
the slab again.
If possible wait to see it for the effects until you can buy the
soft cover book. Book and movie don't entirely agree, but maybe
the book will provide some relief to the confusion of the movie.
The real message, of course, is one Kubrick has used before:
intelligence is perhaps evil and certainly useless. The humanoid
reaction and pointless madness of the computer show this. Men can
only be saved by some vague and unshown mystic experience by
aliens.
This isn't a normal science-fiction movie at all, you see. It's
the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty
symbolism. The New Thing advocates were exulting over it as a
mind-blowing experience. It takes very little to blow some minds.
But for the rest of us, it's a disaster.
It will probably be a box-office disaster, too, and thus set
major science-fiction movie making back another ten years.
It's a great pity.
Copyright ©1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted in "The
Year's Best Science Fiction No. 2" edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W.
Aldiss, by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency,
Inc.