A Review of 2001 (1968)
by Roger Ebert
I wrote, of course, before any other reviews had appeared, and after a
screening which was essentially a disaster. I am proud that I got the film
right. Remember that most of the early reviews were strongly negative.
Not that I wouldn't like to rewrite this review -- but in a sense, I
already have: recently I wrote a review of the film in connection with the
Cyberfest activities at the University of Illinois, part of
a series of reviews called "The Great Movies" that I am doing -- revisiting
classics. You can find these reviews through the
Chicago Sun-Times
website.
It was e.e. cummings, the poet, who said he'd rather learn from one bird
how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. I imagine
cummings would not have enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, in which stars dance but birds do not sing. The fascinating
thing about this film is that it fails on the human level but succeeds
magnificently on a cosmic scale.
Kubrick's universe, and the spaceships he constructed to explore it,
are simply out of scale with human concerns. The ships are perfect,
impersonal machines which venture from one planet to another, and if men
are tucked away somewhere inside them, then they get there, too. But the
achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick's actors seem to sense
this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum.
Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the
face of the universe.
Kubrick begins his film with a sequence in which one tribe of apes
discovers how splendid it is to be able to hit the members of another tribe
over the head. Thus do man's ancestors become tool-using animals. At the
same time, a strange monolith appears on Earth. Until this moment in the
film, we have seen only natural shapes: earth and sky and arms and legs.
The shock of the monolith's straight edges and square corners among the
weathered rocks is one of the most effective moments in the film. Here, you
see, is perfection. The apes circle it warily, reaching out to touch, then
jerking away. In a million years, man will reach for the stars with the
same tentative motion.
Who put the monolith there? Kubrick never answers, for which I suppose
we must be thankful. The action advances to the year 2001, when explorers
on the moon find another of the monoliths. This one beams signals toward
Jupiter. And man, confident of his machines, brashly follows the trail.
Only at this point does a plot develop. The ship is manned by two
pilots, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. Three scientists are put on board in
suspended animation to conserve supplies. The pilots grow suspicious of the
computer, HAL, which runs the ship. But they behave so strangely -- talking
in monotones like characters from Dragnet -- that we're hardly interested.
There is hardly any character development in the plot, then, and as a
result little suspense. What remains fascinating is the fanatic care with
which Kubrick has built his machines and achieved his special effects.
There is not a single moment, in this long film, when the audience can see
through the props. The stars look like stars and outer space is bold and
bleak.
Some of Kubrick's effects have been criticized as tedious. Perhaps
they are, but I can understand his motives. If his space vehicles move with
agonizing precision, wouldn't we have laughed if they'd zipped around like
props on Captain Video? This is how it would really be, you find yourself
believing.
In any event, all the machines and computers are forgotten in the
astonishing last half-hour of this film, and man somehow comes back into
his own. Another monolith is found beyond Jupiter, pointing to the stars.
It apparently draws the spaceship into a universe where time and space are
twisted.
What Kubrick is saying, in the final sequence, apparently, is that man
will eventually outgrow his machines, or be drawn beyond them by some
cosmic awareness. He will then become a child again, but a child of an
infinitely more advanced, more ancient race, just as apes once became, to
their own dismay, the infant stage of man.
And the monoliths? Just road markers, I suppose, each one pointing to
a destination so awesome that the traveler cannot imagine it without being
transfigured. Or as cummings wrote on another occasion, "Listen -- there's a
hell of a good universe next door; let's go."
What follows is my original review of 2001, from 1968; I saw the
movie at its first public screening in LA, the night before its Washington,
D.C. official premiere. Went back to my hotel, banged out a review on
deadline, and hurried it downtown to the Telex machines of Western Union --
this was before laptops and email!). Today I find this first review too
matter-of-fact, but I did give the movie four stars, did write about it
repeatedly, and did and do love it.