Celluloid Confetti

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favourite films, quite literally ever.

People have criticised Stanley Kubrick for his cold, emotionless reading of the human condition, but I thought his films - lovingly crafted bundles of Asperger Syndrome they may well be - are designed to offer a gateway (a star-gateway, if you will) for the audience to feel and express emotions of their own.

Kubrick once wrote:

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

Well, if you re-read the above quote, and replace the phrase “the universe” with “Stanley Kubrick”, you will understand how I see his films.

I suspect that Kubrick was dimly aware that his audiences possessed emotions of their own, and so perhaps that’s why he didn’t feel the need to have them pouring out of the screen like blood out of an elevator.

My own reaction to 2001 was is largely one of wonder, tinged with sympathy for the plight of everyone’s favourite faulty computer.

Well, I was able to revisit these emotions the other weekend when I got my sticky paws on the Blu-Ray release of 2001, which should be arriving in the UK in the new year (like most Warners titles, it’ll also be available on HD DVD).

There’s already a perfectly respectable DVD release of 2001 (I got the version which came with the soundtrack CD for Christmas a few years ago), so what’s the point in shelling out for it all over again?

Well, not to sound like a stuck record, but the detail and clarity is stunning. 70mm films, which look great on DVD, come into their own in High-Definition, and watching 2001 again reminded me how well Kubrick’s superlative sci-fi has stood up over the years.

When I was a young ‘un, I was fascinated by the scenes of astronauts aboard the Discovery, roaming around the giant, rotating control room. I poured over stills from the film trying to work out how this cunning piece of optical trickery had been achieved.

Little could I have suspected that the entire set had been constructed, for real, and that the petrified actors were running at the bottom of a huge, multi-ton hamster wheel.

I also loved the opening Dawn of Man sequences, showing a band of Australopithecines and their monolith-augmented struggle for survival. Again, it never occurred to me that these scenes were shot in a studio, and not in the planes of Africa’s Rift Valley (On Blu-Ray, you can just about make out the texture used to project the backdrop against).

And the effect shots of space ships moving through the void still look magnificent today. This is partly due to the scale of the ‘miniatures’ used (the Discovery model was around 30 foot long) and also due to the complete absence of matte lines.

‘Travelling mattes’ are used in optical effects where two objects overlap, to prevent the background object from bleeding through to the foreground. That’s why moving objects in special effects shots sometimes have black lines round them.

Kubrick got round this in the space shots by never having two objects overlap. So the elaborate choreography of the famous Blue Danube space-station docking sequence is even more elaborate than I first imagined.

So far, so Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but the real fun of 2001 is working out what it’s all supposed to ‘mean’, and that’s why I find myself re-watching it again and again.

What’s with the floating baby? What does the monolith actually do? And just why does HAL go barmy? It’s all very strange, all very ambiguous, and I think that why 2001 has aged far better than Peter Hyams‘ far-too-tidy-by-half semi-sequel, 2010 (1984).

Well, I’ve heard lots of explanations for why HAL tries to kill the astronauts, and I haven’t liked most of them. So I’ll offer my favourite one here, sort of as an early, unwanted, Xmas present.

First of all, I think HAL makes a mistake, pure and simple, in predicting a fault in the ship’s communications module.

So when HAL uncovers the astronauts’ plot to disconnect him, his duty to the Discovery’s mission (the true importance of which he is forbidden to reveal to the astronauts) combined with a very sentient sense of self-preservation, leads him to snuff out the meddling apes one by one.

This leads to the film’s most memorable, and for me, most affecting confrontation, as the surviving astronaut executes the slow and excruciating murder of the troublesome computer by disconnecting HAL’s memory, block by block.

It’s the same struggle for survival that opened the film. But this time the setting is the computer room of a spaceship rather than the plains of Africa. And this time the murder weapon is not a bone club, but a tiny screwdriver.

Connections like that really tickle my funnybone! What’s your favourite 2001 moment?