Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A House Odyssey has been praised in all manner of phrases because it got here out greater than half a century in the past. An early advertising campaign, faucetping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, referred to as it “the ultimate journey”; within the equivalently fashionable parlance of the twenty-twenties, one might say that it “goes onerous,” in that it takes no few daring, even unprecedented aesthetic and dramatic turns. The brand new video essay from Simply One Extra Factor even describes 2001 as “the onerousest movie Kubrick ever made” — which, given Kubrick’s uncomprofessionalmising ambitions as a moviemaker, is certainly saying somefactor.
In one of many many interview clips that constitute the video’s 23 minutes, Steven Spielberg remembers his conversations with Kubrick within the final years of the master’s life. “I need to make a film that modifications the shape,” Kubrick would typically say to Spielberg. Arguably, he’d already performed so with 2001, which continues to launch its first-time viewers into an experience in contrast to any they’ve had with a film earlier than. In contrast to the extra substance-inclined members of his generation, Spielberg went into the theater “clear as a whistle,” however “got here out of there altered” neverthemuch less. It didn’t require medication to appreciate in any case; “that movie was the drug.”
This isn’t to say that 2001 is purely and even primarily an summary work of cinema. In collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put an excessive amount of technical thought into the movie’s imaginative and prescient of the long run, with its well-appointed area stations, its artificially intelligent computers, its video calls, and its tablet-like cellular gadgets. Working within the years earlier than the moon landing, says Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Movies creator Paul Duncan, they “needed to completely visualize, and make actual, issues that had never occurred.” Such was the actualism of their speculative work (as much as and including imagining how Earth would look from area) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the actual Apollo 11 astronauts might describe their experience simply: “It was like 2001.”
Conceived within the warmth of the House Race, the movie envisions a terrific deal that didn’t come to move by the eponymous yr — and certainly, has but to materialize nonetheless at this time. “We haven’t fairly receivedten to artificial intelligence as portrayed,” says star Keir Dullea in a Fiftieth-anniversary interview. “Virtually, however not fairly.” Nonetheless, even since then, the technology has come far sufficient alongside that few of us can ponder the curlease state of AI without quicklyer or later hearing the ominously well mannered voice of HAL somethe place at the back of our minds. The saga of astronauts curleasely stranded on the International House Station does contrast harshly with 2001’s visions of stable and well-functioning life in outer area — however as a story, it’d effectively have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.
