Rating:

Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaker of tremendous foresight. While making 2001: A Space Odyssey in the late 1960s, he was able to think to himself at great length of the way the movie would hold up in the future.

“Self,” he thought, “this is something of a dilemma. Though dazzling at present, the special effects I’ve created in the ‘Beyond the Infinite’ sequence will one day be surpassed by those on even a television cartoon. Though it is now the norm for science fiction to use electronic instruments to create an odd, otherworldly score, in less than ten years symphonic soundtracks will again come into fashion, leaving my use of pre-existing classical music to seem like a trite underachievement. Furthermore, my monkey costumes will soon seem utterly absurd, not up to the quality of even a bad Planet of the Apes spoof.”

Fortunately, Kubrick was a genius when it came to making movies and a brilliant solution occurred to him. “I know!” he thought. “The only way to offset these potential difficulties is to make each and every scene in this movie run in excess of 18,000 minutes! It’s perfect!”

Of course, you can tell this is merely conjecture on my part. (Were these really Kubrick’s thoughts, he would no doubt have brought up his questionable use of horribly grating spacesuit breathing sound effects for what feels like hours on end.) But this hypothetical probe into the director’s mind does serve to underline my point: With 2001, Kubrick created an undeniably great film, but in making a great movie he failed to make a good one.

And I don’t think it’s just me. Granted, my attention span is such that I find Tex Avery cartoons to be too slow, but this movie takes plodding along to all new levels. I suppose there are those who would say things like the movie’s technical achievements and its philosophical themes are outweighed by–or even serviced by–the pacing. Those people are dead wrong.

It’s true, the movie’s effects–particularly in the now famous “Beyond the Infinite” sequence mentioned earlier–are eye-popping. But no matter how much a special effect can knock my socks off, I never want to look at nothing but blinking lights for the approximate length of the Roosevelt administration. The sequence is impressive for a moment, but at this length it’s like a laser rock show with no Dark Side of the Moon. The scene of a space shuttle docking early in the movie looks as good as the real thing, but come on! In terms of story, we’re essentially watching a car pull into the driveway for fifteen minutes. It’s like Star Trek: The Motion Picture taken to the nth degree.

As for the movie’s themes, they are indeed profound, in the grandest spirit of true sci-fi: What makes man what he is, where does he come from, where is he going, and what’s out there in the vast blackness of space? By the picture’s end, it is posited that…well, actually, I don’t really have any idea what’s going on or being said. The astronaut goes inside the extraterrestrial monolith, and then there’s two of him at the same time, apparently? He gets old really fast, I guess? His wine glass breaks and it’s definitely a highly symbolic metaphor, but for what exactly god only knows. He’s inside the monolith but then he sees the monolith again inside it. Or maybe there’s another one in there? Then there’s a giant floating fetus and the movie ends after a sequence so confusing you wonder if maybe there’s another reel that got lost. The subheading of A Space Odyssey is apt because, more than anything else, it certainly is odd.

So what we’re left with is an important, groundbreaking move that has endured so long as a cinematic force that the futuristic story is by now set in the past, a movie that will continue to endure for years to come, and a movie I don’t like to watch. For you see, it’s also the longest, most impenetrably perplexing two and a half hours in motion picture history and, for all its greatness, I’ll instead take Star Wars any day of the week.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
• The State of Star Trek
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial