I just watched “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “2010: The Year We Made Contact” on back-to-back nights over the weekend. It was actually at the behest of a friend who wanted to check out the Kubrick classic, and follow up with the sequel for a kind of closure plus a look at how the direction, film-making styles and periods varied. The first film was out in 1968 and the second in 1984, both of which came as a bit of a surprise. I don’t remember “2001: A Space Odyssey” being released that far back, and I didn’t think there was that big of a gap between the two films – and the surprises didn’t end there.
In ’2001′, I was blown away by the length of some of the sequences. In fact, the entire movie felt exceptionally long. It’s probably the longest 2 hours and 20 minutes I’ve ever experienced. I suppose it’s possible that when I watched it previously it was edited “for television” but I can’t honestly remember. I actually laughed out loud when the “INTERMISSION” card popped up with a bit of Strauss playing in the background. Then I got up and took a break… but the thing that really surprised me was the score. I simply don’t remember that much vocal ensemble work being in the film. Again, this could go back to the edit I might have seen when I was a kid, but damn, that is some seriously smeared chorus! The last 20 minutes or so seemed like an experimental college film. I can imagine the impression it might have left with audiences when it originally screened. It’s also easy to see where Lucas, Spielberg, Scott, and Cameron got a large part of their inspiration in how to portray spaceship environments in film.
’2010′ was a more linear and more in-control film (at just over the standard two hours). Again, most of the things that surprised me were pleasant. Helen Mirren is even hotter with a Russian (Soviet) accent, and John Lithgow is totally believable as a non-wierdo/psycho character – color me surprised. The biggest disappointment of the second film was the antithesis of the first – the score. I am simply flummoxed. There are so many other things about that film that are either true to the original or thoughtfully new – and the original score for 2010 was neither. Again, I suppose it was a sign of the times to use a digital synthesizer – it was the mid-80′s after all. But the absolute lack of variety or craft in the production was disheartening. Get Don Davis to update the score, and it would probably play as well or better than any sci-fi movie of the past 25 years. As it is, the score is ten times more clunky and dated than the politics that are threaded through the dialog and story line.
After the second film was done, my friend and I ruminated on the two. They were both very enjoyable in their own right, and both had elements of timelessness while also being somewhat hopelessly dated (and not just from the titles). Seeing them back-to-back accentuated their differences from one another, and that also heightened the quaintness of seeing what filmmakers from that time thought would be believable in “looking ahead” to years that are nearly in our rear-view mirror. I consider myself a sci-fi buff, and I’m sure there are hundreds of projects whose technology completely outstrips anything I saw over the weekend – but I wonder if they’ll capture the imagination in the way that Stanley Kubrick (and ostensibly Arthur C. Clarke) did back in 1968.
