2001: A Space Odyssey

John Lennon said that this movie should be shown in a temple 24 hrs/day, or something along those lines. Lennon may have been prone to exaggeration, and atheism, but he has a point. Some people say this film is boring or pointless. That amazes me, well actually it doesn’t, since most movies don’t ask anything of their audience, especially patience or imagination. The film itself is simple and slow, but it is beautiful. This might largely be the point. Who knows what Kubrick’s actually thinking? He doesn’t usually seem to have a solid point to get across, but he’s not off the wall for the sake of itself, either, like Godard or Tarantino. He is a storyteller first and foremost, and he tells stories with pictures, which is what "cinema" originally meant. Watching this film is pure cinematic joy to me. It’s a ballet, a tango between man and his time alive, a serene fear of death accompanied by an over-compensation of progress in the face of mortality. Curious as ever, ignorant as ever, obstinate as ever, bloodthirsty as ever, self-doubtful as ever, self-important as ever, self-possessed and unaware as ever. This movie shows mankind as fickle untrusting beasts who hide behind civil hatred and a clean sterile environment. It also shows humankind, and the universe as a whole for that matter, as an outrageously beautiful existence; man and the universe living in a copulatory splendor of partnership. There is a romance between man our world, a torrid affair, really, that lives behind the obvious, beneath history, an underlying beauty, an on-going millennia-old tryst. This is captured by the third person omniscient camera. Such objectivity is how this film relays so much splendor, wonder, beauty, and grace. Few films try to tell a story from outside the boundaries of human life itself, where we breathe, eat, sleep, smoke, screw, drink, travel, taste, smell, hear, see, and feel. This film may show the insides, the inner-makings of fear, stupidity, adventure, and bravery, but it does so from the outside, almost from HAL’s perspective. I agree with Lennon that it should be shown 24 hours a day, but not in a temple, it’s not a holy or divine experience. It is merely beautiful just as mankind is merely beautiful. This is perhaps the best, most profound, most groundbreaking film ever made, of man by man for man. It’s not sacred, but the imagination it ignites within the open-eyed viewer may well be sublime.