Hugh has finally made it all the way through Stanley Kubrick's semenal masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm sure AI won't come up at all. Join the boys as they discuss this one.
In an interview, Clarke was asked where he got his research for the movie. He replied, "from me." The interviewer didn't know that Clarke was the foremost scientist in the field. He is credited as one of the pioneers who created geostationary satellites and lived for a time at the Arecibo Telescope, the giant dish built into the ground Puerto Rico.
The 2001 novel isn't too different. The ape characters have names and narration gives them an inner monologue. The monolith is a pyramid shape in the books that actually interacts with the apes, essentially teaching them how to use tools. There's a section of the book where we see children that have been born on the Lunar colony and how their physiology is fucked up by living in the limited gravity environment. The section where Bowman is left alive after destroying HAL is much longer and more dramatic in the books. He has to work like crazy to keep the ship alive and slowly starts starving and all the while is making peace with the fact that he won't survive and will never see another person again... It's really fucking good. The book lets us into Bowman's head a lot more than the movie. The movie keeps him as more of a symbol for any person to identify with but in the book he feels more like a heroic adventurer. And the ending is WAY different. Bowman coming in contact with the Aliens has a lot of strange imagery that the Stargate sequence chooses to abstract. In the book, Bowman approaches the Monolith in his little pod and falls into the Monolith. The monolith transfers him to some other part of the universe where the void of space is white and the stars are black. He sees from space a planet with a whole civilization on it. Clark makes it clear that the end of the story is Bowman becoming a 4th dimensional being (the space baby lol). They keep him in something like a human zoo and he sees his whole life playing out all at once. Kubrick again abstracts that idea with the montage where Dave continuously sees himself older and then we cut away. I think both are brilliant. You're right, they were written in tandem. The movie takes full advantage of the medium it's using and so does the book, imo. Oh and one thing the movie almost did that's really interesting is that Kubrick tried to depict the Aliens. He tried several methods to create the aliens. Including a weird one where he put a man in a suit covered in dots and placed them in a spotted room. Look up "Kubrick Alien Test Images" on Google and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Something that appears at least annually on my FB feed is Kubrick's angry letter to Warner Bros regarding their making 2010, in which he clearly woke up and chose violence. In the short missive he threatens to come to the studio and beat the producers with the bone prop from 2001 if they proceeded with their plans. I love that guy.
Interstellar kind of homages a bunch of 2001. The moody music, the harder science (minus the love nonsense), sense of scope. Nevermind someone else beat me to it.
In the book Arthur C Clarke explains the "zoo" sequence as, the aliens are playing Dave's life backwards to see if he is worthy or ready for the next stage of evolution. Several of his novels are concerned with how humanity is going to take its next big leap. "The Arrival" is very much like something he would write, which is probably why Vilenueve wants to do Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama."
The original ending was to have the star baby launch all of our nuclear missiles and destroy the Earth, but as Stanley Kubrick had done that with his previous film, Dr. Strangelove, he decided to change. it to a more open-ended and optimistic ending.
I recommend 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke (after reading the first book of course). It is a very good follow up to the first novel. However, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) dir. Peter Hyam, I would not recommend. As a sequel to the first film it is nowhere near as well made or impressive and as an adaptation of the book it makes certain changes that I find much worse. In particular the instructions from the Firstborn about Io has shoehorned on the nose 1980s political commentary.
2010 is what got me interested in 2001. If nothing else it is a good cross section of the state of film narrative in 1984. It's also very topical to that time and is a good sci-fi movie which makes space travel feasible (per Clarke's novel), probably the best and most physics based since 2001. Plus it has HAL! and Dave! PS: The Tim Burton Wonka movie has a cool reference to 2001! But i have only seen it once.
tried watching this movie and i couldnt get past the 15 straight minutes of monkey noises at the start. glad i have a capital O stream to tell me about it
That's the really frustrating thing about this movie; it's 4 hours long when it can easily be edited down to two hours. People love HAL because he's a proper antagonist, but I rarely hear people talk about the shuttle flight to the Moon despite also having fantastic visuals.
I'd say the movie is the worst version of 2001. The book is obviously the best one because it provides context to scenes that otherwise did not make sense. Then there's the comic by Jack Kirby, which is a great adaptation that adds his visual style to the text itself.
