Feb. 1st, 2008

fr_defenestrato: (keir)
2001: A Space Odyssey turns 40 years old soon (April 6). Since I was a kid I've had a troubled relationship with this movie. On the one hand, it's deadly dull. As soporific as movies get, unless you delve into those few Warholian exercises in inaction. On the other, it's undeniably fascinating in its focus and its method. It's like a great Mahler symphony (though saddled now by the near-cartoonish familiarity of those pieces by two different Strausses which it launched into the public consciousness) or perhaps an Entish council: It takes a very long time to say anything, but everything it says is worth saying. Except perhaps the two (count 'em, two) pedestrian birthday messages between Earth and spaceships. (Seriously, the latter one would have been enough as it allows HAL to wish Frank a happy birthday; the former entails an appallingly bad child performance, a little girl who doesn't even for a second look or sound like she's chatting with her daddy.)

With the blurst, er, first inklings of this sonnet in mind, I rewatched 2001 for the first time in many years. I can't deny I did chess puzzles through some sections. But the elegance of Kubrick's treatment, the WAY he shows us the people and machines going about their business, is still startling. No movie has ever achieved the sterile beauty of this film.

The last line, the punchline, as it were, is actually from 2010: The Year John Lithgow Wore Out His Welcome, but it's presented as a transmission from Bowman during the time he gets sucked into the stargate or wormhole or whatever.

Odysseus got off light: a patient wife,
A canny son, a brave if hopped-up crew,
A finite sea and sky, a finite life,
Rough beasts to kill and suchlike deeds to do;
Dave Bowman, by comparison, is screwed
Before he starts—kept clueless by his bosses
And saddled with this psycho cyber-dude
Called HAL, who kills his shipmate Frank and tosses
His body out the hatch—so Bowman fights
And slays HAL; then, for no apparent reason
The 'verse goes wonky: seeing flashing lights
And pictures of himself in every season
Of life, from fetus to Methuselah,
He goes, 'My god... it's full of stars...' Well, DUH!

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