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RE: 2010 versus 2001!

Posted by halfnote on March 9, 2008 at 22:52:35:
Wow, patrickU! That is certainly an unconventional opinion! But hey, didn't T.S. Eliot call HAMLET a "stupid play"? He was no intellectual slouch.

But 2001, at least in my mind, is one of the finest films ever made. There is no other film that so eloquently explores the mystery of existence, the nature of life and consciousness, and the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos.

A machine, HAL, a paranoic psychopath, that blurs the distinction between the living and the inanimate and calls into question the very nature of consciuosness?

The whole history of mankind's ascent summed up in a spinning bone that "turns into" a space ship, equating all of our technological advancement as nothing more than logical extension of this ancient insight, and insinuating at the same time, that nothing signficant in the whole history of humanity has happened since?

A dizzying procession of spinning and gyrating sets that remind us that there really is no up, no down, and no reliable points of reference?

A journey across the chasm of space and time that brings us back to where we came from, that shows us that there is neither a here or a there, and that the great embarkation, birth, and the great arrival, death, are one in the same.

There is not a single frame, a single word of dialogue, a note of music [think of spinning Viennese waltzers to the "Blue Danube" and the spinning space station] in this film that is not deeply imagined and thematically consistent with the whole.

But it was not only an artistic landmark, but a technical and production landmark as well, raising film-making to heroic new heights that, I would argue, have yet to be eclipsed.

What other films have been so ambitious? What films in the history of cinema have had such an impact? "Birth of a Nation," "Potemkin," "Citizen Kane"? Only the greatest of the great.