A Philistine Watches "2001: A Space Odyssey"

We watched Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" yesterday. I was terribly disappointed by this movie: most of the scenes were excruciatingly long, the music (when it was present) seemed mostly arbitrary for the scene in question, the "star gate" scene seemed amateurish and long (and looked as if it was designed to induce a headache), the actors were mostly expressionless, etc. On the positive side, I admired the special effects (awesome for 1968) and was pleased to see how they were shown in a matter-of-fact manner instead of the in-your-face style so common these days. I also like the main music score that was composed for this movie and which is the recurring theme throughout the movie.

The painfully long shots reminded me of the "art movies" we had to see in our childhood. At that time, the state television channel Doordarshan (literally "tele vision" in Hindi) was the only thing we could watch on TV. They used to show a movie every Sunday afternoon in one of the regional Indian languages. Being a Malayalee family, we used to watch every such Malayalam movie out of sheer loyalty. Unfortunately for us, Malayalam (like Bangla, but unlike other languages like Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, etc.) seemed to be blessed by a lot of award-winning directors who insisted on making "meaningful cinema" which was anything but meaningful to the vast majority of the population. It was very painful to sit through such movies.

I still remember a particularly painful scene from one such movie (whose name I cannot recall). The first shot shows an empty and untarred village road receding into the distance. After quite a while you notice a small speck on the horizon, very slowly increasing in size, until you can make out that it is a man on a bicycle slowly approaching your viewpoint. He finally passes your viewpoint after about five long and painful minutes. The next shot shifts the viewpoint so that now you see the same cyclist slowly pedal his way through the same road away from you till he again becomes a small speck on the horizon and till you admire the empty road for quite a while again. This shot lasts another five painful minutes. This scene makes you wonder what the point of the director was. Was it to drain all remaining enthusiasm for the movie from the viewer so that he does not apply much thought to the rest of the movie? Was it to filter the true admirer of meaningful cinema, who is masochistic enough to sit through such scenes, from the wannabes? Was it simply to fill up an extra reel of celluloid? Needless to say, after about 10 or 15 of such movies, our family lost all enthusiasm to watch Malayalam movies aired by Doordarshan. Only the advent of cable television brought relief and the ability to watch normal Malayalam cinema on TV.

Back to "2001: A Space Odyssey". In a couple of shots, there is this chorus of male noises in the background that has been warped to sound somewhat like the collective humming of a swarm of bees. That bit is rather painful on the ear as is the very shrill noise emitted by the black monolith on the moon when it is unearthed by humans. I personally also found some bits of well-known western classical music compositions a bit weird and out-of-place for the respective scenes.

The point of this long rant is that I believe that Kubrick could have so easily made this movie much shorter, much more bearable and much more accessible without losing anything of the story. Such a disappointment.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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