2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey really pulled the rug out from under me, for the film did not live up at all to my reasonable expectations of a feature film.

Stanley Kubrick makes a point of trampling on feature-film conventions, for the film's plot is paper-thin and the characterisation virtually non-existent, in favour of a style in which the visual and sound aesthetics take over. "Barry Lyndon" is plain sailing by comparison.

The film begins back when man was not yet man. A band of apes aggressively guards its waterhole. After an enigmatic encounter with a black monolith, the apes learn to use bones as weapons to defend themselves against the rival band of apes. In the famous metaphorical cut, a prehistoric bone becomes an ultra-modern spacecraft.

In the space age, the mystical monolith appears again. American scientists pick up a signal that the monolith is transmitting towards Jupiter, after which a spacecraft, Discovery, manned by the astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole and a team of scientists in hibernation, is sent off. Bowman is, however, the only one who gets to experience a gigantic black monolith, as the supercomputer HAL 9000 goes haywire and tries to kill the entire crew.

Most of the film left me as one big question mark. What plot there is, is completely incomprehensible. Not least the ending. You actually have to see the sequel "2010" or read Arthur C. Clarke's novel or short story to get some grip on what is going on. Visually the film no doubt left audiences in 1968 utterly awestruck, but it takes a bit more today. There were some very beautiful, poetic sequences, but in general they were too long. And to get anything out of the last twenty minutes - other than a headache - you probably need to have smoked something less than legal.

By the way, try adding one to each letter in HAL; H becomes I, A becomes B, and so on...