Via Andrea James I learned that they have issued a new trailer for this film that many of us have seen more than once, to commemorate the re-release of the film in the UK. I hope they show it in a wide-screen theater locally since I would definitely go and see it again for the fourth (?) time.
Here’s the new trailer.
And here’s the original trailer from 1968, which had no dialogue at all.
Never cared for the film. Nice look, with great music, but too ponderous, self-important, with heavy religious overtones. Could’ve used a bit of comic relief; maybe bumping into a teapot on the way to Jupiter…
Actually, the toilet scene in the moon shuttle was amusing. Imagine having to read all those instructions when you’re desperate to go.
I think 2001: A Space Odyssey overrated as well. It is one of my least favourite Kubrick movies. Part 1, Dawn of Man, is excellent, but the rest is more style than substance.
Rob and mnb0,
This is heresy!
I mostly like 2001, especially when you consider the technical limitations that they had to deal with. However, the “stargate” sequence is waaaay too long. It does provide a nice bathroom break, though, so I guess that’s a good thing.
This article may be appropriate:
“Mourners Unable To Comprehend Last 20 Minutes Of Kubrick’s Life”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/mourners-unable-to-comprehend-last-20-minutes-of-k,4183/
I love the movie and watch it every once in a while.
The thing I don’t like about it is that it is based on Intelligent Design, that an intercession by an extraterrestrial intelligence is required to explain human traits naturally selected in our evolutionary history.
Only four times???
About ET’s genetically engineering the emergence of humanity, I think that that movie did it a LOT better than Erich von Daeniken had done. His book Chariots of the Gods? had come out about when that movie had come out.
There’s so much that is very jarring by present-day standards.
The present-day world seems very much behind that movie’s world, for starters. The ISS and its predecessors don’t look like that early-1960’s idea of space stations in the movie, but instead like collections of tin cans, and they don’t even have centrifugal fake gravity. We aren’t anywhere close to building a big moonbase. Only 24 people have gone beyond low Earth orbit so far, and they were all Apollo astronauts. As to interplanetary space, every spacecraft sent beyond the Moon has been roughly the size of the maintenance pods in that movie, at least if one ignores the solar panels and other projections of many of them.
Unexpected computer misbehavior is central to that movie’s plot, but many of us have had oodles of experience with computer crankiness. That movie also had a sort of mainframe model of computing, something which was common in earlier decades. But nowadays, instead of a big central brain, we have oodles of networked ganglia, some big, some small, and some in-between. Also, instead of one screen displaying one kind of data, which the spacecraft had several of, we have software that can make lots of virtual screens in each display: GUI windows. Artificial intelligence is far behind the human-scale AI of that movie, something that is one of the great disappointments of my life.
Isaac Asimov said at one point in the movie: “They’re breaking the First Law! They’re breaking the First Law!” Someone calmed him down by saying “Isaac, why don’t you strike them with lightning?”
Well of course, forty five years after the fact it looks dated and ponderous. But when it first came out it was going places and contemplating things few people has considered. It was shockingly new, different, and its conception of space, spaceflight, and the future, both beautiful and dangerous, and the message that space exploration and technology, the computer HAL 9000 running everything but facing a dilemma, might change how we saw ourselves were enthralling and edgy. A whole lot of people saw it, said wow, and got back in line to see it again. They/we had never seen anything like it and simply couldn’t take it all in at one sitting. The visual effects were, in their day, stunning. The story was sweeping and profound. It was completely unlike anything people had seen before.
Of course, after more than forty years, after most of the main concepts, unique visual effects and plot points copied to the point of banality, it lacks the impact on the audience it had so long ago.
And the people who saw it back when it was new still have the emotional tint to their memories of how they felt when they saw it back then.