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2001 was finally released in April 1968, accompanied by great hoopla and excitement. As a 70mm Super Panavision spectacular, 2001 was a prestige picture promoted on the same level as such films as Lawrence of Arabia and How the West Was Won. In major markets, 2001 was offered with advanced booking and reserved seating, and the picture was promoted as “an epic drama of adventure and exploration”. Publicity materials featured the technology portrayed in the film, like space stations and moon bases, and played up its scientific realism.[14] Early audiences consisted mainly of the older, more affluent people that traditionally went to prestige pictures. Unlike earlier Cinerama spectaculars, however, 2001 lacked a traditional Hollywood plot structure, dialogue, or resolution. It made little or no attempt to explain things to the audience: rather it presented images, sound, and music in a way that made little sense to many present. The film begins four million years ago at the "Dawn of Man". In the prehistoric African savanna, a mysterious black monolith appears, prompting our distant ape ancestors to learn how to use the first tools to kill for food. Cutting to the near future, the audience follows Dr. Heywood Floyd, a bureaucratic space scientist, as he takes a routine trip to the Moon. It is revealed that a four million-year-old monolith has been discovered in a lunar crater. When exposed to the light of the sun, the monolith sends out a powerful electronic signal. The film then skips ahead eighteen months, to the first manned space mission to Jupiter. The ship's human astronauts, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, are forced to consider disconnecting the super-intelligent HAL 9000 computer that runs their ship when it makes an error. Learning of this, the computer succeeds in killing everyone but Dave, who disconnects it and finds out about the previously secret discovery of the lunar monolith. Arriving at Jupiter, Dave discovers another black monolith orbiting the gas giant. Flying into it, he experiences a fantastical 23-minute light show before landing in a Louis XVI style decorated room. There he ages rapidly before encountering the final monolith, which turns him into a newborn "Star Child" and returns him to look at the planet Earth from orbit. After press screenings on April 1 and 2, the film premiered in New York City on April 3, 1968. Despite MGM’s aggressive promotion of the film with taglines like, “the most technically complex movie ever made,” and, “you’ve never seen anything like it,”[15] its unconventionality shocked and surprised even the most experienced critics. Roger Ebert reports that at the Los Angeles premiere on April 4, Rock Hudson stormed out of the Pantages Theater asking, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”[16] As Alexander Walker wrote in his 1971 book, Stanley Kubrick Directs, “2001 reached its initial audience slightly in advance of their expectations; acceptance of the film’s radical structure and revolutionary content was slower to come. The first wave of critics wrote mixed reviews. While seeing a new use of film, they reacted with responses geared to conventionally shaped films.”[17] The most common complaint of early press reviews of 2001 was its long length and slow pace. Not counting overture, entr’acte, and walkout music, the film was approximately 161 minutes long. Due to its slow and deliberate pace, it seemed much longer for many audience members. New York Times critic Renata Adler noted that “people on all sides when I saw it were talking throughout the film.” Joseph Morgenstern of Newsweek described parts of the film as a “crashing bore,”[26] and Arthur Schlesigner Jr., declared it “morally pretentious, intellectually obscure, and inordinately long.”[27] Kubrick was “confused and puzzled” over the difficulty and lack of understanding reported by early audiences. After the Los Angeles premiere, Kubrick decided to tighten the film. With editor Ray Lovejoy, he cut approximately 19 minutes of footage, including a montage of life aboard the Discovery and an entire sequence detailing the preparation for Poole’s EVA. Title cards were added before the “Jupiter Mission -18 months later” and the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” segments, and a brief shot of the monolith was added to the “Dawn of Man” segment to better orient audiences.[28] Arguing that he did not believe the trims made a crucial difference and only affected some “marginal people,” Kubrick contended, “it does take a few runnings to decide finally how long things should be, especially scenes which do not have narrative enhancement as their guide.”[29] Kubrick’s goal was to make the film more accessible to the preview and press screening audiences, the vast majority of whom were between the ages of 35 and 60. It is questionable whether these changes would have made any difference to the younger people who eventually became the film’s core audience. While most critics found 2001 merely confusing or boring, some of the most renowned film theorists of the time gave it almost universally negative reviews. Andrew Sarris, a critic and film theorist generally “more concerned with the director’s attitude toward the spectacle than the spectacle itself,” was irked by Kubrick’s detached style of directing. In his initial review for the Village Voice on April 11, 1968, he dismissed 2001 as “a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.” Although Pauline Kael publicly clashed with Sarris on several occasions, she shared his disdain for 2001, describing it as “trash masquerading as art.” In an essay entitled “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Kael called the film “monumentally unimaginative” and “the biggest amateur movie of them all.” Her writings about 2001 make numerous references to its appeal among the counterculture and the “tribes” of youth who watched it under the influence of illegal substances. Stanley Kaufman argued that the content of a film, as characterized by its script, performances, and technical merit, is far more important than stylistic “stunts, camera techniques, and cutting.”[18] Although 2001’s special effects impressed Kaufman, he argued that Kubrick had overemphasized them at the expense of the plot, dialogue, and acting. He argued stated that Kubrick’s obsession with both the technology of the film and the future had “numbed his formerly keen feeling for attention span.” Kaufman summarized his review by saying that “in the first 30 seconds, this film gets off on the wrong foot and, although there are some amusing spots, it never recovers. Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is a major disappointment.”[19] While the more conservative East Coast critics gave some of the most negative reviews, 2001 was received well by reviewers on the West Coast. Gene Youngblood wrote an enthusiastic review for the Los Angeles Free Press entitled “2001: A Masterpiece.” In his 1970 book, Expanded Cinema, he devoted two chapters to the film and declared it an “epochal achievement of cinema”.[20] Similarly, Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called 2001 “a milestone, a landmark for a spacemark, [sic] in the art of film.” Despite his annoyance at the ambiguous ending, he argued that even that “cannot really compromise Kubrick’s epic achievement, his mastery of the techniques of screen sight and screen sound to create impact and illusion.”[21] Young film critics on college campuses around the country had a lot of positive things to say about 2001. Both the Harvard Crimson and the University of Wisconsin’s Daily Cardinal published eight-page reviews, some of the longest they had ever published. The Crimson’s review, written by Tim Hunter, Stephen Kaplan, and Peter Jaszi, was so comprehensive that it was reprinted in the journal Film Heritage. Focusing not on the film’s technological achievements and special effects, which most of the favorable mainstream reviews had done, the Harvard students looked instead at the film’s themes of death, dehumanization, and the importance of mankind’s evolutionary and technological progression. In doing so, they went so far as to take issue with Arthur Clarke’s assessment of Bowman’s journey as “the end of an Ahab-like quest on the part of men driven to seek the outer reaches of the universe.” Instead, they argued that the death and rebirth of Bowman as the Star Child is part of a cyclical progression. In their final analysis, they acknowledged that it might be a few years before the wonder of the film’s special effects wears off before 2001 can be objectively judged.[22] In light of the positive response 2001 was receiving from mass audiences and other reviewers, some critics who had given the film a negative review went to see it a second time. Free from the initial shock and prepared for its unconventionality, many took a closer look and decided to recant and publish positive reviews. As one author put it, “accompanying this truly popular response came the more or less public realigning of some critical opinions and even in a few cases downright recanting.”[23] Both Kubrick and Clarke responded to the critical reception of 2001 with the argument that it did not really matter what critics said, so long as the general public found the film stimulating and engaging. When Playboy asked Kubrick how he accounted for the negative reviews of Renata Adler, Andrew Sarris, and others, he responded that almost all of the hostile reviews were from New York critics. He had some very harsh words for his hometown reviewers, saying that “perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.” He minimized their impact, however, pointing out that although it was a crass way to evaluate one’s work, 2001 was on its way to becoming one of the most commercially successful films in MGM’s history.[24] Arthur Clarke was more direct when he wrote, “as for that dwindling minority who still don’t like it, that’s their problem, not ours. Stanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank.” He argued that the reevaluation by some critics was simply a normal reaction to “a new and revolutionary form of art”, and that those who remained hostile probably did so because they had difficulty facing the film’s religious implications.[25] |
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