On 12th of September it was the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" movie, and myself as an uncultured caveman had never seen it before, so when I saw it was a special screening in some super-theatre called the "Scape" I thought why not go see it finally! I read the book a few years back and thought it was good, definitely well ahead of its time, and an important staple to the scifi genre for sure.
I'm not very keen on writing reviews but I will jot down a few lines about the movie for the sake of this blog. Honestly as wild and surreal as the book gets I was very curious to see how it was done for the film. The film, of course, didn't have all the events the book had, and while it did try to achieve the same slow pace, it wasn't quite there. I felt especially the hassle with the antenna "malfunctioning" and the build-up to Hal assuming control of the mission was too rushed and thus didn't have the same impact.
Although I was very impressed with the overall quality of the film, the acting, special effects and all were really solid given the year it was made in, even the trippy scenes at the end were impressive. My favorite part however was realizing the impact some features in the book and the film have had on pop culture in general. Only watching the English version of the film did some of the references and tropes I've seen around open up -- for example the bittersweet song "Daisy, Daisy", which is popular to give for AI or robot characters to sing -- that didn't properly come across in the Finnish translation of the book*. Hal as a character has had a tremendous impact on the way AI characters are depicted and I find that to be a good and interesting thing. He was written as a smart, neutral entity that people treated as if another person, but with his own, quite human-like, quirks.
I heard from a friend that Arthur C. Clarke had written two more books in the series, which took me by complete surprise. I assume they just weren't as successful as the first book. My books-to-read backlog is currently too long to read them right away, but I've stashed away the information for later use.
If you enjoy scifi and want to explore the roots of the genre, I do recommend looking this one up. 👍
*As I found out by doing a quick Googling while writing this entry, the "Daisy Bell" song was originally "sung" by an IBM 7094 computer in 1961, but its spread was undoubtedly influenced by Clarke's book and Kubrick's film.
No comments:
Post a Comment