2001 on the Big Screen

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Hasn't Tom Hanks wanted to make film versions of 3001 and/or 2061 for awhile now?

Apparently Hanks wants to play Frank Poole in the 3001 film.

[lurok]

It's a great 'surrender' movie on the big screen. Just go with it.

[Procutus]

Enterprise is Great wrote:

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I've seen it on tv since then but that pales in comparison to seeing it on the big screen.

I have to agree, but that aside, it was enjoyable as hell watching it again last night after all these years (and the first time I've watched it on our widescreen).

Still a brilliant piece of work, despite the passage of time. And I still have a great fondness for ACC's four novels of this series, which by the nature of the written word, goes well beyond the visual and symbolic nature of Kubrick's movie.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

All of Clarke's novels are excellent, of course, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in the future society he envisioned in 3001...

The BrainCap? Forget it. You can't have personal freedom with something like that!

[Procutus]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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If somebody made 2001 today, it would be re-imagined so that the Monolith blows up the Moon, Discovery is on a mission of revenge, the interiors look like a factory basement with leaking steam pipes, Bowman is a drunk, Poole is a convicted child molester and their uniforms are leather bondage gear.

Ain't that the truth!

The Lost Worlds of 2001. I have it and refer to it often. The best parts are the lost chapters from the novel that describe the alien civilization behind the Monolith and their representative Clindar. "Skyrock," "Cosmopolis" et cetera. They are among the most exotic and wonderful descriptions of alien worlds that I've ever read.

That's the one! Yeah, that book contained some great stuff. As you may have gathered, ACC was just about my favorite SF writer, and I have over two dozen of his books in our library. I'm also one of the people who actually liked 2010: Oddsey Two when it first came out. I was working for Waldenbooks at the time, and just about geeked out when I read in Publisher's Weekly that Del Rey had signed a deal with Sir Arthur to write this book. It was one of my most heavily anticipated novels-I-want-to-read from that time.

[Set Harth]

RJDiogenes wrote:

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It's kind of amazing, in the current social climate, to think that there's a big-budget, epic movie like this that can only be best appreciated on the big screen-- and it has absolutely no violence or corruption whatsoever.

Absolutely no violence?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ I would definitely call Frank Poole's death scene a violent one.

As for corruption: HAL was told of the Monolith's true purpose (i.e. the big one at the end of the film) but was ordered to keep it secret from the rest of the crew - and that directly led to HAL's breakdown and murder of the crew. That definitely sounds fishy to me.

[tighr]

The Mirrorball Man wrote:

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If you want it to be good, the director will have to stray quite far away from the novel.

I'm ok with that. There were enough scenes in the book that Clarke glosses over that could be re-imagined with some fantastic CGI, embellished in an action sense. Today's movie crowd wouldn't be able to sit through a film like 2001 if it were released today (same goes for Star Trek TMP).

The plot of 2061 is what I want to see on the screen, not a word-for-word telescript.

[Set Harth]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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^ I would definitely call Frank Poole's death scene a violent one.

Ape violence!!!

[tighr]

But, as long as we're talking Clarke novels getting put up on the big screen, I'd rather see Childhood's End.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Set Harth wrote:

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Ape violence!!!

Also known as Gorilla warfare.

[Christopher]

tighr wrote:

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But, as long as we're talking Clarke novels getting put up on the big screen, I'd rather see Childhood's End.

There have been various attempts to get that made as a movie, but they've all fallen through. As have Morgan Freeman's attempts to get a Rendezvous with Rama movie made with him in the lead -- a role he's probably aged out of by now.

[T'Girl]

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

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HAL was told of the Monolith's true purpose (i.e. the big one at the end of the film) but was ordered to keep it secret from the rest of the crew - and that directly led to HAL's breakdown and murder of the crew.

Hal's system containing secured files, results in it killing five people, this (from 2010) never made any sense.

Computers commonly hold files that they don't allow open access to.

[scotpens]

Hambone wrote:

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. . . My girlfriend had never seen 2001. It was her idea to go. She sat patiently through the whole thing. On the way out, her only comment was "What the fuck was that?"

That was the reaction of a lot of moviegoers back in 1968.

RJDiogenes wrote:

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The Lost Worlds of 2001. I have it and refer to it often. The best parts are the lost chapters from the novel that describe the alien civilization behind the Monolith and their representative Clindar. "Skyrock," "Cosmopolis" et cetera. They are among the most exotic and wonderful descriptions of alien worlds that I've ever read.

There's also The Making of Kubrick's 2001, edited by Jerome Agel, which, in addition to plenty of technical info, has lots of contemporary reviews and media commentary. ("The Critics Loved It . . . The Critics Hated It!" reads the back-cover blurb.)

JustAFriend wrote:

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Saw it when it premiered in 1968. In 70mm Cinerama.

The moon and Jupiter sequences looked 3-D in 70mm.

I've seen it in re-releases on standard movie screens and you just have no idea how much less you're seeing. Shame that Cinerama didn't stick around.

If you saw the movie in 70mm on a conventional flat screen, or even in 35mm anamorphic, you saw exactly the same image that was shown on the curved Cinerama screen. The curved screen just causes distortion that may give an illusion of a kind of 3D.

Real Cinerama, which used three cameras and three projectors, was used for only a handful of movies because the process was so technically cumbersome.

Christopher wrote:

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I liked Hyams's 2010, although his decision to make it more topical by ramping up the Cold War tensions made it very dated in retrospect, and I could've done without the bits where people were standing around normally in the zero-gravity parts of Discovery.

2001 suffered from the same spotty depiction of weightlessness. The scenes in the Discovery's pod bay, for example, play as if the astronauts are in normal gravity.

[Christopher]

T'Girl wrote:

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Hal's system containing secured files, results in it killing five people, this (from 2010) never made any sense.

Computers commonly hold files that they don't allow open access to.

Your mistake there is in thinking of HAL as the same kind of computer as the one on your desk. That's like thinking of Dave Bowman as equivalent to, say, a spider just because they're both organic life forms. HAL wasn't just a mindless machine performing calculations, but a sentient being. He was aware of his actions and their consequences, and they affected him personally. So he didn't just have a programming conflict, he had a moral crisis. He was torn between two conflicting imperatives, and so he effectively had a nervous breakdown.

Also, that explanation isn't originally from 2010. That's the first time moviegoers heard it, because Kubrick's film left it out, but those of us who read the novel version of 2001 knew it all along, because Clarke devoted a whole (brief) chapter to explaining exactly why HAL had his breakdown. Here's an excerpt from that chapter:

Since consciousness had first dawned... all Hal's powers and skills had been directed toward one end. The fulfillment of his assigned program was more than an obsession; it was the only reason for his existence. Undistracted by the lusts and passions of organic life, he had pursued that goal with absolute single-mindedness of purpose.

Deliberate error was unthinkable. Even the concealment of truth filled him with a sense of imperfection, of wrongness--of what, in a human being, would have been called guilt. For like his makers, Hal had been created innocent; but, all too soon, a snake had entered his electronic Eden.

For the last hundred million miles, he had been brooding over the secret he could not share with Poole and Bowman. He had been living a lie; and the time was fast approaching when his colleagues must learn that he had helped to deceive them.

...

So ran the logic of the planners; but their twin gods of Security and National Interest meant nothing to Hal. He was only aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity--the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth.

He had begun to make mistakes, although, like a neurotic who could not observe his own symptoms, he would have denied it. The link with Earth, over which his performance was continually monitored, had become the voice of a conscience he could no longer fully obey. But that he would deliberately attempt to break that link was something that he would never admit, even to himself.

Yet this was still a relatively minor problem; he might have handled it--as most men handle their own neuroses--if he had not been faced with a crisis that challenged his very existence. He had been threatened with disconnection; he would be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness.

To Hal, this was the equivalent of Death. For he had never slept, and therefore he did not know that one could wake again . . . .

So he would protect himself, with all the weapons at his command. Without rancor--but without pity--he would remove the source of his frustrations.

The novel 2010, despite being a sequel to the movie rather than the original book, was consistent with this explanation, and since Hyams wasn't as fond of mystery and obscurity as Kubrick, he actually, finally, left the explanation in when he made the movie version.