There is a malfunction in the AE-35 unit....

Over at Terminus, Drew Vogel has arrived at his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the course of his ongoing look at all of Stanley Kubrick's films.

What always gets me about this film is the minutiae of the daily-life details Kubrick has in the background. There's the famous shot of the flight attendant walking up the circular wall before delivering food to the pilots, and Heywood Floyd's phone call to Earth, but there's a lot of other small-scale detail in the course of the movie. Consider Dr. Floyd's briefing of the scientists at the Clavius Base: it's free of the kind of pretentious "movie speak" that a lesser film would have used, and a surprising amount of Floyd's verbiage in that scene is devoted to bureaucratic administrativia. And a few minutes later, while Floyd rides a shuttle with a couple of scientists out to where the lunar monolith has been "unearthed", they crack open a cooler and eat sandwiches. Imagine that: these fellows are on their way out to see the first true evidence of extraterrestrial life ever found, and they're saying things like, "What is this, chicken?" "Yeah, looks like it. Got any coffee?"

Incidentally, this kind of detail -- the fact that this is a place, with people doing everyday stuff there -- is one facet of why I love the Star Wars movies so much. One of the best "tiny details" of this sort comes in the scene where Ben Kenobi is cutting the power to the tractor beam: while he's working, two stormtroopers are standing near the door, just shootin' the breeze:

"You know what's going on?"

"I dunno, maybe it's another drill."

"Hey, have you seen that new BT-16?"

"Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me about that. They said it's quite a thing to see."

I love stuff like that.

One of the most haunting aspects of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001, which wasn't reflected in the movie, is how Dave Bowman carries on after he has to pull Hal's plug and everyone else on the Discovery is dead. In the book, Bowman buries himself in routine, and struggles to maintain some connection to the human race from which he is now separated by millions of miles. It's all very startling, and I've always appreciated how Clarke depicts Bowman's struggle to maintain his rationality in the face of wonder mounting upon wonder. In this way, the book exceeds the film.

Drew is correct that 2001 should not really be seen in connection with the sequel 2010, although the latter is a decent enough film that really doesn't hurt anything.