Interstellar vs. 2001

“I’m not going to say 2001 is a great film just because you explained it to me. If it has to be explained – if the plot is some mystery that only certain people are allowed to get because they read some article about it – it’s simply not a good movie.”

That was the sentiment one friend expressed when debating the merits of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a film that baffled audiences when it was released in 1968, and to this day it’s often dissed as some kind of esoteric, elitist “art film” that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

For those people, there’s a remake of 2001 that explains the whole plot. It’s called Interstellar. And it provides a good argument in favour of 2001’s lack of obvious narrative. I loved Interstellar, but it also reminded me that sometimes a director is wise to leave some things to an audience’s imagination.

I

2001's monolith orbiting
Jupiter, and Interstellar's
wormhole near Saturn

'm being cheeky calling Interstellar a remake, but the parallels are obvious. An alien intelligence of mysterious origin places a “calling card” of sorts near a planet in the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2001 it was the monolith orbiting Jupiter; in Interstellar it’s a wormhole plonked near Saturn. A crew is dispatched by a secretive government to investigate. By the end of each film, a lone astronaut has been hauled into a special-effects laden “alternate dimension” which eventually leads him back home to save a doomed Earth from man-made catastrophe. In 2001, the astronaut was reborn in spirit form as the “star child” to avert a nuclear war (the nuclear bit explained only in the Arthur C. Clarke novel, written in tandem with the director’s screenplay). In Interstellar, it’s a whole other mind-bending phantasma that saves mankind from drought and plague. Both films are an ambitious blending of science-reality and imagination.

2001's orbiting space station

Director Stanley Kubrick intended 2001: A Space Odyssey to be cinema’s first serious science fiction film. Prior to 2001, all depictions of aliens and outer space were only found in cheesy B-movies – laughable exercises in bad taste with titles such as The Man From Planet X or The Brain from Planet Arous (and let’s not forget Plan 9 From Outer Space, the first movie to gain a “so-bad-it’s-good” following). 2001 was the first film to show an audience a faithful portrayal of moon landings and what it would be like to orbit the earth in space stations. Moonwalkers from the original Apollo missions to today’s “rock star” astronaut Chris Hadfield have called it the most realistic space sci-fi ever made. What’s most remarkable is that production of the film was completed before man ever stepped foot on the moon – which meant that 2001’s shot of the Earth from the moon’s surface was seen in theatres only a few months before the real thing was viewed and captured by humans. Both the film and the astronauts’ photos looked nearly the same.


At Clavius moon base in 2001

Kubrick didn’t intend for 2001 to be such a vague and ambiguous film. He and pioneering sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke started off with a more literal story. Their collaboration was intended to result in Kubrick's film and Clarke's novel being released as complementary projects. But Kubrick altered the film significantly during production when certain elements didn’t translate well from page to screen. The original script for 2001 had narration to guide the audience through the action, but this was dropped when Kubrick found the voiceover trite and distracting. The film worked much better, he thought, left in the abstract. Those who love the film would agree.

So now we have Interstellar, which gives us an indication of what 2001 would have been like with every detail explained along the way. And, to be honest, I found myself thinking “huh?!” just as many times as I did the first time I saw 2001. Despite the near-three-hour running time, Interstellar is packed with enough ideas to fill another hour’s worth of movie. Which is funny, because 2001 has a nearly identical run time, but where plot exposition could have been crammed in, we got lengthy, introspective sequences devoid of dialogue (40 minutes of speech in the entire film) – and the experience is far richer for it.

And I’m not dumping on Interstellar at all. It’s a wondrous piece of cinema full of bold ideas and imagery like I’ve never seen in any film before. By its end, I felt completely displaced – mostly awed, partly disturbed – in a way the original audience of 2001 might have been in 1968. In that regard, writer-director Christopher Nolan achieved the ultimate success a director could hope for.

Interstellar’s strengths transcend its flaws. But those flaws are nonetheless distractions. One is its editing; I had trouble at times figuring who was doing what and why. And then there’s the attempt to cram too much explanation into the dialogue. I appreciated that Nolan wanted us to identify with what we were watching. Some of the exposition enhanced the fun of the movie – for instance, the descriptions of why a wormhole would appear as a three-dimensional sphere, or the various ways in which time moves slower when travelling around different types of phenomena in space. But there were many other details thrown at us with such haste that they only created further questions and gaps in logic. Which made me wonder why this approach would have made 2001 a better film. If we still don’t entirely get what we’re watching, then why not just let us revel in the mystery?

From the stargate sequence in 2001

This especially goes for the ending (which I can’t give away, because it’s byzantine and nonsensical). Let me say that the finale of Interstellar was one of the most rapturous, illusory, and enthralling  moments I’ve seen in a cinema. The final act of 2001 had a similar mind-blowing final reel. Nolan’s great achievement is in creating a spectacular view into new dimensions that rivals what Kubrick gave us in 2001’s “stargate” sequence – considered the foundation of special effects in the decades before CGI came about. (One of the reasons Nolan’s cinematic worlds look so inventive, whether in original works like Inception or the comic-book Batman movies, is that he shuns CGI whenever possible).

The only downfall to Nolan’s approach in Interstellar’s grandest sequence is that he employed a narrative device to explain what our astronaut was experiencing in the new dimension. Which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing had the explanation made sense. But when you’re travelling through new dimensions, how can any rationalization be comprehensible? In that regard, Kubrick did the right thing just letting us experience it. In both films we leave the theatre scratching our heads, but Nolan's attempt to translate the action felt silly at best, insulting at worst. Insulting, how? With Interstellar, we feel stupid for not getting all the science thrown at us. With 2001, we can blame the director, if we feel so inclined.

There were many other moments throughout the film where the details and descriptions took me out of the moment. I don’t have the benefit of being able to re-view the film and quote dialogue for specific examples, but, in general, I found that characters were verbalizing particulars and procedures that would have, in reality, been discussed and drilled into their heads during mission training or other appropriate moments. For instance – the fact that the onboard computer, TARS, was programmed with a sense of humour, or that he was programmed to be dishonest when it was warranted and wouldn’t hurt the mission; I don’t think the crew would be discovering this stuff during liftoff. It was just thrown in for the convenience of moving the story along.

Astronaut Bowman doing a little maintenance on HAL in 2001

You could say that this was artistic licence. Then again, Kubrick took artistic licence by not explaining at all that his onboard computer, HAL, sabotaged the mission because of a neurosis caused by being programmed to both be honest 100% of the time and yet lie about the mission’s purpose – a detail only available to those who read the novel. Some would say that unrealistically timed explanations in movie plots are more satisfying than drawing them out in realistic-but-lackluster scenes. It's easier to have Joe Explainer show up on the scene in the form of a detective or long-lost relative to utter, "It's a shame Bob killed his wife for the insurance money, because she had a terminal illness anyway, but he didn't know that, and now he has to spend the rest of his life in jail."

Others would say that Kubrick’s method compliments the audience’s intelligence by creating a sense of wonder and mystery. No human in 2001 understood why HAL took the actions he did, nor did anyone on-screen understand the monolith’s origin or meaning, nor did astronaut Dave Bowman comprehend his transformation in the stargate. To have the reason exposed by some contrived plot convention would have felt false.

I will be honest and admit that I didn’t like 2001 all that much on first viewing, though I was fortunate that my first experience seeing it was on the big screen during a revival in 1980. The fact that I was 12 years old probably contributed to my befuddlement (I grew up with the action and splashy effects of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).  It wasn’t until the next year that something clicked. Channel flipping on TV, I caught the film at the beginning of the “moon” sequence and was entranced right to the end. I still didn’t entirely get it on a conscious level, but some deeper part of my mind was understanding something. I knew it was leading to that psychedelic fall through the alien stargate and into the surreal bedroom where Dave Bowman would die and be reborn. When the film finished, it was the same feeling I had at the end of Interstellar – stunned by the beauty, but wondering if I’d sleep that night.

Over the years, I came to understand 2001 by reading the novel and delving into all the articles, critiques, and books written about the film – and through countless discussions with fans and detractors, and realizing its influence on the sci-fi movies I grew up with.

The difference was this – after first viewing, I knew I’d want to see 2001 again, but Interstellar, despite its originality and splendor, doesn’t seem to demand a second go ‘round. 2001’s lack of dialogue made me fall in love with its images and ideas, whereas Interstellar’s barrage of verbosity and jam-packed plot will probably make for a tiresome exercise to sit through a second time. I want to see the film again, but I don’t want to hear it.

I’m sure many will disagree with that assessment for legitimate reasons. I know of many people who grew impatient with 2001’s pace (what I call quiet and meditative others call slow and frustrating), and I guess those folks would enjoy delving into Interstellar's dialogue a second or third time to try to grasp all the details.

~~~~~

"I don't want to [give my own interpretation of the film] because I think that the power of the ending is based on the subconscious emotional reaction of the audience, which has a delayed effect. To be specific about it, certainly to be specific about what it's supposed to mean, spoils people's pleasure and denies them their own emotional reactions."

– Stanley Kubrick interviewed in Eye magazine

(Agel, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Modern Library, pp. 248-49; date unavailable)

The monolith prepares astronaut Bowman for rebirth in 2001