Any votes for the most prescient film of the last century? One that looked ahead to a future that most could only dimly perceive.
My vote is for Stanly Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Forward-looking only begins to describe this work. Here is how Michael Benson begins his piece in the Wall Street Journal:
Fifty years ago, invitation-only audiences gathered in specially equipped Cinerama theaters in Washington, New York and Los Angeles to preview a widescreen epic that director Stanley Kubrick had been working on for four years. Conceived in collaboration with the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was way over budget, and Hollywood rumor held that MGM had essentially bet the studio on the project.
The film’s previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film’s iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick’s panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.
Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day’s reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie “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.” And yet that afternoon, a long line—comprised predominantly of younger people—extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee.
Stung by the initial reactions and under great pressure from MGM, Kubrick soon cut almost 20 minutes from the film. Although “2001” remained willfully opaque and open to interpretation, the trims removed redundancies, and the film spoke more clearly. Critics began to come around. In her review for the Boston Globe, Marjorie Adams, who had seen the shortened version, called it “the world’s most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before, or for that matter, anywhere. The film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life.”
Fifty years later, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is widely recognized as ranking among the most influential movies ever made. The most respected poll of such things, conducted every decade by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine, asks the world’s leading directors and critics to name the 100 greatest films of all time. The last BFI decadal survey, conducted in 2012, placed it at No. 2 among directors and No. 6 among critics. Not bad for a film that critic Pauline Kael had waited a contemptuous 10 months before dismissing as “trash masquerading as art” in the pages of Harper’s.
