About Stanley Kubrick, Part 3
Excerpts from Piers Bizony's 2001 filming the future, (Aurum Press, 1994)

Kubrick's epic was more than three years in the making, and it came in at an officially quoted budget of well over $10 million.
At the end of March 1968, MGM executives previewed their investment in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They couldn't decide if they were looking at the biggest financial disaster in MGM's history or at one of the greatest movies ever made. At the press previews in Washington, Los Angeles, and New York during late March and early April 1968, the critics were equally puzzled. Obviously, what was on screen represented an incredible technical achievement—they were all in agreement about that. But just what kind of a movie was it? It didn't seem to have any beginning, any middle, or any proper ending. Nobody even spoke in it for the first half-hour! Reviewers had gone into the screening rooms expecting a traditional drama of human crises, love, hate, battle, and resolution among the stars. What they got was one man's obsessively detailed, multi-million-dollar waking dream of humankind's evolutionary and technological destiny. "An epic achievement," said Life magazine's reviewer; while Renata Adler wrote with greater conviction in The New York Times that 2001 "is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its fanatical devotion to detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring." In a rare error of judgement, the great Pauline Kael described 2001 in her Harpers magazine article as a "monumentally unimaginative'" piece of work. The film's strange mix of gleaming technology, godlike aliens, and petty human insignificance was too much for most critics. Some of them appreciated the complex special effects, but just as many felt confused, irritated, and bored. The movie 2001 was unapologetically ambiguous. It seemed to offer catastrophe and redemption in the same breath. It was unbearably slow, yet deeply thrilling. It was sexless, emotionless, cold, yet weirdly sensuous, debauched in rich colors, awash with swirling shapes and mechanistic eroticism. There was little action, yet tremendous things happened (though exactly what things, nobody was quite sure). Next page