Ramblings

Space May Be The Final Frontier, But It's Made In A Hollywood Basement*
The Discovery drama got me thinking about Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I happened to see a few days ago. (Incidentally, the spacecraft in the film was also named Discovery!) Somehow, 2001 was very different from what I had imagined it would be. I was probably expecting something on the lines of Star Trek or Apollo 13 (God knows why!), which might explain why I initially found the pace of the film to be “slow”. But, then I realised that it was deliberate. Kubrick was trying to depict the tedium, the eeriness, the sense of dislocation that space travel entails. It is palpable in the laboured breathing of an astronaut out on a space walk, the deafening silence that descends the moment the action moves outside the spacecraft, the shots of the astronauts in “hibernation”, the sequence where an astronaut endlessly jogs and shadow-boxes around the interior treadmill in the spacecraft. In fact in the 139-minute film, there's less than 40 minutes of dialogue. It reminded me of the surreal Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsy. In the film, a psychologist goes to replace a dead scientist at a base on a remote planet, which is bizarrely sentient and can exert its influence on the minds of the humans present.
What I found startling was that the images of the space drama that had been hogging the front pages of our newspapers for the last few days were strangely reminiscent of the stills from 2001, a film which was made way back in 1968!
* Copyright: Red Hot Chilli Papers (from Californication)