I’ve never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. There, I’ve said it. It wasn’t easy. When your job is writing about films, not having watched Stanley Kubrick’s space epic is like being a taxi driver who hasn’t passed the driving test. It’s a basic qualification. Because 2001 is officially a masterpiece: number six on Sight & Sound’s list of greatest movies; the best sci-fi ever made according to Time Out and the Guardian. It’s one of those films that movie lovers all seem to have watched at an impressionable age. Christopher Nolan has spoken about going with his dad when he was seven to see a rerelease in Leicester Square.
I’m not sure how I didn’t see it growing up. My dad is a film buff who adores Kubrick and never bothered too much about age certificates and ratings. We first watched The Shining together when I was 10 or 11. In my early teens, I was obsessed with Full Metal Jacket. Then came A Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove. I never got on with Lolita but I’m in heaven with Barry Lyndon. I’m a big Kubrick fan, I’ve even read the biography his chauffeur wrote.
You can probably hear the whiny high-pitched “take me seriously please” desperation here. But to be honest, I think the real reason that I never saw 2001 is that I’m just not very science-y. The thought of infinite space does not fill me with a sense of awe. I did keep meaning to see it, but then well, I never did. And the funny thing is, I understood the pop culture parodies without having watched it.
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever lied about it. But I’ve definitely nodded along as someone banged on about the psychotic computer HAL 9000 or tripping off their nut while watching 2001. My partner doesn’t know I haven’t seen it. If I’d told him on the night we met and talked non-stop for two hours about films, would he still have asked for my number?
Anyway, thank you Guardian for making me watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Going to the cinema was not an option so I rented it on Google Play and watched on an ancient projector. And, what can I say? It’s a bloody masterpiece. I watched the opening Dawn of Man sequence in wonder at this perfect image of the spark of human consciousness. What fun Kubrick would have had, I thought, with Andy Serkis’s motion capture technology. Yet his society of human ancestors (played by mimes in furry suits) is perfect. The colour, the extravagance of all those beautiful space sets, what a vision of a future. I still have the imagination of a potato when it comes to space but I loved this movie.
What I will say is that 2001 does not work as escapism. I usually like a film with big long expanses of silence to get lost in. I’m quite partial to a bit of uncompromising slowness. But right now, my brain is 50 miles a minute. Concentrating on anything for more than 43 seconds is impossible. The film’s sense of emptiness made me edgy. But I’ll be back, when cinemas reopen.
Funnily enough, I watched 2001 with headphones on while my toddler napped with a fever in bed next to me. She woke up right at the end, at the bit where the freaky big baby in a bubble hovers next to the moon. She was transfixed – the moon and babies are two of her favourite things. So, who knows, maybe for her it will be a film she remembers watching at an impressionable age.
