"2001": The Grand-Daddy of All Interstellar Movies

Last year it was Gravity; this year it’s Interstellar. In the real world of space exploration, the focus is now on robotics, like the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission that this week (semi-)successfully landed an unmanned spacecraft on a comet. But moviegoers still enjoy watching men and women personally contend with the perils of outer space. Space-travel movies date all the way back to the 1902 Georges Méliès fantasy, A Trip to the Moon. In the era of Sputnik, Roger Corman got into the act with 1958’s hilariously low-budget War of the Satellites. Of course there’ve been outer-space films aplenty. But the one that made all the difference was released in 1968. It was, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When 2001 first appeared, Time Magazine hailed it as “the most dazzling visual happening in the history of the motion picture.”  Today, when asked where he’s spotted the long-range impact of Kubrick’s space adventure, film industry veteran Bruce Logan responds, “Well, everywhere. From on-screen graphics for TV stations on down.” Bruce should know. A London-born cinematographer and effects specialist, he’s worked on such classic fantasies as Star Wars, TRON, and Batman Forever. But he started out as a self-taught animator, one who began his motion picture career at Britain’s MGM Elstree studios as part of the special photographic effects unit on 2001, under the supervision of the great Douglas Trumbull.

Says Bruce, “2001 was my film school.” For the first year of his involvement, he contributed to the animation of what looked like a spacecraft’s computer screens. Given that the film was made years before such computers existed, these computers today look remarkably convincing. He’s particularly proud of his work on the read-out monitoring the “sleeping” astronauts who all flat-line, in one of the film’s most disturbing moments. It took a while, though, before he was able to fully appreciate Kubrick’s achievement: “For the first ten or twenty years after the movie came out, to me it was just a bunch of shots that I had worked on, strung together. . . . I think that the time that I saw the genius most was when I saw it about a year ago, at the Academy, without any recollection – and I was able to see for the first time what a brilliant piece of work it was.”

In preparation for filming 2001, Kubrick had his visual effects team watch such sci-fi flicks as Forbidden Planet and Fantastic Voyage (which Bruce now calls “that terrible movie with bad special effects where they go inside the body”). Ultimately, though, Kubrick’s vision was wholly unique. It’s worth remembering that when the film was being planned, NASA missions were paving the way for the 1969 moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.While Kubrick and company were deciding what the moon in their film should look like, actual photographs of the far side of the moon were starting to be made available for the first time. The filmmakers seriously considered altering their visual concept to make it resemble the lunar surface as seen in NASA’s photographs, but then admitted to themselves that “the moon looks kind of boring.” That being so, they decided to forget about authenticity and stick with their original design plan.

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Though Bruce made a Roger Corman detour upon first coming to America, he’s best known for his work on big-budget Hollywood spectaculars: “I blew up the Death Star. It wasn’t Luke, it was me! That’s one of my claims to fame.”

Curiosity Sticks Its Landing

On Sunday night, I took time out from watching Olympic gymnastics to trek to Pasadena. In a Caltech auditorium, surrounded by men and women who had spent years of their lives on the project, I cheered the live video feed from the JPL control room confirming that the Mars Science Lab -- an over-sized Wall-E type thingamajig named Curiosity -- had landed safely on the Red Planet. It felt like an extraordinary combination of science fiction and reality TV, a sort of celestial Dancing with the Stars. NASA, which in the light of proposed budget cuts needs all the good publicity it can muster, is doing its best to highlight the drama of the mission. It sent its feeds worldwide (there was a viewing party in Times Square), and tried hard to illuminate for the novice such features as the Sky Crane as well as the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” that tense waiting period before we would know for sure if Curiosity had reached its destination with all systems go.

Of course a Martian sighting would have helped.

Mars has always captured the human imagination. The Romans named it after their god of war, and writers and filmmakers have long imagined it populated with hostile creatures bent on destroying civilization as we know it. Orson Welles’ 1938 live radio version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, broadcast as though an invasion were actually in progress, famously sparked panic. Welles’ dramatic coup in turn sparked one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which mysterious extraterrestrial doings cause paranoid small-town Americans to turn on one another.

I can’t begin to count the number of movies that feature Mars and Martians. There’ve been deadly serious films, as well as totally goofy ones, like Tim Burton’s delightful Mars Attacks! In most cases, of course, science fiction is as much about how human beings behave under pressure as about threats from outer space. (See for instance Independence Day, in which – in response to an invasion by unspecified aliens – mankind bravely rises to its own defense.)

But, in light of my trip to the California Institute of Technology, I’ve been thinking about a gathering that took place in the very auditorium in which I sat last night. It was held in anticipation of a much earlier Mars success story, the November 1971 arrival of Mariner 9, which would orbit the Red Planet, sending back the first-ever photos of the Martian surface. Among the superstars present were Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, who had collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the most mesmerizing and maddening science fiction film of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to cinematographer Bruce Logan, who as a very young animator spent several years on 2001, Clarke submitted a voiceover narration that would have put the film in context, helping out viewers by explaining its enigmatic ending. This, though, was scrapped by Kubrick, who decreed, “Let them figure it out.”

An important point about 2001 is that it was made when human beings had only taken baby steps into space. In 1999, Clarke’s novelization of 2001 appeared in a new Millennial Edition. His introduction notes that “2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have been inextricably intertwined; the Apollo astronauts had already seen the film when they left for the moon.”

Can't resist adding this terrific Youtube tribute to Curiosity and the JPL team:



Rest in peace, Neil Armstrong, born August 5, 1930, died August 25, 2012