2001/2010: The Story of No Story

I just watched the movies 2001: A space odyssey and 2010: The year we make contact.  First, 2001.  I really liked this, although I knew what the story was beforehand.  That's probably why I could handle the excrutiatingly long pans and lack of dialogue.  Some truly incredible imagery remains with you long after it's over.  The construction of the shots were expert and exciting.  Innovative.  The problem for me is that Stanley Kubrik was telling individual unconnected stories.  1.) Early primates discovering tools, 2.)  A mission to the moon, 3.) A mission to Jupiter that ends up with Hal malfunctioning, 4.) David Bowman's transformation into the Star Child.  These are not discrete plot points but interconnected threads of a bigger picture.  Kubrik is a master technically, but a rudimentary synopsis from wikipedia will yield more narrative than what's on film here.  And the problem with this is that the story is fantastic and really complicated and interesting.  

The film takes a "hard science" approach to what life would be like onboard a spaceship--which translates to a lot of monotony and boredom punctuated by life-threatening crises, and this I think is the biggest pitfall in the storytelling.  It's the same problem that befell Minority Report: they got so involved "showing us what the future looks like" that they didn't show us real characters pursuing their objectives in that environment.   Kubrik (and Clarke) are rightly fascinated by the details; Ships take months to reach their destinations, everything is automated, and the characters spend their time exercising, eating space food, or in hypersleep.  At one point, Frank Poole watches a video birthday message from home while sunbathing. This is very real, but let's get into the fact that an alien monolith has been discovered buried on the moon that represents a care-taking race of superior beings who have been guiding the course of human evolution since the beginning!  The movie is ostensibly about a mission to explore a similar monolith on Jupiter and then halfway through becomes an entirely different movie altogether.  When Hal breaks down the whole 

movie breaks down, too because of Kubrik's flights of impressionistic fancy in representing the non-scientific, surreal story elements.  It's a movie not a book, so visuals take priority, but there is no way I would have had any clue what any of it meant (or amounted to) if I didn't already know.  

2010 is basically the same thing.  A rougher, less sexy, more populated version of the same thing.  The whole business of life being ushered into being by the monoliths is pushed aside in favor of the space-escape/cold-war-tension elements.  It's more about an unlikely allies adventure than about connecting the dots.  I wanted to know what's going on!