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Post by ijon on Jan 2, 2006 11:29:39 GMT -5
OK, to get what I'm on about here, first look at this: www.astronautix.com/articles/roastars.htmThe guy's contention is that this admittedly impressive Soviet movie probably inspired considerable detail in 2001. Now if you hunt around his site any you'll see he really knows his space hardware, but based on the side-by-side caps he presents alone I'm not convinced. Here's the first: www.astronautix.com/graphics/0/2001comp.jpgThe first shot compares the two stations, and frankly they don't look so similar to me. Kubrick's looks inspired by von Braun's designs (here's his 1946 drawing). Klushantsev's is conceptually similar in that it's a ring with a central docking facility, but its overall shape reminds me of Tsiolkovsky's designs. This was the best shot I could find; later iterations look more like a flowerpot crossed with a floodlamp. OK, next it's the interior shots of the doughnut. In the real world rotation is the only way to make artificial gravity, and that means a ring (you could use two capsules in a dumbbell configuration, but rings make it easier to get around inside the structure). Well, if you want to show the interior of such a thing with the floor curving up, it seems like that's the obvious way to compose the shot. Babylon 5 used it as well. Next, the picturephone. I've seen stills of this from skiffy movies dating back to the early '30s. Kubrick's stands out mostly for the Earth in the background. The spacesuits are next. To my eye Klushantsev's resemble those from Collier's in 1952 rather than those from 2001. As for the adrift in space shot, again it seems pretty inevitable to compose the shot that way. You could probably get some caps from Lost in Space that'd look similar. OK, next set, more suits but mostly the Moon landers: www.astronautix.com/graphics/0/2001com2.jpgKlushantsev's look like the von Braun designs also presented in Collier's. Now, this next one is the clincher I think. It wasn't sourced on the site where I found it, but I believe it's R. A. Smith's illustration of the British Interplanetary Society designs presented in the 1950 book The Exploration of Space by . . . Arthur C. Clarke. That sure looks like the prototype for Kubrick's Moon shuttle to me, and that's unmistakably a proto- Discovery in the background. Again, this guy knows his stuff. Maybe if you see the actual movie it's more obvious. Klushantsev's movie looks remarkable, and if anyone can run down a copy let me know, but for now I'm unconvinced that it was necessarily a big influence on Kubrick. Thank you, you may now carry on with your lives.
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Post by ijon on Jan 2, 2006 18:23:44 GMT -5
That's a cool site, Doc; I especially like the one of Keir Dullea reflected in Hal's eye.
A couple of rebuts though:
That actually looks like three grown men in the 2001 image to me. It's the guys who are watching the Moon shuttle land. I've seen stills of edited scenes of kids at the Clavius base but they're interior shots. I bow to your cinematic eye, but still can't quite accept the two troikas as rising to "uncanny."
Well, that's why I'd have put this in the "realistic space movies" thread if it weren't for the images. These two movies fit the bill in that they take overwhelmingly from what the engineers were doing, in fact had such as their advisers (Ordway and Tikhonravov). This really does set them apart. Now, first off we can lose all the ones that get away with stock footage of V2s or Atlases. Looking at those that did bother to build a model, Rocky Jones' Orbit Jet is pretty typical. Yes, it bears some resemblance to a V2, but traces it's ancestry more to Amazing Stories covers (though if you check that link in my reply to mummifiedstalin you'll see even von Braun couldn't resist that influence).
You're right that UFO drawings were also a commom inspiration, but generally for far future ships like the one in Forbidden Planet. I don't count those because they're premised on technologies we don't even begin to have; they're more akin to de Bergerac's dew bottles than Verne's cannon, even when they try to present themselves plausibly. I'm still thinking that the similarities don't look to me likie they go that much beyond two movies that set out to portray spacecraft of the near future honestly and which bothered to do their homework. Unfortunately, that puts them in a select group right there. I was struck though in reading the sysnopsis of Klushantsev's film that it sounds like the original concept for 2001, ie a How the West Was Won of space. I'd find it pretty easy to believe that that might have been one reason why Kubrick decided to go beyond that, if there was already a movie out there that had done it pretty well
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Post by ijon on Jan 2, 2006 19:55:51 GMT -5
I see what you're saying, but it still looks to me more like they're just on somewhat uneven ground. I don't think we're that far apart though, I'm not arguing that 2001 couldn't possibly have echoes of Klushantsev in it. I remember seeing Gene Siskel on TV years ago saying he had once sat next to Neil Armstrong on an airliner. He asked him if any movie really captured the feel of spaceflight. His answer? 2001: A Space Odyssey. It really is to most space movies what Barry Lyndon is to Pirates of the Caribbean. You really can wonder how he eats and breathes, and other science facts! You're right about Apollo 13, even it shows sound in a vacuum. I was lucky enough to see a Jim Lovell appearance after the movie came out. He verified that the only element of it that's totally cod is the bit where they blow up at each other in the LEM, but that while a great deal of the details are accurate a few things were either too difficult to show, elided or occasionally spiced up. Still darn good though. Exciting news on the 2001 special edition!
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Post by ijon on Jan 2, 2006 20:30:02 GMT -5
Doc, I think we're sitting here strenuously agreeing with each other!
Yeah, the sound in a vacuum thing always peeves me, but it seems as ingrained as the cowboys inexhaustible revolver. They always say the shots are dead without the sound. I suppose so, but Kubrick showed that you can fill that in with the music. I can't think of another movie offhand that did it.
I seem to remember seeing something you posted somewhere about 2010 but I don't recollect where. What did you think of it? My reaction was that if it had been a standalone I'd have probably liked it quite a bit, but that as a sequel to 2001 it had set itself a bar that it didn't even come close to. One friend of mine summed it up by saying that William Sylvester felt like a scientist turned bureaucrat while Roy Scheider felt like an undercover cop.
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Post by ijon on Jan 2, 2006 23:49:32 GMT -5
Clarke is an interesting writer. Some of his early work especially has the sort of scope that British writers like Wells and Olaf Stapledon brought to their writing, which I always figured was what attracted Kubrick to him. On the other hand some of his stuff just lies there like chilled oatmeal. I didn't hate 2010 the book, though I rather expected to. 2061 felt like nothing particular ever happened (which is sort of the Clarke failure mode) and although I actually finished 3001 I can remember nothing beyond your synopsis. I only saw 2010 the movie once, and I guess what worked for me was what plausibility of the concept carried over from the first movie. Although if memory serves they do push a rope in one space walk; why does hollywood hire a linguist to make up Klingon but not a first-year physics student to vette the effects?
Sound in vacuum is the symbol of a lot of this, and I wonder how much of it is selling the audience short and how much is a failure of imagination by the movie-makers. I caught the last Alien knockoff on cable a while back, and if the IMDB is to be believed they were considering having the decks of their ship oriented like the floors of a skyscraper rather than the decks of a waterborne ship. For various reasons I think that's more plausible, and it certainly would be different, but reportedly they didn't do it because the long axis of the movie screen is horizontal and so the ship must be too. Um, you couldn't show the actors oriented horizontally as well? Kubrick already did it, and it was quite effective in my view.
I imagine you know Stanislaw Lem, at least from the adaptations of his novel Solaris. His criticism of even the "greats" among American SF writers is that for them the universe is a limited and unchallenging place, fairly easily dominated by man. I think he has a point, and it's even worse in SF moviedom. 2001 is one of the few movies that acknowledges just how small man really is, and how leaving the surface of the planet forces us to leave behind a lot of preconceived baggage as well.
Or something like that, if I ramble any further as I may as well sing "Daisy."
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Post by ijon on Jan 3, 2006 2:27:52 GMT -5
Have you read Solaris, or any of Lem's other works? There's a lot of thematic similarity. Neither of the movie treatments really did it justice.
By the way, if anyone has read a single Lem book and not liked it, for your own sake try at least one more. He uses several flagrantly different styles, and even if one doesn't appeal another might.
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Post by ijon on Jan 3, 2006 3:08:59 GMT -5
Ironically the Tarkovsky one needed a load of effects, a feature I think is usually too overblown in modern movies. I was surprised that the ocean's symmetriads, asymmetriads, mimoids and such weren't used in the remake, you'd almost think Lem had modern cgi in mind when he described some of them. I came out of the remake thinking it's not the perfect way to translate Solaris to film but it was an acceptable way. Kind of a weird reaction for kme as it's a favorite book and I'm normally an over-perfectionist.
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Post by ijon on Jan 3, 2006 6:31:35 GMT -5
As I think about it, I'd really recommend Lem's His Master's Voice to you.
It's an interesting story to compare to Contact, which I've never seen and, honestly, it's not high on my list. While respecting Dr Sagan for many things I found the book enjoyable but not spectacular. Barring the idea of a message buried in pi it was still largely of the "universe unfolding pretty much as we figured" variety.
To whet your appetite I'll tell you this much: the message in HMV isn't recognized for a couple of years. It's picked up by an unrelated background noise survey, the tape of which a grad student at the observatory steals and tries to sell as a random number list, and is then taken to court when his customer discovers it's actually a repeating loop.
Addendum: Do you know a movie called Countdown, '67 or '68, Robert Duvall and I think Robert Altman? It was adapted from a pretty decent novel by a guy named Hank Searls. I recollect it as an OK movie, but it may just have abstained from sound in a vacuum. Anybody out there seen it recently to verify?
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Post by ijon on Jan 4, 2006 21:47:43 GMT -5
Haven't read it for a while, but I remember liking it OK. I saw the movie first so it remains the "gospel" for me.
Clarke is certainly trying to explain things a lot more explicitly there. I think the whole 2001 genre (that's not quite the word I want, but I can't think of a better one just now) was strengthened by Clarke and Kubrick bouncing off each other. Clarke brought a lot of nuts'n'bolts while Kubrick brought a lot of magic.
I remember the first time I got to the hotel sequence in the book it just felt wrong, but on reflection it's an interesting case of how you can't transliterate books and movies between each other; to do so is like transliterating Japanese to English, and that gives you Gamera vs Guiron.
Imagine trying to just put the movie ending on the page: ". . . then Bowman ate a little creamed spinach. Reaching for the salt, he inadvertently . . . ." Likewise, Clarke's ending would be greywater on screen. Both are trying to give us glimpses of that which surpasseth understanding, a tricky thing to do without either falling into nonsense (as Terry Gilliam does when he listens to his demons) or falling into banality (as 2010 did when it tried to touch that part of the story).
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Post by ijon on Jan 4, 2006 22:24:25 GMT -5
Well, you're saying yourself they're not that different in the literal sense, so how can one be nonsensical and not the other? Indeed, isn't the point of this sequence indicating that the alien supra-consciousness is of such a different order can't be interpreted "sensibly?"
Kubrick was working in a visual/aural medium, so he uses imagery to convey the idea. I suppose some writers can do similar things in print--Burroughs comes to mind--but that was never Clarke's forte.
Kubrick has the sensory tools to show communication taking place at a level beyond the conscious. Clarke goes the route of making the hotel room more of a holding area which lulls Bowman into sleep, at which point he is receptive to such an approach. It seems to me Clarke is trying to illustrate the latter through the contrast.
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Post by ijon on Jan 5, 2006 0:24:54 GMT -5
We DO seem to end up arguing over which agrees with the other more!
I maybe should go back and reread the book. Since the last time I did I've pretty fundamentally re-assessed American skiffy writers (and Clarke is kind of a "bridge" between US and UK skiffy). As I kid I devoured Asimov, but I got a chapter or two into his last book and, well, never looked back. It's exactly that criticism of Lem's of their universes being too man-sized. What was that line from Fire Maidens? "Hot damn, is there nothing around here I can't dominate?" Now Clarke at least has a better sense of the scale of the universe in his writings, especially his early ones. Anyone who can use "The Himalayas subsided" as a bridge--in a short story--can't be all bad. He is also one of the best at presenting extrapolated technology believably, and part of that comes from his portraying it prosaically. I think the structure of the movie as a whole uses a long and prosaic, albeit beautiful, setup so that the more bizarrely presented ending hits you harder. There are maybe similar progressions in the "The Dawn of Man" sequence or the EVA scenes (run through twice in the first cut), they carry right to the edge of putting you to sleep (past it for some viewers) and then snap you with a towel. Yeah, I think we're at least landing in the same ballpark at this point. I'm glad Clarke didn't try to go psychedelic; it just wouldn't fit him. Even some of the better examples of that New Wave SF that Spinrad or Gerrold did feel quite dated now. As it stands it at least outclasses the Contact-like earlier versions where everyone piles out of Discovery to sit on the grass.
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Post by ijon on Jan 5, 2006 2:25:27 GMT -5
Yeah, I never found it boring either, but I guess it's a matter of taste. I remember seeing an interview with Lucas one time where he was saying something about the problem with earlier SF movies being that they held shots way longer than it took people to "get it." Of course, I'm a space freak anyway, tech of all kinds really. I'm weird enough that while watching Starfighters I'm saying, "Are those F-104As or Cs?" I can't pick a favorite sequence, but the one that sticks in my mind just now is the deaths of the corpsicles. Who was it who called "Life Functions Terminated" the epitaph for technological man?
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