Kubrick's '2001' Effects Precocious

LOS ANGELES (AP) â€” Way back in 1968, when Stanley Kubrick's ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' first was released, critics blasted it as ``somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring''

Thursday, December 28th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

LOS ANGELES (AP) â€” Way back in 1968, when Stanley Kubrick's ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' first was released, critics blasted it as ``somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring'' (Renata Adler, The New York Times) and ``in some ways ... the biggest amateur movie of them all'' (Pauline Kael, Harper's).

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it ``a film out of control, an infuriating combination of exactitude on small parts and incoherence on large ones.''

Now, at the turn of the year 2001, things look a little different.

Kubrick's visionary tale about a manned flight to Jupiter â€” edited from its original length â€” has become a cinematic classic and launched a new genre of quality space films (even if we are still years away from visiting other planets).

The American Film Institute's poll of filmmakers and critics ranked ''2001'' 22nd among the 100 best American movies in the medium's first 100 years, between ``The Grapes of Wrath'' and ``The Maltese Falcon.''

The film elevated Hollywood's space features from the clunky B-movie to important productions such as ``Star Wars'' (1977), ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' (1977) and ``Star Trek: The Motion Picture'' (1979).

Science fiction author Ray Bradbury recalls attending the Hollywood premiere with Arthur C. Clarke, who supplied the original story and co-wrote the script with Kubrick.

``The film was about eight hours long, I think,'' recalls Bradbury. ``The next week they cut half an hour or 45 minutes and they kept cutting, but it's still too long. It's a beautiful film, but they just didn't know when to stop. We were all restive, including Arthur Clarke.

``I have seen it many times since. It's a lovely film, but you could still cut half an hour out of it.''

Actually, Kubrick cut 17 minutes from ''2001'' after the premiere, bringing it to its present length of 139 minutes â€” not all that long by today's standards.

``I saw `2001' on opening day at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood,'' remembers science fiction author and screenwriter Harlan Ellison.

``I thought it was mostly a bore. I wrote an article that chewed it to pieces. Years later I saw it again, and I realized that Kubrick had edited it. It was no longer a bore ... I rather liked it then. Now the article I wrote looks a little embarrassing.''

In an introduction to ``The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey,'' critic and screenwriter Jay Cocks remembers the first public screening, at the Capitol theater in New York, as a ``catastrophe.''

``Planet of the Apes'' had just been released, and the ''2001'' audience began laughing at the opening apes sequence.

``The laughter stopped after a time,'' Cocks writes, ``but the restiveness increased, turning finally to outright mockery and hostility during the Star Gate sequence.''

Kubrick watched from the projection booth, then went to bed for three days before pulling himself together and making the cuts.

MGM executives were understandably nervous about their $11 million investment. Then press agents noted that most of the good reviews appeared in counterculture papers, and ticket buyers were younger than normal; also, the scent of marijuana permeated theaters during the Star Gate sequence. They skewed the ads and publicity to portray ''2001'' as ``the ultimate trip,'' and, Cocks says, ``if you weren't hip enough to take it, you weren't worth being taken seriously.''

(Similarly, Walt Disney's 1940 ``Fantasia'' gained new popularity in the '60s when the youth movement embraced it as a ``trip.'')

''2001'' managed to make a tidy profit, winning an Oscar for special visual effects and nominations for direction, writing and art direction. Warner Bros., which now owns the film, is considering a re-release this year.

Seen today, the movie's major, central section â€” the space flight â€” remains fresh and thrilling, the special effects well ahead of their time. HAL, the spaceship's computer with its red-rimmed orange eye and calm, reassuring voice, ranks with Dracula and Hannibal Lecter as an all-time great movie villain. The sequence in which HAL sends Gary Lockwood tumbling into deep space is harrowing.

Kubrick's metaphysical binge in the prologue and epilogue continues to plague the literal-minded viewer. What did those gamboling, battling apes mean? Why did Keir Dullea wander through Versailles-like rooms as he was dying? And what was the meaning of the unborn baby at the climax?

Some scientists today say ''2001'' helped shape their lives.

``It was just what I wanted to see at the right time,'' said Richard Terrile, chief scientist for the Outer Planets/Solar Probe Project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who saw the film at age 17.

``That was in 1968, and we were going to the moon in 1969. There was tremendous excitement about the future. In that decade, we had gone from zero and Sputnik all the way to landing on the moon.''

While ''2001'' provided an exciting vision of the future, it was not an accurate picture of what space science would become.

``It's still the way it could be some time,'' said Terrile. ``For a lot of people involved in space exploration, it provides a sort of reference point, an idealized goal to keep aiming for. The people who made it were not scientists or engineers; they were filmmakers â€” masterful filmmakers, but they couldn't know where things would be in 2001.''

Marc Rayman, project manager of Deep Space 1 at the Pasadena laboratory, saw ''2001'' at age 11 and found it ``wonderful, though like everybody else, I didn't understand the ending.''

''`2001' tells us more about 1968 than it does about the future,'' said Rayman, technical adviser on the 1984 sequel, ''2010.''

The movie's portrayal of transportation advances, for instance, has not happened.

``The airplanes we fly, the cars we drive, the nature of transportation had really not changed very much by the late '90s. We went to the moon in 1969, and we have no capability to go back there in 2001. That was something you wouldn't have predicted,'' Rayman said.

The movie underplayed communications advances, on the other hand. ``Certainly the Internet and the availability of information were not even conceived of at the time,'' he said.

``And assuming that HAL had the capacities of a human brain, we're about 1/1,000th of that right now in our supercomputers.''