The Infinite Set: On '2001: A Space Odyssey'
reverseshot.org
reverseshot.org
"Upon reaching Jupiter, Bowman is guided into a wormhole, triggering Trumbull’s bravura psychedelic sequence. On either side of a perpendicular line dividing the screen, two vertical planes of brightly colored lights and shapes emerge, rushing past and out of frame, giving the illusion that Bowman (glimpsed in a juddering cutaway shot and then in paralytic stills) is racing through a corridor of infinite dimensions at speed-of-light intensity. Modeled in part after the avant-garde films of Jordan Belson (who later created special effects for The Right Stuff) and fraternal animators James and John Whitney (collaborators with Saul Bass on Vertigo’s title sequence), Trumbull recreated screen space with his slit-scan technique, combining long exposures of circuit board diagrams, Op Art prints, film negatives, and electron microscope photographs for this sequence, which cleverly exploited the simple x and y axis geometry of an ideally proportioned widescreen frame."
That scene is probably my favorite movie scene of all times. My dad was a big fan of 2001, and made me watch the movie when I was 13 or so- I missed a lot of the subtleties, but that last part of the movie added a new layer to existence that I could have never conceived of before. For a nerdy teenager who was really into science and sci-fi, it was mind blowing to be exposed to such an artistic depiction of the subjectivity of the human perception of time and space, and the ambiguity of reality.
It's interesting to read the techniques that went into making it - it's a very creative use of the medium. I can't help but feel that CGI has put special effects designer into a box of vertices and polygons, resulting in special effects that all look the same. I certainly can't think of a single movie that has something as unique and distinctive as the wormhole scene in 2001. I had high hopes for Interstellar, but it fell very flat (there are some groups doing very cool work in more traditional animation however - I really like Studio Laika, for instance).
Also interesting is the way they echo and expand on the imagery of the scenes inside HAL 9000.
http://metaspatial.net/conferences/io/hal9000.jpg
Kubrick was a genius photographer before he was a genius director. It's well worth hunting down the images he took in his pre-Hollywood career. E.g.
https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/photograph...
So much of what Kubrick did here has never been replicated, few have even come close to the impact he created on the industry and the level of professionalism he created.
However, that's not to say the end result is particularly enjoyable for me to watch. It's long runtime wears down on me and by the first hour I find myself wanting to watch many scenes at 1.5x speed just to feel like I'm watching a movie and not staring at slightly-moving still photography.
(In the case of 2001, it is on my list of best films, but if I'm being honest that's more on the basis of its place in film history and scenes that are part of both film and broader cultural memory than because of a particular desire to watch the movie as a whole repeatedly.)
Related to this is average shot length as a metric.[1][2] "2001" has an average shot length of 13 seconds. At the other extreme are the Bourne movies, which are now down to around 1.1 seconds per shot. James Bond movies have sped up over the years, with "Dr. No" at 7 seconds and "Die Another Day (2002)" at 2.4 seconds. This is an industry-wide trend.
Trailers are insane. Trailers routinely break the 1 second barrier today.
So there's been a speedup in two dimensions - removal of unnecessary context, and shorter shots. To a modern viewer, 2001 looks quite slow-paced.
With enough short shots, films can conceal the lack of a plot. (This is a problem with effects-heavy movies. After you leave the theater, you realize the plot made no sense. But it was a great effects demo reel.)
[1] http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php [2] http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2007/01/average-shot-leng...
Unless you're talking about the Tomb Raider movie. The trailer with the fight between Lara Croft and the robot is basically the first 5 minutes of the movie and you can stop watching after that. :P
Blade Runner has the same issue. Great visuals, but you have to watch them for twice as long as you need to.
That said, a part of me has always wished this sequence gave more thought to the physics and what it might be like to visualize the experience of traveling through a gate/wormhole like this. I don't think the coloration, visual patterns, or sequencing represents much understanding of the then-current physics theory on what this sort of thing might possibly be like, and I'm not sure it even captures it well in the abstract.
Amazing cinematic work which moved the industry forward in a positive direction. I just always wished they'd somehow been able to go even further and applied the same brilliance of vision and execution in technique to an even more refined concept that incorporated some viable notions of the possible/theoretical physics involved in traversing through space-time like this.
'Interstellar' did some of that, and they had to hire Kip Thorne as a consultant, and run a render farm to raytrace the relativistic effects.
I'm not sure the theory was quite at the same level in the '60s, and the cinema technique was definitely not the same. It would have been a lot harder to do any degree of realism.
Certainly the theory has developed greatly since then. But being even somewhat informed about the contemporary physical theory would've made the sequence even more impactful and satisfying, for me personally.
I don't think technique would've necessarily required greater complexity or difficulty. For example, one might have used the same planing technique, but used different patterning and colorization, based on more mathematically derived outputs. Not suggesting any kind of simulation or super-advancement. Just using the same technique, but informing the visuals based on more physical theory.
Firstly there was no theory of wormholes back then. Black holes were incredibly obscure mathematical abstractions in physics journals that weren't accessible to most people.
Secondly, this was 1968, when the world's faster supercomputer ran at 36MHz. Evans and Sutherland were just getting started when 2001 was being made. There were no GPUs, no digital frame stores, and monochrome bitmapped displays were still exotic.
It's easy to take computers for granted today. You can plot and animate almost anything, and you can do it at home - or on your phone.
Not so in the late 1960s. Mathematically derived animations would have needed a mountain of cash to pay for computer time just to get something very rough and approximate.
Why assume a complete theory of black holes or wormholes was necessary? Clearly the concept existed. Clearly we had General Relativity. One could imagine a more speculative but still physics-based visualization of what might happen in traveling through such a nexus of space-time.
It really is a mind-blowing film. He changed the design language for space from jump-suits and ray-guns to something cleaner and more logical. As well as spaceship design, clothing and the space suits. And reinforced IBM's design language as the way a computer should look (even the non-homicidal ones).
https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyss...