2001: Spaceships, space suits and space food

The audience: Monaco Open Air Cinema

In 1968, a year before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey. The industry awarded it an Oscar for best visual effects, but initially it failed to impress the critics and movie-goers. Within a few years that changed, its reputation grew and it gained a cult status. To celebrate this iconic film's 50th anniversary, self-confessed fan Christopher Nolan re-released it at Cannes Film Festival this year, and on Thursday evening (26 July) it was screened at Monaco Open Air Cinema.

There were only six people in the cinema at 21:15, and by the time the feature started, forty-five minutes later, less than twenty seats had been taken. I had seen the movie once before on a small screen, so you might assume that I'm a fan. I'm not, but The Man is, and since he had sat through Singin' in the Rain (1952) with me, I felt obliged to watch the sci-fi classic with him. It sends many men of a certain age into raptures, but it mystifies me.

Kubrick collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke to make 2001, developing it from the sci-fi writer's 1951 short story, The Sentinel. At just shy of 4000 words it's a quick read about the discovery of a pyramid on an unexplored lunar mountain range. Once found, the object transmits a message to its super intelligent builders, suggesting that humans are now advanced enough to be interesting. Keep this in mind if you are watching the movie for the first time.

2001 starts in darkness, the screen is black, and strange music by avant-garde Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti provides an eerie overture. After three minutes, Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra heralds the Dawn of Man: there is light, the sun rises above the earth. The first scenes of this genesis portray a barren landscape, with no sound but the whistling of the wind. I half expected birds to begin tweeting and the opening chords of The Sound of Music (1965) to strike up. But no, in the silence, actors dressed in shabby monkey suits shuffle into the frame. Post Andy Serkis and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), they look rather comic.

One morning our evolutionary ancestors awake to find a black, iPhone-shaped monolith planted outside their cave. They scream at it and taunt it, eventually working up the courage to touch it. Afterwards the most aggressive primate learns he can smash the skull of his enemy using a hammer-like animal bone rather than his fists, and in triumph he throws his weapon into the air. The scene cuts to the future, where a space ship spins above Earth to the strains of Johann Strauss II's On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

If you manage to get this far into the film, the rest is easy. Seventy minutes passed unheeded, and then "Intermission" flashed up on the screen. Yes, in the 1960s they used to have intermissions at the cinema. Parents could bribe kids to sit in silence with the promise of a Choc-Ice at the interval, bought from a woman standing with a tray at the end of the aisle.

Refreshed, the audience settled back in their seats for the second half of the movie, and my favourite scenes. Technological failure was as big a problem in 1968 as it is in 2018, but in Kubrick's imagination of the future, it would at least be courteous. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," explains the HAL 9000 computer to his human colleague's request to "Open the pod bay doors, Hal."

By midnight the audience might have been tired, but it was tenacious. Unfortunately the Star Gate sequence's never-ending, drug-trippy effects pushed some to the limit. Even The Man agreed that Kubrick had over-indulged on the flashing, coloured lights, and a couple a few rows in front of us left before the end of the two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza. If they had stuck around, they may have been even more confused by the character Dave's solitary yet luxurious existence.

Having seen 2001 as intended, on the big screen, I have a better idea why it is so popular. First, for all the kids obsessed with the Apollo Missions it must have been tremendously exciting. The movie brings to life spaceships, space suits and space food. Second, its themes and meaning remain enigmatic. Kubrick refused to spoon-feed his audience, and many still wonder what it's all about. Fans never tire of finding new interpretations to bestow upon it. And finally, the movie is an exceptional example of the craft of film-making. Students of cinema analyse Kubrick's work in the same way that would-be writers study Joyce's Ulysses. It may not be to everyone's taste, but the vision, inventiveness and skill of its director cannot be denied.