2001 Is A Difficult Movie To Summarize In 60-Seconds
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Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Spacy Odyssey is a dense, esoteric, philosophical mind scrambler of a movie that people continue to debate the meaning of even decades later. Books, many of them, have been written about this film, from just about every angle imaginable, but one question remains, can you distill the essence of the movie down into 60-seconds? Well, this new video attempts to do just that. You’ll have to judge for yourself if they’re successful or not.
The answer to this question, which you probably gathered for yourself, is that they don’t really pull this off, but you didn’t really expect them to, did you? But that doesn’t mean this quick animated video isn’t without a certain set of charms. This is the 13th episode from 1A4STUDIO’s Speedrun series, where they recount the entire story of a movie in a minute or less. Some installments work much much better than others, and with a movie like 2001, it’s not an easy feat to accomplish. Hell, HAL 9000, one of the most terrifying antagonists in all of film history, is barely anywhere to be found in this video, and that’s a bummer.
For my money, this approach works better for more up tempo movies, like this video they did of the Wachowski’s The Matrix…
…or this one of James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens. In addition to these, they’ve also tackled everything from Star Wars to Blade Runner to Pulp Fiction to instructional videos about Bitcoin, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Based on the work of Arthur C. Clarke, it’s hard not to think about sitting in a basement really high, engulfed by the stunning visuals and talking about deeper meanings, man, in 2001. It feels like everyone did this in high school or college at least once. That image has become such a parody over the years that it’s easy to forget what a magnificent, groundbreaking film it is, on a lot of levels, technique wise as well as in regards to content and theme. Still, go to a midnight showing of this, and you’re likely to be watching through a haze of smoke and people starring at the back of their hands.
