>>there’s a tendency to assume that everything to do with Star Trek is mindless action and explosions<<
Star WARS, maybe, but the initial TV series (which was all that existed when Wisde made his film) has a very, very limited budget for fx. At the time of the ST:TMP’s release some fans were kvetching there was too much emphasis on the fx … indeed when the film came to TV & dramaric scenes were added back in, the film made a good deal more sense compared to the often klunky character realtionships in the theatrical release.
But anyway … it occurred to me at the time ST:TMP was first released that it was an attempt to steer sci-fi back towards the 2001 approach by way of positing a “higher intelligence” which was, in fact, an alien race & that the last scene of humans taking an evolutionary step, courtesy that alien race, was kind of a nod toward 2001.
But decades passed before I saw SOLARIS & I thus never made the connection between it & 2001, much less with ST:TMP. I may have to watch all three in close proximity … well, maybe not 2001 as I watch it pretty frequently as it is.
Sorry, but I see nothing explicitly religious in the nature of Kubrick’s 2001. Can you elaborate?
I remember reading that Tarkovsky hated Kubrick’s film, apparently finding it cold and soulless. I don’t have the means right now to cite the exact quote.
Kubrick, in an interview when the film was released, explicitly declared “that the God concept is at the heart of 2001,” though he did not mean by this the traditional view. Rather, he went on to say, “the important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man’s own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.” These entities would be indistinguishable from deities, and their motivations would be opaque to us (‘the Lord moves in mysterious ways, e,g,). Hence the black slab, the purpose (as opposed to the effect) of which is never made clear. Something similar takes place in ’Solaris,’ where the powers and motivations of the planet are the subject of speculation rather than knowledge, and the ending implies a kind of acceptance even of that which we do not understand. The central figures in ‘2001’ and ‘Solaris’ achieve transcendence of a sort, but it is one they themselves do not understand; in ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture,’ by way of contrast, Wise’s film, the developments come from human choice, with problems stemming from choices based on too little knowledge, whether of self or others. His point, ultimately, is that the purpose of knowledge is self-willed self-transcendence, rather than the externally compelled events more common to Western religious thought (think of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, an even over which he had no control, for example).
I wonder what Tarkovsky would have made of ‘Star Trek: the Motion Picture.’ It’s a much warmer film than ‘2001’ (or, for that matter, ‘Solaris’), but its humanism might have alienated him just as much as the scientism at the heart of ‘2001.’
Uh huh. Still don’t see any particular explicit “religious” content in 2001. Yeah, the other intelligences being so advanced that they’re godlike to us lower beings and all, but explicit religious content, no.
Maybe that’s what God is, a black monolith imparting knowledge. It’s non-traditional but it’s just as valid as an old man with a beard.
V’Ger rules!!
2001 is about God, not religion.
Also, I remember reading the same article where Tarkovskey accused Kubrick’s film of being cold and lifeless (I happen to disagree with this viewpoint 100%, though I love Solaris as well).
I watched Star Trek:TMP a long time ago, and I don’t remember it that well. I certainly didn’t get the feeling that it was on the same intellectual level as Kubrick and Tarkovskey, but I might have missed something I suppose.
To be about god involves religion, as religion is the external expression of our attitudes toward the god-idea. In a sense, therefore, all three of these films are religious, as each explores the nature of human relations with a god-like power. ‘2001’ approaches the idea the most traditionally, in that the god-figure is simply a mystery to be accepted, one which acts upon humanity (and, eventually, an individual human being) in inexplicable ways for undetermined reasons. Dave is simply swallowed whole by the processes which surround him. Something of the same thing is true in ‘Solaris;’ there we know what the god-figure is, but there is still no clear understanding of its purposes, either on the part of the viewer or of the characters. Kris simply submits at the end. In ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ the religious structure is still present, both explicitly in the dialogue and implicitly in the film’s progression, which strikingly mimics the ‘journey of the soul to God’ as laid out by St. Bonaventura, a foundational text in Western theology. Yet the climax is, if you will, a-theistic; the god-figure turns out to have been created out of human desires and to require human intervention to attain its goals. Hence the concluding intertitle: “The human adventure is just beginning;” the implication is that we need to overcome our submission to a deity and strike out by and for ourselves. Each of these is a religious attitude, though none has to do with religion in the organized churchly sense.
Rory: You probably did miss something if you last saw ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ “a long time ago,” as what you would have seen was an incomplete film, to say the least. Once Wise was able to finish it, the structural balance was vastly improved, as was its overall impact; all sorts of subtle details of image and form are much more sharply focused now.
“that the God concept is at the heart of 2001,”
Well i always believed it to be that god is dead and it plays on the super human of nietzschein philosophy.
I always felt the analogy between Solaris and 2001 purely formal, i.e., they are both sci-fi movies and that’s it. What really dazzled me on Solaris is his take on the Orpheus myth and so, for that end, I think the accurate comparison is with Vertigo. The problem of Kris was that he was given a chance to stay with his dead wife and he did not take it. I cannot imagine a deeper pain than this.
Tarkovsky never saw his film as an answer to 2001, which he did find lifeless and I somewhat agree with. Tarkovsky also felt that Solaris was his biggest failure, he believed that his films should not be able to subscribe to any genre, and with pressure from Stanislaw Lem, the author of the book, he couldn’t avoid the genre. So even though they are often seen as compared Tarkovsky didn’t even have 2001 in mind while creating Solaris.
I know this debate is a lille old, but when Kubrick declares that “the concept of God is in the heart of 2001”, he refers to a very universal spinozian god. God is everything, god is the nature and the whole universe. This also refers to the human nature – the free spirit (starchild) beyond time and space. There is alot of hardcore humanism and existentialism in 2001 – its a very optimistic movie where man defeates his own tool (HAL) and comes a step further in human evolution. In the last sequence, man becomes superman and replaces God as a universal power. God is dead – its all Nietzschean.
SpiderGod
‘Solaris’ is often compared with Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ to which is it sometimes said to be an answer. Maybe the latter claim is true, or maybe not, but certainly the two films share a certain tempo and feel. What few people seem to have realized (it hit me only a short time ago) is that there is a third film very relevant to this cinematic conversation: Robert Wise’s 1979 ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture.’ It’s not difficult to see why Wise’s film might get ignored here; there’s a tendency to assume that everything to do with Star Trek is mindless action and explosions, especially in the most recent films. In addition, there was the fact that Wise didn’t get to finish the film until, ironically enough, 2001, twenty-two years after the rushed release of the unfinished version.
But forget the TV shows or movie sequels; Wise’s film can be appreciated entirely on its own, and it forms a true, if probably unintentional, answer to both Kubrick and Tarkovsky, as a few examples may show. Kubrick’s film is explicitly religious in nature; what happens is almost never the result of human choice but is imposed by the actions of some higher, and unknown, power. Tarkovsky’s film is more ambiguously religious, but certainly the central point is one of resignation; human action never achieves what it seeks to achieve, and in the end the best lesson is one of resignation to fate. Wise’s film, by contrast, is truly humanistic; every significant action develops as a result of conscious human choice, and the closer the film comes to its climax and resolution the more important self-knowledge and self-transcendence become. In all three films we witness personal journeys, begun and signified by extensive moments which are relatively static in terms of action (in Kubrick and Wise realized through complex special effects, in Tarkovsky much less so (the highway sequence, e.g.)), sequences which symbolize the necessity of stripping away one’s conventional will. In all three films the question of identity is paramount; in Kubrick there is the question of what Dave is becoming, in Tarkovsky and Wise we have literal questions of identity: when is a simulacrum enough like the original to count as the original? In all three films there is a tension between technology and humanity; in Kubrick there is a suggestion that humanity is subservient to technology; in Tarkovsky there is a strong suggestion that technology is dehumanizing; in Wise technology turns out to be merely the extension of humanity, of no value without the human element.
Godard once commented that the only proper review of one film is another film. As viewers we can apply his insight across time, such that an earlier film serves as a comment on a later film. These three films strike me as beautiful examples of this sort of conversation, as well as each being a superb piece of science fiction film-making in its own right.