Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took five years and $10 million to make, and it’s easy to see where the time and the money have gone. It’s less easy to understand how, for five years, Kubrick managed to concentrate on his ingenuity and ignore his talent. In the first 30 seconds, this film gets off on the wrong foot and, although there are plenty of clever effects and some amusing spots, it never recovers. Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is major disappointment.

Part of the trouble is sheer distention. A short story by Arthur C. Clarke, The Sentinel, has been amplified and padded to make it bear the weight of this three-hour film. (Including intermission.) It cannot. The Sentinel, as I remember, tells of a group of astronauts who reach the moon and discover slab, clearly an artifact, that emits radio waves when they approach it. They assume it is a kind of DEW marker, set up by beings from a farther planet to signal them that men are at last able to travel this far from earth; and the astronauts sit down to await the beings who will respond to the signal. A neat little open-ended thriller.

The screenplay by Kubrick and Clarke begins with a prologue four million years ago in which, among other things, one of those slabs is set up on earth. Then, with another set of characters, of course, it jumps to the year 2001. Pan Am is running a regular service to the moon with a way stop at an orbiting space-station, and on the moon a similar slab has been discovered, which the US is keeping secret from the Russians. (We are never told why.) Then we get the third part, with still another set of characters: a huge spaceship is sent to Jupiter to find the source or target of the slab’s radio waves.

On this Jupiter trip there are only two astronauts. Conscious ones, that is. Three others—as in Planet of the Apes—are in suspended animation under glass. Kubrick had to fill in this lengthy trip with some sort of action, so he devised a conflict between the two men and the giant computer on the ship. It is not exactly fresh science fiction to endow a machine with a personality and voice, but Kubrick wrings the last drop out of this conflict because something has to happen during the voyage. None of this man-versus-machine rivalry has anything to do with the main story, but it goes on so long that by the time we return to the main story, the ending feels appended. It states one of Clarke’s favorite themes—that, compared with life elsewhere, man is only a child; but this theme, presumably the point of the whole long picture, is sloughed off.

2001 tells us, perhaps, what space travel will be like, but it does so with almost none of the wit of Dr. Strangelove or Lolita and with little of the visual acuity of Paths of Glory or Spartacus. What is most shocking is that Kubrick’s sense of narrative is so feeble. Take the very opening (embarrassingly labelled The Dawn of Man). Great Cinerama landscapes of desert are plunked down in front of us, each shot held too long, with no sense of rhythm or relation. Then we see an elaborate, extremely slow charade enacted by two groups of apemen, fighting over a waterhole. Not interwoven with this but clumsily inserted is the discovery of one of those black slabs by some of the ape-men. Then one ape-man learns that he can use a bone as a weapon, pulverizes an enemy, tosses the weapon triumphantly in the air .. . and it dissolves into a spaceship 33 years from now. Already we are painfully aware that this is not the Kubrick we knew. The sharp edge, the selective intelligence, the personal mark of his best work seem swamped in Superproduction aimed at hard-ticket theatres. This prologue is just a tedious basketful of mixed materials dumped in our laps for future reference. What’s worse, we don’t need it. Nothing in the rest of the film depends on it.