Kubrick's greatest flaw as a director.

I hope as movie buffs, we can balance a director's extraordinary contribution to the arts, while also being able to discuss the works critically. From a visual and audio standpoint, Kubrick is very rarely surpassed. He has a great eye for casting and suspense. However, when it comes the story and characters.

2001: Space Odyssey is really an abstract arthouse piece. A beautiful snooze. For it's time, it ventured to a place where few other films went. But it really didn't have much to immerse me intellectually or emotionally.

Dr. Strangelove is brilliant in some ways and empty in others. It had enough substance to keep me watching, but with pockets of emptiness in between. There's no real believable story within the fantasy. And there were sort of so many gags going on, that none of the characters or motives were given proper attention. If it's all just a farce, then the comedy itself is stereotypical and cartoonish half of the time

The Shining is my favorite work of Kubrick's by far and maybe my favorite horror film of all time, but it's even apparent here. Stephen King lambasted Kubrick for using his most personal work on a decent father corrupted by alcoholism and self-hatred and turned it into a heartless man of a haunted house. Believable characters were traded off for some of the best thrills I've had, but at the end, apart from being blown away, I did feel like a little story was missing.

The Clockwork Orange is probably the biggest example of Kubrick's flaw. It's his most well directed work, yet the third act does the novel a disservice. The first hour of the movie, the most controversial, was very lavish. However, the story was trying to convince the viewer that the Ludovico method was a morally grey two sided debate. However, the punishment the main character gets is not nearly as clever and intricately devised. The book delved into the psychological effect of the experiment which the movie does not. To be clear, I am NOT arguing that the problem lies within justice not being served. I have no bias toward whether the good guys or bad guys win. However, the entire weight of the dillemma with controversial technology rests on the viewer having some reason to feel that the Ludovico experiment was excessive. And without that, the story of an otherwise masterful film collapses in the third act.

If you can't get immersed in 2001, then maybe Kubrick's just not for you.

Why does this sound so familiar...

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That's a sweeping statement that's not really indicative of anything.

I hated 2001, but I absolutely love the Shining, and I enjoyed Clockwork Orange.

I recognize that my sample size of only 4 of his films is not a lot. But these are 4 of his most acclaimed films.

And the odds that most of his other films excel in plot/story and I just happened to pick the worst 4 of the lot is statistically low.

First of all, welcome to movieforums!

I happen to think very differently about these four Kubrick films.

There aren't many films that have provoked intellectual meditation in wider and deeper ways than 2001: A Space Odyssey has among cinephiles, so suggesting that you not feeling immersed intellectually by this film says something about the film itself is almost absurd. There are few films that have encompassed human existence in a macroscopic sense as profoundly as this masterpiece has.

In my opinion, one of the strengths of Dr. Strangelove is in fact that it does have a certain credibility to it. Of course the film makes use of stereotypes, but that's inherent to the satire genre. All in all, I think it's rightly considered as one of the most intelligent satires about how we as a society have put our collective fate in the hands of inevitably flawed humans who just happen to have risen to power.

Kubrick filtered out the more obvious and cliché elements of King's novel and chose to focus on the more surreal, supernatural and ambiguous aspects of the story. I think this was a good choice. If he had simply remade the novel, people wouldn't still be discussing the true essence of this fascinatingly strange film. No plot can compete with the sheer atmosphere that is exhaled by a film like The Shining.

You didn't think the Ludovico experiment came across as excessive in the film? We must've seen two completely different films then.

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It seems to me that you are focusing way too much on the plot of Kubrick's films, while Kubrick wasn't a plot-centered director and intentionally never tried to be either because plot often forms a limit to a filmmaker's creativity.
Instead of being obsessed by plot, you should simply try to inhale the atmosphere that Kubrick's creating with his marvelous skills as a filmmaker and meditate on the ideas that are sporadically (sometimes subtly and sometimes less subtly) interwoven in his stories. This always seemed to me to be the right way to approach his films, even though there's nothing wrong with the construction of his plots either. It's obviously just not what he was most interested in.

For the rest, I gladly refer to this post and this other post of mine from a few weeks ago in a similar thread.

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I absolutely agree Kubrick improved on King's novel. I only noted that this too fell in line with the trend of discarding plot in favor of atmosphere.

How was it excessive? The protagonist was a rapist, murderer and sociopath who ruined many lives. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him because he got beat up twice, gets headaches when he listens to Beethoven and jumps out of a window? Regardless, the experiment did preclude the protagonist from committing crime even if it did not permanently remove his sociopathic tendencies. Burgess did a great job at conveying the dangers of this technology, whereas Kubrick didn't. Of course, the viewer can speculate all they like, but Kubrick did not convey the dangers of technology. As far as this is concerned, this is not a very morally grey plot. Kubrick went through far more effort to create explicit rape scenes than he did in developing the themes he touched upon.

I'm not. Plot isn't everything. Clockwork Orange, for example, I regard as an 8/10 film which could've been a 10/10 film for me if the third act had as good of a plot as the first two acts. I wouldn't have cared if the movie were 10 minutes longer, provided that there is a quality conclusion to the premises. If Kubrick knew story was his weakness, maybe he should have hired good writers to patch that up.

And that's a good thing, especially in that case.

The cruelty of the first act makes sure that the Ludovico experiment comes across as much "greyer" than it should be. If the crimes in the first act weren't as bad, the experiment could've too easily been dismissed as cruel and every viewer would've immediately sided against it. Exactly because of the fact that the main character is a raping murderer the moral dilemma starts holding more weight. Kubrick's focuses are right.
By the way, if you can't see the severity of the consequences of the experiment in the film there's no point in discussing this any further with you, as we feel completely different about the matter. That's totally OK of course, but I just wanted to mention this.

You're not? Then why is your whole criticism focused on plot again?
His tendency to not care too much about the plot of his films is actually one of his major strengths. He was able to tell profound stories without relying on plot, just like all great filmmakers. It's certainly not a weakness and he definitely didn't need any "good writers" to put more plot in his films. I'm sure his films would've been of a significantly lower quality if he had done that.

A Clockwork Orange is a bit of an odd example in my opinion though, because that's an example of a film that has both a great plot and is also full of original sequences and non-plot moments that significantly contributed to the memorability of the film. He made plenty of films that relied much less on plot than that one.

Clockwork Orange has a great plot compared to most films, but an inferior plot compared to the book. Some would say this is the nature of film-making, but the first two acts capture the book perfectly fine. It's the third act that gets lazy.

Just because I dislike Kubrick's plots doesn't mean he isn't a great director. And just because John Lennon is average at singing doesn't mean he isn't a brilliant composer and songwriter.

average singer? Please recommend a great one!

In terms of vocal range, holding notes, tuning and other mechanical elements, yes. He will never be an Al Green (or even a Charlie Wilson) when it comes to singing. Lennon was superb in creating melodies, instruments, concepts and lyrics. And for that, he's one of the greatest musical artists, but to say that he's a great singer (because of irrelevant criteria) or to suggest that one has to be a great singer in order to be a great music artist overall, is erroneous.

I say the same for Kubrick. Does Kubrick's lack of good plot disqualify him from the top 10 directors of all time list? Absolutely not. But does that mean his plots are good? No.

I saw Full Metal Jacket. And the story was excellent. So Kubrick was able to make great stories when he wanted to.

I'm sorry. This thread is a flaw

Lack of heart?