By Andrew W. Griffin

Red Dirt Report, editor

Posted: May 20, 2011

reddirtreporter@gmail.com

FILM REVIEW:  Kubrick’s Odyssey  by Jay Weidner (Sacred Mysteries / Cubed Brick Productions) 2011

My first introduction to the work of world-renowned director Stanley Kubrick took place in 1980, when I was eight years old. I went to see a movie, it may have been The Empire Strikes Back, but it was a trailer for the upcoming Kubrick film The Shining that got the attention of my fragile, eggshell mind.

My already over-active imagination did not quite know what to make of the horrific scene of a flood of blood coming out of a closed elevator. It was shocking to see, no doubt about it. The images from the trailer alone would stay with me for years, haunting me. And while it would be many years later when I actually took the time to watch The Shining, it’s impact would, once again, be powerful.

The first Kubrick film I would actually watch all the way through was 2001: A Space Odyssey.  This was the movie that hit my like a punch to the gut. It struck a chord in me I was previously unaware of. The story, the mood, the colors, the implications … it was as if I had been waiting all my life – I was then 13 – for Kubrick’s vision of Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction tale of transformation from ape to man to god-like eternal consciousness.

Clearly, Kubrick was on to something. His final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is notable in that he died soon after its release. Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Kubrick takes us on a journey into the secretive world of the elite. The folks really running the show. Allegedly there are scenes that have never been shown beyond some trailers which are now missing. What line did Kubrick cross that so upset Warner Bros. executives? Clearly Stanley Kubrick was “in the know” and he used his art as a brilliant film director to tell stories that revealed things often hidden in plain sight.

Enter Jay Weidner. This guy has been looking behind the curtain, as it were, for some time. Long interested in the mysterious and esoteric, Weidner has taken an interest in finding “mankind’s spiritual destiny via ancient societies and artifacts” and has interviewed countless alternative historical and scientific theorists. He has been featured on The History Channel and has been getting a lot of attention in recent years for his research into the 2012 theories.

As Weidner notes, in the opening credits of his fascinating documentary, “This film is the first in a series dedicated to revealing the secrets hidden inside the films of the greatest filmmaker of all time.”

And there are lots of secrets within Kubrick’s films, as we soon discover. Kubrick, suggests Weidner, is not only a great filmmaker, he was “privy to the main secrets of an occult society that rules the Earth.”

One of the biggest and most shocking is that Weidner speculates, through clues he found primarily in The Shining, that Kubrick faked the Apollo Moon landings, using his work on 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as cover. Weidner, however, does believe the U.S. did get to the Moon, just not in the fashion we were told.

Weidner, who narrates, liberally uses footage from Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001 and The Shining.

Dr. Strangelove, notes Weidner, “made fun of the Pentagon, the generals and their various war plans” and while this irritated the Defense Department, they were more amazed that Kubrick had pieced together what a B-52 looked like on the inside by looking at pictures in military magazines.

Because the U.S. Government, through NASA, was hellbent to get a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960’s, as President Kennedy had promised, and because they wanted to prove to the Soviet Union that the U.S. was going to win the space race, they had to have some insurance – a way to prove, at least to the public and the world – that the U.S. had the technology and wherewithal to get to the Moon.

That’s where Kubrick comes in. Impressed with his work on Dr. Strangelove, Weidner speculates that Kubrick made a deal with the U.S. Government to fake the Apollo Moon landings – with Apollo 11 ultimately being the first one to land in July 1969.

Weidner leans towards the idea that the U.S. did go to the Moon but that the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 shown to the public were all staged and Kubrick was the guy directing the whole thing.

So, how did he do it? Weidner says that Kubrick’s use of a cinematic technique called “front screen projection,” used effectively in the ape-man scenes in the first part of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Front screen projection allows scenes to be projected behind the actors. The ape-man scenes were filmed on a soundstage and scenes of a Spanish desert are projected behind the actors in ape costumes. The same technique is used in 2001’s Moon scenes as well.

This same technique, Weidner speculates, was used by Kubrick to film the Apollo Moon landings.

Interestingly, Weidner notes the research of Richard C. Hoagland. In his book Dark Mission, co-authored by Mike Bara and reviewed by this writer for The Norman Transcript, Hoagland believes glass-like structures are on the Moon and that NASA hid this evidence in the photos they released. Weidner believes what Hoagland is seeing tiny glass beads in the slightly flawed Scotchlite screen used in the background of the scenes by Kubrick.

Weidner says scenes showing people moving slowly in space in 2001 was to condition people to accept the same movements that would be seen a year later (and for three years after that) in the Apollo footage.

And while this is shocking, if it’s true, things get even stranger further in Weidner’s film when he uses Stephen King’s novel, The Shining, as the basis for a film with the same name. Of course this interpretation would bother purists and confuse others. But Weidner explains that Kubrick needed a way to get it out there that he was the one behind the Apollo Moon landing hoax and that The Shining would be the way he could accomplish this.

Starring Jack Nicholson as frustrated writer Jack Torrance, Weidner says Jack is actually Kubrick and that when Jack goes to the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies. It is here that Jack Torrance transforms from writer/caretaker into a homicidal monster. Clues are peppered throughout the film, explains Weidner, and the things he points out are quite shocking, from what Jack Torrance’s (Stanley Kubrick) real role was and how his son Danny and wife Wendy have roles in this situation as well.

In Kubrick’s Odyssey, Jay Weidner makes a compelling argument that there was a serious and deep cover-up of the true nature of the Apollo Moon missions. Director Stanley Kubrick, arguably the greatest filmmaker of all time (I vote for him!), made a deal with the U.S. Government to fake the Moon landings in exchange to get all the funding he could ever want to make films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. And feeling some level of frustration or guilt, Kubrick revealed the nature of his involvement in the cover-up via clues in the story told in his cinematic version of Stephen King’s novel The Shining.

This is an important documentary and the first in a series of films that Jay Weidner is working on. I, for one, can’t wait for the next installment.

For more information go to www.jayweidner.com or  www.sacredmysteries.com.

Grade - A

Copyright 2011 West Marie Media