One of the greatest movies of all time

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2003)

Upon yet another viewing of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on a woefully inadequate home television screen, it occurred to me that I have never had the opportunity to see this masterpiece on a regular theater screen, much less the arc of a Cinerama screen. While this may sound like a minor setback in my appreciation of the film, as I began to imagine what it would be like to have Kubrick's images wrapped around me, I realized that the enormity of those images is a vital component of the thematic elements of the movie. The huge curves of the celestial spheres the open and close the film undoubtedly lose their impact when placed between the twin black bars of a 2.1:1 widescreen presentation on TV, and this impact is all but essential to a full appreciation of Kubrick's vision.
Perhaps some of the touches that make 2001 so masterly are the small, hardly noticeable elements (such as the music when the huge black Monolith is first encountered and in every subsequent human interaction with it, a choir chanting an otherworldly kyrie eleison, or `God have mercy', or the line, created by outstanding cinematography, that slices the Monolith down the middle into twin strips of black and white, or the positioning of astronaut Frank Poole's body when it is released to burial in space in a arrangement strikingly similar to that of a crucified Jesus), but what make it a great film, in both senses of the word, are the enormously broad strokes with which Kubrick paints his parable.
The two most significant elements of the film are the Monolith and HAL. Both these elements serve to remind us of Kubrick's central message, that each individual human being and indeed the human race as a whole are entirely insignificant in the realm of the universe as an entity, but remind us in opposite ways. The Monolith is what makes us human, undoubtedly, and what makes Dave more than human. We are nothing without the external influence it has on us. HAL, on the other hand, shows us that we have not yet attained the status of the Monolith or of God. HAL is described as perfect in `every practical sense of the word,' and yet he fails because of human error. Although unclear from the version of the film that now exists, HAL's malfunction is explained in a voiceover in the original screenplay: he is given conflicting orders and cannot function properly because of this conflict. Human beings tried to create life in HAL and couldn't. HAL's malfunction is a form of chastisement at man's attempt to reach beyond his humanity.
And yet this chastisement doesn't reach us directly. Kubrick keeps us at arm's length, gives us the impression of watching instead of participating in the events taking place on the screen. We see the backs of the heads of spaceship pilots, monologues are filmed in wide shots, and we almost never see the details of the face of one of the main characters, Dr. Heywood Floyd. Kubrick pulls back and removes sympathy for the characters in the film, thus achieving a less personal and more universal impact.
Taken altogether, 2001 ultimately inspires a feeling of isolation. Loneliness would be the wrong word because we don't feel the desire to see more emotion in the characters, we don't wish the movie included more dialogue to enlighten us as to the real meaning of the film. Ultimately, 2001 makes us realize, as do so many of Kubrick's films, that we're alone in the universe. We are at the mercy of fate. Chance and hubris ruin our best-laid plans and we cannot hope to transcend our state because it is, indeed, the human condition itself. To become more than we are, we require help, either from God or from an enigmatic slab of blackness. To see 2001 is to be reminded of our humble station in existence.