Reel Look: '2001: A Space Odyssey'

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2015)

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL". The visionary and perfectionist director Stanley Kubrick teams up with science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke to create an epic monolithic achievement that takes us on an epic adventure beyond the stars and the realms of our imagination, based from Clarke's book 'The Sentinel'. But is this revolution of science-fiction cinema more visually engaging than its four-act storyline? Let's take a look.
Setting the stage for the vast leap from ape to star child, the adventure is triggered by a mysterious black monolith appearing at the dawn of man. Evidently of unknown extraterrestrial origins, the imposing alien structure inspires a certain hominid (with state-of-the-art makeup only to be outdone later on the same year by John Chambers' Oscar-winning makeup for 'Planet of the Apes')to develop tools from the bones of an animal carcass, following in the most robust and famous jump cuts in cinematic history, from an airborne tibia to a space station some millennia later. The monolith is then discovered on the surface of the moon after being deliberately buried for four million years. Eighteen months flash forward and the U.S. spacecraft Discovery One is bound for Jupiter. Aboard are mission pilots and scientists Dr. David Bowman(Keir Duella), Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and three other scientists of whom are in cryogenic hibernation. Most of Discovery One's operations are carried out and controlled by the ship's monotonous and psychologically disturbed computer, HAL 9000 (chillingly voiced by Douglas Rain), and is referred to by the crew as "Hal". Though enthused by the mission and stating how he enjoys working with humans, the homicidal Hal wants noting to do with jeopardizing the mission, killing any astronaut awake or in sleep on board that or would deter him until Bowman puts a stop to this and disconnects most of the computer's memory and processor modules.
Free from HAL, Bowman leaves Discovery One in an EVA to investigate another monolith orbiting around Jupiter. Approaching it, the pod is suddenly pulled into a vortex of colored light, as the disoriented and terrified Bowman finds himself racing at intense speeds through a the Star Gate portal over vast distances of space and time, viewing cosmological phenomena of bizarre proportions and strange, unusually colorful landscapes, all shot with the innovative use of slit-scan photography. What may have been considered a radical trip from hippies on psychedelics at the time, it is nothing more than a disturbing yet mind-grappling array of kaleidoscopic images that both stun and enhance the senses of Bowman and the audience as truly and audaciously groundbreaking. Bowman, still in his pod, finds himself in an 18th century-style bedroom, where he sees himself as middle-aged then as an old man dying, reaching for the mysterious monolith at the foot of his bed, which reincarnates him as a fetus enclosed in a transparent orbit of light beside the Earth, as the new being gazes at it from above.
With the punctilious Kubrick winning his only personal Oscar for breathtaking visual effects (with the genius collaboration of special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull),this poetic meditation gravitates flawlessly, depicting the ingenuity and folly of mankind through four acts of wonder and enlightenment that demands to be seen on the big screen to be fully appreciated. To John Strauss II's 'The Blue Danube' orbital waltz of space stations calmly floating amid Earth's orbit to Richard Strauss' triumphant and powerful famous five-note opening of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', this is truly a silent film with sound, is baffling, engaging, spectacular, strange, imaginative, compelling and so forth. In fact it is all these things and more, as Clarke's novel is adapted if by a composer, meshing the concept of science-fiction as a virtuosic rhapsody, orchestrating the vast celestial heavens and space time continuum itself to a world of limitless wonder, surreal, intriguing beauty and the ineffable, infinite beyond.