A truly amazing experience

Rating: 10/10 (27 October 2006)

Kubrick is a genius and none can deny the superb special effects in this film so ahead of its time. Kubrick here achieves the promise of science fiction literature, bringing the beauty of space travel to the screen in believable form. The film opens with a prehistoric tableau: sub-human man is confronted by a huge black obelisk, an alien artifact that somehow teaches man the use of tools(and weapons). The implication is clear: man's one crucial step towards native intelligence was prompted by intelligence from the stars. Kubrick then cuts to his vision of 2001, on a space station high above Earth, and the figure of Dr Floyd who is being transferred to the moon to study a mysterious black obelisk recently discovered/excavated from beneath the Lunar surface. Our cameraman is afraid to approach this monolith as us astronauts approach and then the light of the sun hits it and a piercing signal is transmitted to the vicinity of Jupiter. Determined to investigate what lies at the other end of the signal, an expedition is mounted and eighteen months later, the great ship "Discovery" departs from Earth orbit. Fashioned in space, this beautiful monster carries two astronauts and three other scientists in suspended animation in the company of a smooth talking computer named HAL-9000, which seems to have developed a curious personality of its own. Hal is an adolescent in human terms, has a pathological fear of being turned off; to protect itself, the computer kills an astronaut, terminates the life functions of the three men in deep freeze and exiles another guy to slow death in a space repair pod. One man unable to reenter the ship through the normal hatches, all of which are controlled by the machine, opens a manual hatch, blows in without a space suit, and activates the airlock, penetrating the "Discovery" without any apparent damage(the other guy should be long dead by now) HAL is terminated after telling this guy about his mission. A third monolith is discovered on one of Jupiter's moons, and it throws the astronaut through a magnificent, most spectacular light show. At this point the remaining audience who had the patience to enjoy the film's earlier slow pace are thanking the good Lord for what they are witnessing, we have come so far. This "light show" kind of space travel is meant to represent or suggest some kind of mental transformation or another dimension in space or time, or both. Bowman lives out his days in plush quarters on the Jovian moons, and when he dies, is reborn again in an alien embryo, hovering over the turning green sphere of the Earth. 2001 is a major cinematic experience I discovered in my late Grandfather's video collection years ago and since then I've seen it over and over even if its a pretty long movie, its always a pleasure. After this film movie makers everywhere started taking the sci-fi genre more seriously. 2001 gave the science fiction film respectability, and a sense of growing maturity.