Beautiful, intelligent, creative - Kubrick shows how to make intelligent science fiction.

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2002)

Watching a movie like `2001: A Space Odyssey' is mildly depressing on some levels, when you realise the film world has lost the talent of Stanley Kubrick. His movies feature heavily in IMDB's Top 250.. because they deserve to. This is certainly no exception, and I'd place it even higher than it's current #54 ranking.
The plot? Funnily enough there's not much of one, and it's hard to describe what there is. A giant black monolith appears before primitive man on Earth. Then it appears again on the moon in 2001, before also being seen near Jupiter. A crew, under the guidance of their onboard computer HAL, are sent to investigate. What is it? Well watch the movie (though you won't necessarily find out what it is.).
What of the script and acting? It's shocking to realise it's about twenty-four minutes into the movie before you get the first word of dialogue. In fact the dialogue is incredibly sparse. A lot of what's there is exposition, as a character explains why they're heading to Jupiter, or how HAL works, et cetera. There's little in the way of banter, though the movie doesn't suffer from it. The acting, what's needed, isn't particularly out standing - Keir Dullea, playing the principal scientist David Bowman is quite wooden and his main counterpoint, the soft dulcet tones of HAL, is a blinking red light. Yet they work because the speech is so sparse, so that you attention is never really drawn to the performances.
It's the direction that makes this movie entirely. In the hands of many others this movie would have been a shambles, but Kubrick elevates it to greatness. It's hard to imagine being able to make huge chunks of movie without dialogue interesting, and yet Kubrick does just that. It's an understatement to say the movie looks gorgeous - despite being a product of 1968, it still stands proud with it's use of detailed models (as opposed to the weak CGI still employed). The camera work is typically absorbing, often taking in huge vistas in a single shot that manages to frame the scene perfectly. There's a very meditative tone to it all - we can focus on a ship drifting for a minute, without ever finding it tedious. Each set piece is beautifully constructed, and yet never is there a feeling that Kubrick's style got in the way of creating a feeling of authenticity. There's never a break, or jarring moment, that jolts the viewer from the movie's universe, despite some increasing drug-induced moments towards the movie's end (which manage to still look fantastic - the Star Gate sequence is trippy, but dreamily invocative too). The sound is fantastically well chosen - the classical music score used at peak moments of the movie work great, and really add a sense of wonder to what's been shown. It's not just the music though that shines out, as Kubrick chooses to completely silence the movie at some points, or have one sound - such as heavy breathing - the only dominant noise on screen, drawing the viewer right into the moment with the character, with an intensity that would be lost if supplemented by needless music.
It's hard to fully describe the magic of `2001: A Space Odyssey'. It's an `experience' movie that needs to be seen to be able to understand why it still stands the test of time. Watch it in a quiet room and dream of what may yet be. 9/10.