Amazing.

Rating: Null/10 (15 March 2008)

This film, hailed by many, including myself, as the best and most important science-fiction film ever made is very influential but still very unique. Philosophical, stunning, forever fascinating- 2001 is all of these. It defies genre convention and is unlike any science-fiction film before or after its release. Certainly it deviates from Kubrick's stated intention to make the proverbial good science-fiction film. Visually, 2001 is undeniably awesome. Ground-breaking special effects (designed by Douglas Trumbull and Kubrick himself) are a dazzling mix of imagination and science. 2001 can be taken as a mysterious adventure, sermon, or vision, one that was understandably the ultimate trip for hippies on psychedelics, but even viewed simply as a haunting spectacle it is unsurpassed. Its sketchy narrative and sometimes bewildering themes and questions are more than compensated by its gripping engagement between man and machine, its visual starkness and serenity, and, above all, its rhapsodic wonder at heaven and earth and the infinite beyond.