Some remarks from someone who was there...

Rating: 10/10 (20 May 2001)

I find the divergent comments about this film quite interesting. It's either a masterpiece and suprmely involving or it's a worthless boring fake. I think if you were in a Cinerama theatre and had the experience that Kubrick intended, there would be no doubt that you had just seen one of the great films of all time. The pacing of this film is absolutely dependent upon the overwhelming size of the image and the detail of the soundtrack. There is no way to describe in words the power of the first time I heard the Zarathustra theme in a Cinerama theatre. It went way beyond what you would experience even in a concert hall since the music surrounded you and the volume and fidelity were simply overwhelming. This is a film that had people shaking and giddy following the title card! And so it goes for the rest of the film. What may seem slow and uneventful on a video screen was just what was required for an audience to absorb all the visual and aural information. Those stills for example, at the start of the film were accompanied by desert sounds that were so real you expected a cricket to hop out from under your seat. And the long sequences outside the Jupiter ship involving the AE35 unit are entirely engrossing and set one up for the silent horror that ensues.
I just watched the film again for the I don't know how manyth time, and every time I see it I am surprised by threads I never noticed. This time I was amazed that the film is so much about murder. Murder as the basis for evolution, murder of humans by machines, murder of machines by humans. And has there ever been a greater metaphor for our technology dominated society that the sequence of the man jogging in his giant squirrel cage while the saddest music you have ever heard plays on the soundtrack?