Visual Poetry - a landmark achievement

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2010)

One of the seminal points in the development of film and cinema. Future directors like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron, to mention just a few, were massively inspired by this film. Its easy to see why.
Kubrick evolved film making conventions considerably. The plot is decidedly ambiguous and thinly sketched so as to force the audience to understand and interpret it themselves, with very little exposition, and deliberately trivial or even banal dialogue. Compared to Kubrick's previous films, there is no verbal narration beyond the films division into the sections of 'Dawn of Man', 'Jupiter Mission', and 'Jupiter - Beyond the Infinite'. The film if full of ambiguous symbolism, which forces the viewer to invest in the picture viscerally. You then have to reflect on the experience to get anything from it. Albeit this only works as a viewing experience if you are very patient.
Acting performances are not really the point of this film, with William Sylvester, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood giving deliberately controlled, restrained, even bland performances which are designed to create a sense of detachment from the characters. The only character that is genuinely interesting is the man-ape Moonwatcher, played brilliantly by Daniel Richter.
Technical credits are really the driver for this film. Production Design by Terry Masters and his team is excellent, working in great collaboration with Geoffrey Unsworth, resulting is staggeringly amazing cinematography, that still looks brilliant by today's standards. He is a genius at simulating natural light and conditions on indoor studios. This is further re-enforced by Kubrick's signature camera-work The visual effects are still hugely impressive, even by today's CGI dominating standards, and for the most part the miniature work is fantastic, as is filming on the simulated centrifuge on the discovery spacecraft. There are some minor quibbles, for example there is a scene set in zero G where the stewardess walks in a circle but seems to walk too far for where you would expect the cockpit to be, and there are some views out of windows that don't seem to correct for the angle that the spacecraft are flying at.
These issues are nevertheless more than compensated for by the amazing experience of watching the film, particularly with the marrying of image with existing classical music. Alex North, whom Kubrick worked with on Spartacus, had written 40 minutes of score, but this was discarded when Kubrick elected to use his choices of classical music, which works amazingly well. It leads to an original, fascinating experience, that feels very poetic and highly visceral.
In many ways, its the ultimate silent movie, relying more on music rather than dialogue to tell the story from an auditory point of view