The only realistic space movie

Rating: 10/10 (22 February 1999)

This is my early favorite. Though Star Wars is flashy and fun, it breaks the laws of physics and gets the space travel all wrong.
Kubrick lets the spacecraft carry the story forward quietly and majestically, yet at no point is it boring. "2001" is really the opposite of the loud, short-attention span space movies that have always been the norm. You must keep watching because there are countless detailed things going on at all times--antennas turning, computer screens flashing, machines smoothly operating--that are all critical to the story, yet not explained except visually. It's a real treat for the moviegoer because it assumes some intelligence on your part.
There are really only a few minor technical flaws I could point out (but why bore you?). It is amazingly advanced for its time (1968). It has the look and feel, the sights and sounds of what spacecraft MUST be in order to function properly.
So what if the dialog is uncomfortable, stiff and stilted? This is one of the only movies to get it right technically. It also introduces HAL 9000, the hypnotically perfect-talking computer, the most famous movie computer character of them all.
The first 20-minute part, the prelude, consists of proto-humans (hairy apes!) roaring and bashing each other with animal bones. It's bearable because of what comes at the end of the prelude. The transition from savagery, as the beast triumphs over his foe and hurls his thighbone club into the air, to civilization, as the bone turns into a satellite gracefully gliding by in orbit (to the opening bars of "The Blue Danube Waltz") sends chills up and down my spine every time.
The last 20 minutes are nothing but psychedelic colors and absurdly out-of-place scenes, as the astronaut Dave goes through a portal to "the infinite." It's a sharp contrast to the rational, paced logic of the middle section of the film, similar to the deep contrast between the pre-civilization primates and the space-faring people of 2001.