unique

Rating: 10/10 (17 June 2002)

It's a unique experience in film history.
Visually it's almost unparalleled even after more than a generation where many of the most ambitious people working in film have done science fiction. This aspect of the film really has to be seen on the big screen, in 70mm. Every inch of the screen is packed with almost unbelievable amounts of detail and the illusions are flawless. Kubrick was one of the masters of visual composition.
It's arguable that 2001 makes the most spectacular use of music in cinema. The images backed by Strauss, Ligeti, and Richard Strauss leave an unforgettable impression on literally anyone who sees those sequences.
The acting and sets are convincing. It looks odd now in 2002 when most movies are celebrity vehicles, but the nondescript actors in this film ring true as apes, bureaucrats, and astronauts. The space station, Discovery, African Savannah (which for some reason looks much better projected than it does on the DVD), and even Beyond the Infinite look right. 2001 is craftmanship of the highest level.
The plot is a miraculous mix of documentary style recording and epic story telling. At the most basic level, 2001 is science fiction about the evolution of life on earth. The monolith and life on earth meet several times in the film, heralding a massive change in how life is lived. Simultaneously, Kubrick presents Life on Earth as a voyager in the pattern of Odysseus. The tool using ape, Floyd, Bowman and the star child are representative of the human species moving through history and overcoming obstacles loosely reminiscent of the episodes of the Odyssey. Kubrick uses 2001 to give a history of human life - from apes gnawing raw meat, to sucking liquid veggies, to eating TV dinners and finally on to fine dining. And one could go on listing the themes - man vs. machine, mind vs. body, the nature of identity, and Kubrick's awfully bleak satire on modern life. I don't think any other film has ever tried to touch 2001 in its audacious attempt to absorb life and history into one plot.
It's a film that demands visual literacy in a way few others do. How many times do you see people (apes, then humans and HAL) sleeping, eating, arguing, killing, using tools reacting to a monolith or being killed? Where do the eclipses occur and what changes? Why does almost everyone look exactly the same? What does it mean that all the technology looks like pieces of HAL and the Discovery? Where does the orange/red color appear? Why does everyone spend time talking to or looking at TV screens? 2001 is a hall of mirrors once you see the patterns.
2001 invites people to ask questions about its haunting images and explore their meanings. It's a very demanding film. It's dismaying to read all the posts here from people who were indignant that a movie expected them to figure out what it's up to. That said, the 2001 experience is so unique that it stands pretty far from what a lot of us have come to think of as film. There are no sympathetic characters by design, the pacing is almost that of a stroll through a museum, and it ends on a note of utter abstraction (how else to represent on the screen what Bowman has become?). In an age dominated by Spielburg's obvious and noisy sentimentality, Kubrick's 2001 can seem a lot like Antonioni on downers.