A bona fide masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (8 June 2003)

The thing I really like about Stanley Kubrick films is how different they are from conventional films, thematically, stylistically, how they stand apart from every other film in the genre, if some Kubrick films can even be said to belong to a genre.
The same is true with 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've seen it four times now and it gets better each time. Like all great works of art, it sometimes takes repeated viewings to fully comprehend its depth. The story- and it's true that there's not a complete story here- is the story of man through the ages. It begins with a twenty-minute sequence on prehistoric man that will leave some people scratching their heads, before it segues into man in the age of space travel. To watch certain scenes over and over is really to appreciate their simple beauty. The astronaut exec (played by William Sylvester) presiding over a board conference, having a private chat with some people allied to the business, on board the spaceship as commander directing his men. And I never fail to be charmed by the "zero-gravity" images or the videophone conversation between the commander and his six-year old daughter.

The only nod to any sort of movie convention begins aboard a spaceship heading for Jupiter comprised of a five-man crew and HAL 9000, the talking computer, who either is or isn't as human or more perfectly human than the men flying the mission. The real drama concerns HAL and whether or not his superior intelligence presents a danger to the mission. Beyond that, Kubrick shows us what space travel is really like: boredom, a lot of empty hours, doing maintenance checks and playing chess with HAL. The final segment, Jupiter and Beyond, is so spectacular for its visual effects, the splicing of the galaxy as the ship passes through it in a spectrum of colors, the terrain of Jupiter itself, an endless ruin of crevices and barren surfaces. I think people who downplay the effects in the movie or don't like them are just looking to see something blow up, maybe have a head-on crash with another spaceship, something a la Star Trek. The special effects in 2001 are as real and as relevant as they were in 1968.

Another point worth mentioning is Kubrick's use of classical recordings to frame the action (even though he had commissioned a film "score" from composer Alex North). The music, like the best film music, actually becomes part of the viewing experience (as in Psycho, for instance). It emphasizes the action, rather than accommodating it, sweeps you up at certain points and provides a counterpoint in others. I don't know how much better or worse North's score would have been, but the classical music, which Kubrick originally put in just as a placeholder while editing the film, makes you aware of it, even though I've heard something like "Blue Danube" a thousand times, including Bugs Bunny cartoons.

2001 is a dazzling experience from start to finish. And if you don't exactly "get it", see it again and again. It wears well. 4 **** out of 4