Gets better with age

Rating: 10/10 (3 September 2007)

Combine Stanley Kubrick's ability to make every scene intensely watchable with subject matter that is natively fascinating to begin with and you have one of the most hypnotic films ever made. The film is long but it never ambles or stalls. It marches at its own "just right" pace from beginning to end inviting you to savor each word, each scene, each dizzyingly perfect camera angle. I've heard many versions of what the film is about. But after almost 40 years of sometimes sober, sometimes drunken and occasionally post-coital discussions about it, I still don't know what it's about and frankly I just don't care anymore. I can recite the story line, sure. But what are the major themes? How does one articulate them? I think only the writer, Arthur C. Clark, knows for sure how to frame those notions into a coherent whole. But for the mentally fragmented rest of us, the movie shines like a multi-faceted crystal twirling in the light, inviting us to think, to ponder, to have our own epiphany or two about consciousness, human evolution, and the collective destiny of humankind. Or was that the destiny of a single human in the context of the many? I forget. Not sure it matters. Nonetheless, the film causes you to ponder yet again the nature of the universe and more than anything come to the conclusion that the universe could be even stranger and more beautiful than you thought. Or is that - more beautiful than you remember? I don't know. It turns out that the distinction is not all that important either. The film will forever remain a beautiful, unparalleled and utterly glorious enigma to me. If it hasn't already, I hope it does for you as well.