My favorite movie

Rating: 10/10 (12 July 2002)

This film is beautiful to behold. Beautiful pictures, beautiful music, beautiful direction all telling a rather simple story about very complex issues. For those who found the film boring or slow, you ought to know that Kubrick intentionally created a drawn out exposition of the plot to show how boring space travel and perhaps space itself can be. Indeed, there are lots of jabs at techonological progress throughout, e.g. HAL spells IBM minus one letter in the alphabet for each letter, and the primitive bone-tool is juxtaposed with a space ship in what must be the single greatest jump cut in the history of cinema. The excitement occurs due to conflict and is instigated by a mysterious and rather unnatural or even supernatural monolith from (?outer) space. The monolith intervenes with the natural course of history at very crucial moments in evolution and human development leading man into a pursuit of the monolith itself. We never learn what the monolith is nor do we know where it came from. Is it God? Is it alien life? Is it a cosmic joke? Regardless of what it is, man is simply obsessed about finding out what this monolith is, where it came from, and what it means. Like most of Kubrick's films, this one is about human nature and it's mysterious origins. At first innocent, later intelligent and, consequently, violent. In many ways, 2001 is a retelling of Adam's fall from grace and, possibly, future salvation.