Kubrick re-writes the cinema rulebook

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2011)

Stanley Kubrick's landmark sci-fi epic blew a lot of minds back in 1969, and at the dawn of the 21st century the film lends an even more compelling perspective to our place in the cosmos. Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C. Clarke ask more questions than they answer, which is only appropriate, since their scenario follows nothing less than he entire evolution of human consciousness, moving in daring narrative leaps across time and space from the genesis of primitive intelligence (notably, an act of violence) to Mankind's first, enigmatic encounter with infinity.
And yet rarely has a film drawn on such a monumental canvas communicated so much by saying so little. Kubrick embraces a truly cosmic vision of exploration and discovery, but the ideas are expressed with an equally cosmic reticence perfectly suited to the arid emptiness of outer space (the human astronauts show even less emotion than their renegade HAL 9000 computer). Ironically, it's the void itself that leaves the deepest impression, and the film is able to capture its intimidating silence and sense of disorientation using a spare economy of images and sounds: a spacecraft racing silently over the barren, blue lunar surface; the mammoth Discovery probe en route to Jupiter, floating through the loneliest reaches of the solar system; and above all else, there's always that compelling, opaque black monolith, hovering in perfect symmetry between the sun and the stars.