Mankind's quest for its place in the cosmos.

Rating: 10/10 (19 April 2008)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) is indisputably a landmark film in the history of cinematic special effects and in the rise to prominence of science fiction as a narrative genre in American popular culture. Released in the midst of America's initial thrust into the frontier of outer space and one year before the first moon landing, the film's special effects range from the psychedelic "Stargate" sequence to nearly documentary realism in the rendering of spacecraft and space travel. Several of the artists and technicians who helped create the film's special effects (especially Douglas Trumbull) were to become the gurus of SF special effects for the next several decades.
Among its many distinctions, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was the first commercially successful art film in American motion picture history. Curiously, its late '60s popular audience was instinctively more receptive to the film than the mainstream newspaper and magazine film reviewers, most of whom complained about the film's obscure plot, minimal dialog, and cardboard characters (excepting the H.A.L. 9000 computer and maybe a hominid or two). What was clear to many in the film's largely youthful and college-educated audience was that 2001's director, Stanley Kubrick, was deliberately rejecting the established Hollywood mode of storytelling and challenging his audience to a cinematic experience that was largely non-verbal yet, paradoxically, searchingly philosophical. Among a generation feverishly seeking alternatives to the established social/intellectual order, the film was hailed as a profound mind trip of perception and concepts. Astonishingly, much of 2001's visionary power remains despite the passage of forty years, seven beyond the portentous date in the film's title.
Regarding the film's non-verbal communication, here are a couple of startling facts: no words are spoken until nearly 30 minutes into its 139 minute running time and a total of only 40 minutes contain dialog, much of which is either minimal or emanates from a non-human source. In place of words, Kubrick uses the "pure cinema" of image and sound (and silence). His distinctly original marriage of a classical score to the film's primitive landscape and futuristic space imagery is justly cited as among the film's crowning achievements. The emotional reverberation of such key compositions as Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (opening sequence), Johann Strauss's "Blue Danube" (first space scene), and Ligeti's "Atmospheres" (distorted voices in the "hotel" sequence) cannot be overstated. Nor can the prolonged silences of outer space that greet the astronauts and film audience once outside the human cocoon of the spaceship.
Perhaps most importantly, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY brought to film the philosophical dimension of prose science fiction that with rare exceptions (like The Day the Earth Stood Still) had largely been ignored by Hollywood in favor of more adventurous or horrific modes. Deriving its initial concept from "The Sentinel," a short story written by the renowned British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY paved the way for science fiction's now common use as a vehicle for the serious analysis of such heavy themes as human nature and evolution, man-machine interaction and differentiation, and the possibilities/implications of extra-terrestrial intelligence. From such a bizarre assembly of objects and images as proto-human cave dwellers, recurring monoliths, mammoth spaceships, an advanced but neurotic computer, a mysterious hotel suite with invisible staff, and a star-child gazing with supra-human wisdom on the universe, Stanley Kubrick forged an endlessly fascinating and provocatively ambiguous epic of mankind's quest for its place in the cosmos. Few, if any, films have had greater or more lasting impact.