Amazing...too amazing

Rating: 9/10 (9 September 2000)

Me and a couple of friends rented A Space Odyssey in the spring of 2000 and watched it for the first time. As Gen-Yers we'd been raised to believe that science fiction and action go hand in hand. They hated this movie; to them it was terribly boring and meaningless. I looked a bit deeper and I think I understood what Clarke and Kubrick were trying to say: that humanity as a whole is only just beginning to crawl out of its infancy; that to understand the nature of the Universe we must first learn to understand ourselves; and perhaps the most important lesson of all - supercomputers can read lips. This certainly is not a conventional movie. It is a grand experiment to show how much can be said through vision. If a picture is worth a thousand words, 2001 is worth a googolplex. That's what makes this movie a classic. All the images that aren't tainted by our primitive language but speak on a much higher level: the ancient monolith on Earth, the circular interior of the ship, the Star Child...these images don't need voice-overs or explanations or subtitles; there are no words to adequately describe them. The only language we have that even comes close to describing this film is Music. 2001 has plenty of music, great music, lots of astonishing images, and virtually no dialogue. It doesn't tell you what it is about...it makes you figure it out for yourself. That's why this is among the greatest films ever made.