Daunting Imagery And Sounds

Rating: 10/10 (4 June 2011)

This movie, one of Kubrick's greatest, is in every sense of the word epic. Before anything else let me say the cinematography was amazing with every frame. As most know, this movie revolutionized space travel in film, the dawn of amazingly detailed miniatures and sets that set the standard for science fiction films to this day. The shots are not brief and to some drawn out. However, it was done for the main purpose of admiring the beauty and wonder of technology, specifically the advent of exploratory astronomy. It's a very intriguing concept and one Kubrick handles without giving into the clichéd tendencies of fast-paced sci-fi/action flicks of today. Especially ones such as myself that love the genre and when watching such films sometimes wish fascinated audience members could gawk at an enormous space craft only a moment longer.
Along with that, the beauty and dazzle the future promises, there's a dark underlying theme of the threat of technological advancement. You can see it from the start with the apes and the striking power that simple primitive tool brings. HAL only compounds this. The film in itself is rather abstract in a sense that it takes quite a bit of analyzing to grasp any sense of it. My understanding of it is that of a Nietzsche allegory, more specifically the concept of Apollonian and Dionysian in society. In the film, we see society as it began, with the apes as a mostly Dionysian society filled with chaos and a animal-like sense of simplicity. It's the origin point of man, which to me has always been a point of Kubrick's films. To display to audiences that despite mankind's advancements man is still just another animal with the same savage instincts as beasts, just cluttered and disguised by morality which is still just a concept dreamed up by philosophers. Calling it nihilist or not, so be it, it is a simple embrace of logic. Mankind strives ever so hard to achieve the Apollonian society, one of pure enlightenment and rational thought fueled by advancement in science. In the world set up by Kubrick, mankind has achieved this state of being and have become chillingly machine-like. The vast mystery of space is something that is not marveled at as we see a character sleeping in a bored fashion as he rides on a space shuttle and later another character sees a happy birthday wish from his family and has an almost stoic reaction. It's implied that neither have seen an actual human being in the flesh for quite a bit of time and yet their focus is entirely on their mission.
HAL is the threat of a purely Apollonian society manifested. He suffers the human tendency to make an error though, and this is perhaps due to the fact that his flawless logic has become humanized by human emotion: fear and paranoia such. Dave achieves something in the end, to me a simple form of life that is in essence pure and possibly neither Apollonian or Dionysian, via the monolith. There's quite a bit of room for interpretation in this grand and certainly strange movie. It's use of music is seldom but beautiful and chilling to hear. The moments of silence seem to have even more profound reaction. A must see by all means.