An example of excellence

Rating: Null/10 (5 August 2004)

As the movie, one becomes short of words in its praise after watching it. Arguably the best movie ever made in Hollywood history, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a viewer's and a director's movie. No actors come in between the two except for the inhuman HAL, the supercomputer. That the movie sets mark for defining excellence is not a preposterous statement.
The movie speaks of journeys in many ways. Be it the journey of 5 humans in a modern spaceship from Earth to Jupiter, or the journey of William Sylvester to the moon through the international space station. But the main journey shown is the journey of the mankind, from living a nomadic life to gaining intelligence and becoming a higher form of life to gaining super intelligence. Is this journey controlled or carefully planned by an external source? Kubrick tries to tell you the answer by taking you through the journey, you experience every bit of it. Through minimal use of dialogues, the director has been able to project the experience.
The movie starts with no life at all. Even the shots are not moving scenes but still images that signify the lack of movement. The first signs of movement are of some animals and then nomadic humans in a corner of the frame. Here, through a fight for survival and under the force of an extra ordinary object, human life gains intelligence. This power grows until humans are able to build computers that can simulate every emotion of the human being. Thus, enters HAL 9000. Interestingly, if all the three letters of HAL are shifted by one on the right in the English alphabet, we get IBM, a leading computer manufacturing firm of the time when the movie was made. HAL may as well stand for Heuristic and ALgorithmic approaches in Artificial Intelligence.
The journey in the movie is always given a direction by some external force and when Kier Dullea goes to find it, he is pulled to some corner of the universe ultimately resulting in the birth of a new super intelligent form. In a way, the journey completes a whole cycle.
The beauty of the movie lies in the accurate depiction of modern technology. For someone to show the International Space Station in 1968 exactly as it hangs today is miraculous. The generation of artificial gravity through rotation shows the scientific correctness of the various scenes. The imagery to show the astronaut's transition in the end is superb as is the same at the time when his space ship is pulled to some unknown realms of the universe.
I would strongly recommend this movie to everyone who has a bit of taste for science or pure cinematic art. Watching the movie may, however, require a lot of patience as it may feel to be too slow (nearly static) as many times.