Formality

Rating: 10/10 (22 February 2018)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a landmark, science fiction classic - and probably the best science-fiction film of all time about exploration of the unknown. It was released, coincidentally, at the height of the space race between the USSR and the US. It appeared at the same time as NASA's exploratory Apollo Project with manned Earth orbiting missions - a prelude to orbiting and landing on the Moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. And it prophetically showed the enduring influence that computers would have in our daily lives.
Director Stanley Kubrick's work is a profound, visionary and astounding film (a mysterious Rorschach film-blot) and a tremendous visual experience. This epic film contained more spectacular imagery (about what space looked like) and special effects than verbal dialogue. Viewers are left to experience the non-verbal, mystical vastness of the film, and to subjectively reach into their own subconscious and into the film's pure imagery to speculate about its meaning. Many consider the masterpiece bewildering, boring, slow-moving or annoying, but are still inspired by its story of how man is dwarfed by technology and space.
The first spoken word is almost a half hour into the film, and there's less than 40 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Much of the film is in dead silence (accurately depicting the absence of sound in space), or with the sound of human breathing within a spacesuit. Kubrick's sci-fi experiment intended to present its story almost purely with visual imagery and auditory signals with very little communicative human dialogue (similar to what was attempted in the surreal, fragmented, non-narrative imagery of the Qatsi trilogy - from 1983-2002, from Godfrey Reggio). All scenes in the film have either dialogue or music (or silence), but never both together.
The film is enriched by stunning, pioneering technical effects, and featured orchestral music, presented in movements like in a symphony, from:
Richard Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Johann Strauss, The Blue Danube Waltz
Gyorgy Ligeti, Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs and Orchestra
Aram Khatchaturian, Gayane Ballet Suite
The breathtaking, richly eloquent, and visually-poetic film - deliberately filmed at a slow pace - about space travel and the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence (many years before Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)), was based on the published 1951 short story The Sentinel, written in 1948 by English science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Its original screenplay was co-authored by director Stanley Kubrick and Clarke from an expanded novelization, and the film was originally titled Journey Beyond the Stars. The film's title was chosen because it was the first year of the new Millenium and of the next century. The film was also strongly influenced by director George Pal's Conquest of Space (1955), and was similar in some plot elements that were referenced by Kubrick. Three months after the film made its debut, Clarke published a novel based upon the film's screenplay.
Kubrick's masterpiece was not nominated for Best Picture, but received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Story and Screenplay. It won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects. The film was snubbed by the Academy that instead voted its top accolades to the odd musical Oliver! (1968) based upon the Charles Dickens tale. [Note: In the same year, Planet of the Apes (1968) was given a Special Honorary Oscar for John Chambers' outstanding, convincing makeup (there was no Best Makeup category until 1981) - the Academy members presumably didn't realize the superior, too-believable makeup in the opening scenes of 2001 that included both human actors with life-like masks and infant chimpanzees.] Douglas Trumbull, the Special Photographic Effects Supervisor, went on to work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
The film initially opened to hostile, unsympathetic, negative or indifferent critical reviews (it was criticized for being boring and lacking in imagination), and 19 minutes were cut from the film after premieres in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. But it slowly gained enormous popularity during yearly re-releases, especially when embraced by late 1960s counter-cultural audiences for its psychedelic, mystical and mind-bending elements. It was re-released in a slightly shorter version (141 minutes) in 1972.