Cosmic Grandeur

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2010)

I have got to say that it is one of the best films ever made. It is a visual symphony. This would go down in the history as a treasure. You could spend a billion dollars, hire the finest directors, scour through hundreds of books for material, design the unprecedented special effects and set pieces and attempt to create a wonder like this, but I bet it I would still be a challenge so formidable, such as to be so sensually and philosophically and technically gratifying as this movie.
The movie starts with the dawn of man on a desert landscape about 2million years ago. The ape-make up is too realistic to believe they were actually actors. The mystery starts when a black monolith appears to the apes and they somehow learn to use tool for kill prey for food, thus the transformation of ape in to man. This premise was wonderful and the background score (György Ligeti's Requiem) for this monolith was terrific. From the perfect shape of the monolith it is implied that it came from an alien intelligence for the purpose of transforming intelligent life.
Then comes the famous match cut to a space ship 2million years later. And then comes arguably one of the most beautiful scenes ever seen in a movie, with the Blue Danube waltz (by John Strauss II) multiplying the effect; the dramatic docking of the space ship with space station and the voyage to the moon. The decor used in the space ships are splendid and the costumes of the actors were apt. The moon landscapes made me crave for moon, something which never even the Apollo landing pictures did for me. The black monolith appears again to the visitors at site on the moon implying that there is going to be an extraordinary leap of human intelligence. The radio waves form the monolith seems to point towards the Jupiter and so the mission to the Jupiter commences. HAL 9000, the computer which runs the ship for the mission to Jupiter was particularly terrifying in its tone of voice and the scary close up of it. The scene where HAL reads the lips is shown magnificently by turning the camera alternately between Bowman and Poole. In the end part the monolith appears again taking the space ship thru a kind of worm hole into another kind of world. The climax is philosophical and open for many interpretations.
Many complain the slowness of the movie, but it is what that really did it for me. The director of the film, Stanley Kubrick is a genius. I have loved his other movies, Dr.Strangelove, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, the director never wavered in sculpting absolute pieces of art, any person could dream of. The extraordinary thing I felt about the director is the way he can take the most complicated subjects and interpret it through his extraordinary vision.