Weird and hard to understand, but captivating nonetheless

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2007)

When I saw this movie for the first time, at the age of 14, I actually hated it: it was too slow (I had to repeatedly press the fast forward button on the remote control, especially during the last 20 minutes) and I did absolutely not get the ending. It took me two more viewings to understand that was the point: nothing ever happens quickly, man's rise to power was a slow process and therefore humanity's decline (Kubrick's favorite theme), as depicted here, should require an equally long amount of time.
In fact, the director's idea is that often our greatest accomplishments are in reality an anticipation of decay. This is shown most clearly in the (very) long opening sequence, where a mysterious black monolith appears and presumably affects the planet's inhabitants (apes), as they learn to use bones as weapons, thus getting one step closer to progress but also much closer to extinction.
The movie then cuts to a different era, in one of the most beautiful images of sci-fi cinema: one of the apes throws a bone in the air and as it goes back down it morphs into a spaceship. Apart from skipping centuries or even millennia in a very creative way, this also has the purpose of underlining the connection between the prologue and the rest of the film which, as indicated by the title, takes place far away from Earth in a distant (at the time this movie was made, that is) future. In particular, the focus is on a space station where a group of astronauts, led by David Bowman (Keir Dullea), are helped by a supercomputer named HAL 9000. HAL is, by his own definition, absolutely perfect and incapable of doing anything wrong. Or at least he was before the black monolith started showing up again, causing the machine to behave strangely and put the men's lives at risk (this was later reused by Kubrick, albeit differently, in Full Metal Jacket). What is happening? What is that black object, and what does it do?
These questions remain unanswered, and given the director was the most notorious perfectionist in the history of cinema there has to be a good reason. Perhaps the answer is to be found in Kubrick's personal opinion about films: he believed watching movies was similar to dreaming, which is why some of his most famous works feature dream-related material (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and the nightmarish, pun not intended, Eyes Wide Shut). In his mind, images were much more powerful than words, hence the limited dialogue in 2001: like in a dream, what really matters is what we see, not what we hear. Kubrick lets the visual elements speak by themselves, with nothing more than classical music as a companion (the "dancing" space vehicles and asteroids are among the most fascinating and iconic shots ever). When someone speaks, it is merely to move the plot forward, even though in one specific moment (the last scene where HAL "appears") it is used to highlight the film's most ironically moving sequence.
Dreams are intriguing because we do not always understand their meaning and usually only remember a few images. 2001: A Space Odyssey is exactly the same: maybe the epilogue will never make sense, but the visual memories that have been left behind ensure the movie has a well deserved place in any Top 50 list of the greatest pictures of all time.