Kubrick's groundbreaking sci-fi film remains a classic milestone for the future.

Rating: 9/10 (20 March 1999)

Let us remember Stanley Kubrick as a genius of provocative filmmaking, and also a prophet of events that came and went. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY has survived the test of advanced time. Not just in eye candy, but the imagination of living in an artificial world where new forms of communication are evitable. This is science fiction a step forward in fantasy that becomes reality. In this case, things already have...
Don't thrash the movie's opening sequence. Try to picture your mind the living standards man would use later. With a few primates hanging around the barren land of Earth, there is a point of significance about the future of civilization. "The Dawn Of Man" instantly becomes "The Dawn Of Computer". The primates' ways of intelligence is applied for the next challenge in an artificially run setting like the year 2001. Smart thinking from Kubrick!
As I've said numerous times before, visuals do not always make the movies, but this is an exception when you had a movie that revolutionized special effects. For 1968, expect the impossible. If you have remembered seeing this in the theater, it's because you had terrible seizures from looking at the most vibrant graphics and pyrotechnics ever mastered on film. No object is ever tacked onto the print (like the Starship Enterprise), and they look like glimpses of future sci-fi hits including STAR WARS. But if you have developed severe hemorrhoids after the film was over, it was because of the knockout "hyperwarp" scene. Its amazing display of dazzling colors and quick speed still rivals against the eye-heavy, eye-demanding visuals of today's movies. Give this one another thirty years to prove itself worthy as time and technology progresses. Truly incredible!
Like I mentioned, Stanley Kubrick acts as a prophet by using ideas that soon become reality or has already happened. The supercomputer HAL-9000 is a perfect example, which lead to modern operative machines and devices running on simple chips and bits of hardware. And did this movie predict a form of network communication like the Internet? Computer malfunctions? Artificial intelligence? If time had only told us, the answer is strictly "yes". But let's continue to believe that this is a science fiction movie without inducing panic.
There may be thousands of other possibilities to discover from this masterpiece. We've learned an awful lot out of this one, though. I don't mean to say it "is" the greatest thing ever created (and no, TITANIC "is" not the greatest, either), but if we can dig deep into Kubrick's finest talents of a genuine Hollywood classic, we'll know that 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY can easily withstand all of the mediocrity that will continue to play in the high-tech multiplexes.
A perfect "9" winner from you know who!