Kubrick is God (end of discussion)

Rating: Null/10 (12 March 1999)

This movie needed to be seen the first showing of the first day it played: two weeks later, with scratches and dust on the print, the effect was not quite the same. The perfection of the style of the cinematography, compositions that were a series of tableaux of period paintings, set the environment of the story like no movie had before (or has since). The same critics who found this picture over-long and the performances wooden were some of the same people who waxed rhapsodic over 2001. Though "wooden" is a calculated part of Kubrick's palette, 2001 is definitely the longer of the two pictures, in my opinion. Critics of the day also found the narration to be "anti-dramatic", as in several cases throughout, the narrator announced what was about to be played out on the screen. I found this device, as with Kubrick's other intentional effects in this picture, to be absolute perfection. Viewers who were not brought up on Kubrick become very impatient with the worshipful tones some of us adopt when discussing his films. What can I say? He is the only director whose decisions I would never have the effrontery to question.