2001: A Space Oddesy (1968) Review

2001: A Space Oddesy (1968)
J.R

There's no mistaking this picture for any other director. From the groundbreaking visuals to the brilliant storytelling to the slightly...confusing ending, this is definitely one of Kubrick's finest. It definitely fits into my top ten somewhere, as a virtually flawless masterpiece. Adapted from Arthur C. Clarke's short story 'The Sentinel', later to be the novel '2001: A Space Oddesy' based on the screenplay he and Kubrick wrote, this film tells the story of a strange Monolith which changed human evolution, but we spend the bulk of the film watching a Jupiter-bound spaceship containing an AI computer, HAL, two conscious crew members and many others in some form of stasis.

Visuals and Sound

From the 360° run onboard the ship to the somehow terrifying monolith, this is a visual marvel. It's rare to find a movie nearing its fiftieth anniversary and still have to take a couple of minutes to contemplate how certain shots and effects were achieved. The beautiful landscapes from the "DAWN OF MAN" prologue were interesting and gorgeous enough, (While it may seem somewhat pretentious to start your story off at the VERY beginning, for this film it is a necessity) but it's when the story takes us to space that things really get interesting. Kubrick plays brilliantly with the idea of gravity, creating images as foreign to earth as imaginable, making the audience constantly consider and question how things work both within the narrative and behind the scenes. Overall the visual brilliance has a certain hypnotism over the audience, keeping them transfixed and not wanting to look away even for a moment. Kubrick had such faith in his visuals, and rightly so, that there is minimal dialogue throughout the movie, with the opening and closing 20 minutes of the movie being entirely speechless, with the story being told purely visually (a nice break from the overexplained rambling dialogue we have today in movies which take the audience for idiots), but admittedly the ending was left a little ambiguous to me without any expository dialogue or voiceover (which, I suppose was the point, and I'm incredibly tired of seeing characters talk to themselves as a way of obvious and borderline fourth-wall-breaking exposition to the audience).

And in true Kubrick style, the music and sound are perfectly fitting with the visuals. From the Blue Danube transitioning us from the Dawn of Man to the beautiful space travel of the 'contemporary' period, to the utter silence when HAL kills Frank (this surprisingly being one of the most effective and scary sequences I have ever seen, and it's not even in a horror film). The immensely grand scale of the visuals and symphony of music combine to form a brilliant cinematic experience, giving the average viewer hope of comprehending the magnitude and amazing infinity of outer space.

Artificial Intelligence
Surprisingly, this film covers lots of themes relevant to modern society, such as Artificial Intelligence, humanity, and technology. The creepy HAL 9000 with its single eye watching is genuinely disturbing, knowing that 'he' is nothing but a cold unfeeling machine. His scenes are particularly unnerving with the inclusion of extreme close-ups on his eye, giving the chilling feeling that you are being watched, and the pinhole point-of-view shots from HAL making it feel like we as the audience are spying on the crew. The interview with HAL near the start if the film is a nice touch, clueing the audience into understanding the capabilities of the system, and the slow build-up and realisation that HAL has gone rogue gives us a brilliant conflict, with Dave being unable to trust his sole robotic companion on the mission, being forced to continue his journey through the emptiness of space isolated and entirely cut off from any communication.

Mystery
Something the film does extremely well is keeping some things mysterious. For example, HAL is scary because he is a mystery. He has no face nor body to give away his emotions or doubts, and we can never truly be sure what he is thinking or what he is planning. Another are the Monoliths. By the end of the film, our best guess is that some unseen extraterrestrial force has used them for some reason, but the motivations and endgame for these structures are left unclear, making them even more (for lack of a better word) spooky.

While the ending is confusing, and somewhat justifiably so, Kubrick gives us a brilliantly engaging story told mostly through intense visuals of his Clarke's fantastic vision of space travel. I've been putting off watching the apparently unheard of sequel film '2010', based on the next of Clarke's novels, but I'm not expecting much of it, as som much of the greatness of this film comes from the style and choices of Kubrick.