Whether they make it, I honestly don’t know. A spacecraft manned by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, three hybernating scientists (to economize on life-support commodities) and a rather epicene talking computer named HAL (“Open the door, please, Hal”) take off for Jupiter. Clues point to Jupiter (I guess things get to be very elliptical and obscure). It’s hushed up, for it can only mean the existence of other intelligent life in space, maybe unfriendly. In 2001, a similar black monolith has been found beneath the moon’s surface. In the desert the apes ponder a curious tall, black monolith, not natural, not theirs, not earthly. The film begins with a fairly pretentious title: “The Dawn of Man,” introducing a long - interminable - sequence (like everything else, beautifully photographed) in which our grandfathers the apes achieve the beginnings of humanity: they divide into warring camps and discover that an old bone makes a killing cudgel. There is plot, of course, and for my money it is right here that the pocketa-pocketa-queeps of malfunction become audible (Let me be clear: I don’t think the sci-fi-faithful will hear the queeps of plotting, but the non addict with a more literal turn of mind may be in greater or lesser degree exasperated.). This must be the best-informed dream ever. The detail - down to the operating plaque for the Zero Gravity Flow toilet - is immense and unimpeachable, I’m sure.
So ordinary is the experience that the soundtrack is the old-fashioned “Blue Danube” waltz (which is only one of Kubrick’s inventive strokes.). The Pan American commuter craft makes its ordinary way to the busy moon, in this day only 33 years from now. Weightlessness is shown to be an accustomed state. Men walk in space, and tumble in death toward an eternal orbit. In that sense, it is a milestone, a landmark (or a spacemark) in the art of film.Ī spacecraft resembling a vast cubist centipede glides noiseless through deep space toward Jupiter. As a technical achievement - a graduation exercise in ingenuity and the making of film magic - it surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. It is an ultimate statement of the science-fiction film, an awesome realization of the spatial future. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the picture which science-fiction enthusiasts of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might one day give them.
Here is Times critic Charles Champlin’s April 5, 1968, review. The re-release of the 50-year-old film was accomplished through an entirely photochemical process overseen by Christopher Nolan. A newly struck 70 mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s epic science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” opens May 18 at the ArcLight Hollywood.
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