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Sharp, hypnotic, detached, obsessive, rigorous in its wealth of inventions (always the improbable, never the impossible), "2001: A Space Odyssey" is a mysterious adventure, a psychedelic parable, an astonishing and hallucinogenic journey, yet extraordinarily realistic, into the darkness of the unconscious and evolution. Born from the reworking of three stories by Arthur C. Clarke ("The Sentinel," written in 1948, "Encounter in the Dawn" and "Guardian Angel," both composed in 1950), Kubrick creates his most ambitious work, "the first film, since the times of 'Intolerance,' to be a superproduction and at the same time an experimental film" [Ghezzi], released, it should not be forgotten, more than a year before man's landing on the moon (and conceived starting in 1964). Lacking a true narrative plot, replaced by bold jumps in time and space through superb and exasperated "match cuts," in which even the characters are devoid of true personality, appearing as paradigmatic and functional shadows to the symbolic needs of the narrative (dialogues occupy less than a quarter of the film), the only real protagonist of the events is a monolith-phenomenon, a "Nunc Stans" with straight edges and distressingly delineated margins.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" is a non-film that, with a Darwinian beginning and a lysergic ending reminiscent of underground cinema, overturns the tragic paradox of intelligence as a survival weapon into a Nietzschean dream with Straussian backgrounds and transitions cinema from narration to myth, achieving a synthesis between realism and symbolism. As Kubrick said: "everyone is free to speculate as they wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film. I sought to create a visual experience that bypasses understanding to penetrate with its emotional content directly into the unconscious." And even on TV, without the power of the big screen (the film is shot in 70mm superpanavision format), the final sequences (created through an optical printer, invented from scratch by Douglas Trumbull, named "slit-scan" – based on the technique of "streak photography") retain their visual power and remain one of the highest expressions of cinema magic.
The name of Hal 9000 stems from the initials that compose the two methods of knowledge and communication: heuristic and algorithmic, but it is also a cryptic "tribute" to IBM, because the name of the computer was invented by Kubrick using the letters that, in the alphabet, precede those of the famous company. The unenthusiastic reception the film received after its first screening on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theatre in Washington D.C., prompted Kubrick to re-edit the film with Ray Lovejoy, reducing it from the original 160' to the current 141'. In 2009, the parts cut without a soundtrack were found by Warner, but it seems that to respect the filmmaker's wishes, the production company in question has no intention of releasing them.
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Other reviews
By iside
"The black Monolith is always present, it is God, it is the Root of Being, the Number, the Consciousness."
"Hal’s death is the film’s most dramatic part, as if a man had died, as if a PC had feelings."
By Babel
This film is simply immense. Attempting to explain it would be like trying to objectify Being.
This work should simply be watched, it should not be understood or analyzed.
By Valeriorivoli
The strength of this film lies in its ellipticity, in its polysomic reference to multiple layers of interpretation.
Man comes from the stars, he has within him a fragment of divine mind shared with other technological alien races of the Universe.
By Ilpazzo
No special effect in computer graphics could give that sense of realism that Kubrick gave in the 60s!!
"This film is art. Interpret it as you wish, but it remains one of the greatest works of art ever created."
By Stebre
2001: A Space Odyssey is a countdown to tomorrow, a roadmap of man’s destiny, a quest for eternity and infinity.
The phrase pronounced by the robot before being deactivated is emblematic: "I’m afraid."
