Rating: G
Genre:
Science Fiction
Theatrical Release: 10/05/2001(USA
Release Date: 10/23/2007
SubTitles: English/French/Espanol
Dubbed: English/French
Sound: DD5.1
Run Time: 148 Minutes
Flags: Mild Violence, Adult Situations, Questionable for Children
Distributor/Studio: Warner Home Video
A mind-bending
sci-fi symphony,
Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968
epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. Based on
Arthur C. Clarke's story
The Sentinel,
Kubrick and
Clarke's screenplay is structured in four movements. At the "Dawn of Man," a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of
Strauss's 1896
Also sprach Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air,
Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development. U.S. scientist
Dr. Heywood Floyd (
William Sylvester) travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon's surface: a black monolith. As the sun's rays strike the stone, however, it emits a piercing, deafening sound that fills the investigators' headphones and stops them in their path.
Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts
David Bowman (
Keir Dullea) and
Frank Poole (
Gary Lockwood) head toward Jupiter on the spaceship
Discovery, their only company three hibernating astronauts and the vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship. When the all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the astronauts to cover his error, forcing
Bowman to defend himself the only way he can. Free of HAL, and finally informed of the voyage's purpose by a recording from
Floyd,
Bowman journeys to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," through the psychedelic slit-scan star-gate to an 18th century room, and the completion of the monolith's evolutionary mission.
With assistance from special-effects expert
Douglas Trumbull,
Kubrick spent over two years meticulously creating the most "realistic" depictions of outer space ever seen, greatly advancing cinematic technology for a story expressing grave doubts about technology itself. Despite some initial critical reservations that it was too long and too dull,
2001 became one of the most popular films of 1968, underlining the generation gap between young moviegoers who wanted to see something new and challenging and oldsters who "didn't get it." Provocatively billed as "the ultimate trip,"
2001 quickly caught on with a counterculture youth audience open to a contemplative (i.e. chemically enhanced) viewing experience of a film suggesting that the way to enlightenment was to free one's mind of the U.S. military-industrial-technological complex.
~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
