This review was updated on September 21, 2024
Selected by Time Out as its best movie ever Stanley Kubrick’s gargantuan interplanetary pilgrimage tracks humanity’s progress from the prehistoric plains of Africa, where proto-human apes discover a consciousness-expanding alien monolith that grants them the wit to use tools, to the start of the 21st century, and a human voyage to the moons of Jupiter where the evolutionary promise of the monolith will finally be realised.
Working with British sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke – whose short story ‘The Sentinel’ provided some of the initial concepts – Kubrick’s intention was to make what he described as ‘the proverbial good science fiction movie’: a film entirely free of scaly monsters, scantily clad princesses and laser-packing heroes, where the focus was on real-world speculative science rather than space opera.
Graceful, inquisitive, groundbreaking and endlessly rewatchable
Needless to say, he succeeded. Released over a year before the first manned moon mission, 2001 mirrors the Apollo project in its sense of absolute, painstaking precision: like the lunar missions, this is a film where every single element works perfectly, where every person involved – from the designers to the special effects technicians to the actors to Mission Commander Kubrick himself – has given their total focus to the project.
Accusations of emotional coldness are hard to refute, but any remoteness is offset not just by the musical choices – from Richard Strauss’s ominous ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra' to the giddy, gliding ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ – but by Douglas Rain’s indelible vocal performance as HAL 9000, the shipboard computer who is also, ironically, the most sympathetic character in the film.
Critically lambasted on release, 2001’s reputation was rescued in part by its popularity on college campuses, where the hallucinatory extravagance of its climactic ‘star-gate’ sequence was warmly received by those whose minds were chemically opened to the experience. It stands now as a work of pure, sensory cinema: graceful, inquisitive, technologically groundbreaking, endlessly rewatchable – a flawless film.
What to Watch Next:
Planet of the Apes (1968); Silent Running (1972); The Tree of Life (2011)