2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey tackled a theme as awe-inspiring as the destruction of the world, the exploration of the universe beyond it. Its prologue, set in prehistoric times before the evolution of man, showed the arrival of a mysterious black slab among a colony of apes; it seemed to possess some kind of power to transmit intelligence, for later the apes devise a means of defending their waterhole against the encroachments of a neighbouring tribe.A bone is tossed in the air and in a sudden cut is transformed into an orbiting space station at the turn of the twenty-first century. A similar slab has been found on the moon and has been discovered to be sending signals to Jupiter. A monumental space expedition is mounted, with two astronauts operating a huge spaceship, their three colleagues in a state of hibernation and kept alive by the latest and most complex computer, Hal. In flight Hal asserts its authority by causing a minor fault and the deaths of all crew members except Bowman (Keir Dullea) who disconnects the computer's memory. During the approach to the destination the spaceman falls into a timewarp and the dimensional meaning of everything he has known until then ceases to apply. He finds himself in a strange apartment where he rapidly passes through life into old age. As he dies a slab appears before him and his regenerated foetus takes its place in the universe.The production values of this ambitious film were on an unprecedented scale. Many large American corporations projected their planning more than thirty years in order to predict what everyday objects would look like at the end of the century, and glimpses of the uniform of a Pan Am stewardess on a moonliner, or Howard Johnson's Earthlight Room in the space Hilton, as well as several hundred words of complicated instructions on how to use a space toilet, provided considerable humour. The interior of the space ship was made weightless because Kubrick had it shot within a centrifuge, built specially for the film at vast expense by Vickers-Armstrong. Every detail was carefully researched and depicted, and some of the process work, such as the docking of the Pan Am clipper into the satellite hangar, was breathtaking and faultless in its execution.Yet in spite of the technical gloss, 2001 goes far deeper than a mere exercise in lavish film-making. It attempts to describe the final loneliness of man and the result of exploration to the edge of his soul. An astonishing accomplishment, 2001 is one of the seminal films of the sixties.
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