SIGHT AND SOUND on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY:

A year before the first moon landing, Stanley Kubrick envisioned an outer space where vast spacecraft revolve weightlessly to the strains of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. 2001 revolutionised the depiction of the cosmos on film, at the same time—with the HAL-9000 computer that fatally malfunctions during a mission to Jupiter—sounding a warning about unbridled technological advance.

Beginning with primordial apes discovering tools and climaxing with astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) travelling beyond the limits of the known universe, Kubrick’s film was an intellectual (and psychedelic) event in the late 1960s. A “match cut” which quickly replaces a bone thrown upwards by an ape with a similarly shaped spaceship floating through space, thereby compressing millennia of human evolution, is justly celebrated.

“If Kubrick could get rid of the human element, he could make the perfect film,” joked Malcolm McDowell. But here, he almost does. By acting, arrogantly, as if nobody had ever made a really good science-fiction film before, Kubrick solves all the genre’s problems methodically but also pushes it into epic, mythic, spiritual terrain. It’s stately, bold, astonishingly beautiful. The great rationalist suddenly blasts us off into a psychedelic experience which doesn’t yield fully to reason. It’s not even certain if the film is optimistic or despairing (yet colourful).

—David Cairns

Read more at bif.org.uk