Four½ out of Ten stars (See Appendix for calculation)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick; Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Starring: Keir Dulles (Bowman), William Sylvester (Floyd), Douglas Rain (the voice of HAL)

2001, A Space Odyssey is a legendary film, and perhaps rightly so, as we shall see. This does not, unfortunately, mean that it is a great or even a good film. It is beautiful, but it is quite empty. There is little plot and even less characterization.

The film opens with Apes wandering in the early days of the earth. They are surprised by the appearance of a very large black monolith. One ape touches it. The group shrieks at it for a bit then goes to sleep. The next day one of the apes, in a flash of apely intuition, realizes how to use a bone as a weapon and armed with this knowledge and a tibia, drives away a rival band, slaying their leader.

The rest of the film makes about as much sense.

The film has virtually no dialogue at all, what little there is is mostly of a banal nature. The humans discuss foodstuffs, gossip and call people on the phone. The characters have no motivations, no goals and no personalities. They might as well be anonymous, they are so utterly flat and insipid… Except… HAL.

HAL is a computer. Although he speaks only in a monotone mechanical voice with no variation in tonality he expresses cognizable emotions and has understandable motivations: he describes himself as being ‘afraid’ as he is being dismantled, worries about factors that could influence the success of the mission, fights to preserve his existence, plots to commit murder and finally falls into madness. The humans, on the other-hand, are cold and mechanical. Dr Floyd, David Bowman and Francis Poole are the human characters but they behave like computers. HAL behaves like a human.

The editing is poor, long segments should have been deleted entirely or reduced greatly, the tediously long scene with the apes, the extravagant docking sequence, Floyd’s endless dawdling on the space station, his overly choreographed flight to the moon, his long journey to the excavation site, Bowman’s interminable passage through deep space, the list goes on. Each of these should have been edited down to a few minutes each, instead they comprise the bulk of the running time of the film.

The tedious slowness of the pace is caused, it cannot be emphasized enough, by the irrelevance of these scenes. Certainly they are beautiful, but except the ape scene they do not advance the abstruse plot, none improve the already thin characterization and all accomplish little more than to bore the audience to sleep.

These scenes, it cannot be denied, are often extraordinarily aesthetically compelling. Kubrick had an incredible understanding of how to create visual effects and construct images. Even more impressively, the special effects have scarcely aged at all! Many an early sci-fi flick becomes a laughing stock in the decades following because the effects look ridiculous, not so 2001. Even the Monoliths are arresting.

Many of the effects used had a long-term impact on the course of cinema sci-fi. The true impressiveness of the Warp Gate sequence is lost on modern audiences because they have seen imitations of it dozens of times. The “slit-scan” tunnel has become universal film and television short-hand for hyperspace, reused and reproduced in everything from Doctor Who to Star-Gate, but the technique was quite novel at the time and must have seemed nothing short of awesome.

The physical design of the Discovery One spaceship in particular, deserves special mention, it’s shape, HAL’s omnipresent “eye”, the just-so machinery, the incredible EVA pods and, of course, HAL’s memory room.

The psychedelic closing scenes with Bowman in “France in Space”  are among the most surreal and bizarre ever filmed and they are very, very effective. As the inter-title said “beyond the infinite”. The scenes powerfully imply altered states of awareness and an ineffable alien superintelligence.

Overall, the film is technically stupendous. The very lighting itself is a thing of wonder. Excepting the music, sound is used magnificently, magnificently… go back to the scenes on the Discovery One and just listen, the sound of the breathing apparatus, the silence of the EVA scenes, HAL, the sound is as vivid as the sight.

Finally, in the closing one minute of the film, the whole point of the  metanarrative comes out. God is something that humans evolve into, with the help of large black slabs from outer-space. God, by the way, is also a huge glowing baby. There is no plot, only meta-narrative. What a waste.

The film grapples with massive ideas and it is at its absolute finest when grappling with the concept of intelligence, the plodding intelligence of the apes, the devious intelligence of HAL, the esoteric intelligence of the unseen beings… but these lofty ideas are not intelligible in drama form, the film fails because sheer visual might is no substitute for plot, grandness of artistic vision cannot replace characters and a slideshow is not a film.

How Rating was Calculated:

Plot/Story	0/10
Philosophy	1/5
Acting/Characterization*	2/10
Music/Sound**	2/5
Direction/Photography	10/10
Special Effects	5/5
Technical/Other***	3/5
TOTAL	23/50 4.5/10 stars

Detailed Explanation of Calculation

Rating notes: * because of the lack of characterization the acting is very hard to evaluate. The points given are one for HAL’s voice and the other for Dulle’s facial expressions as Bowman while ordering HAL to “open the pod bay doors” ** had the music been better, or even absent, this rating would have been much higher *** the lighting is worth one point in and of itself, one point is given for the attempt to accurately portray the year 2001 the other is given for the witty faux “product placement” in the space-station and Discovery One scenes (PAN-AM spaceflights, Howard Johnson, Bell System, British Broadcasting Corporation, Hilton, etc)