Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood
Running Time: 142 minutes
Genre: Science-fiction
This is one of the greatest, most influential, and daring films ever made. It deals with how a mysterious, unseen, alien race influences human development, from prehistoric hominids to the space age and possibly to the next stage in human evolution.
It largely eschews conventional film narrative, telling it's story through images, and music, rather than dialogue, in fact there are only about forty minutes of dialogue in the nearly two and a half hour film. The film allows itself to remain ambiguous, there is a lot that is unexplained, and open to interpretation. The film appears to be a very cold work, with it's cosmic scope, pristine spaceship interiors and bland characters, as well as Kubrick's clinical style, but it is surprisingly emotional, in the film's most conventional passage involving murderous computer HAL 9000. The sequence where it pleads for it's life, as an astronaut methodically dismantles it's brain, is genuinely moving, particularly it's plaintive rendition of the song "Daisy Bell" as it expires.
The film's visual effects are still striking to this day, the scenes where the fragile looking spacecraft float in the void to the strains of "Blue Danube" is memorable, and so is the extended sequence where an astronaut travels through a "Star Gate".
I first saw this film as a young child, expecting it to be an action-packed sci-fi adventure about a rampaging computer, and I didn't get that at all, of course. What I got, on that rainy Sunday afternoon at my Gran's house, was something far better, which I didn't understand at all, but I fell in love with the film, and I have come back to it many times since. It's a powerful, beautiful, frustrating, mesmerising film, and ultimately, in it's final image, strangely hopeful.
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