Word: kubrick
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Intermission. By this time, almost 1 hr. and 40 min. have passed, and the non-sci-fi fanatic may feel as benumbed as the scientists in their "hibernacu-lums." In depicting interplanetary flight 33 years from now, Director Stanley Kubrick and his co-scenarist, Arthur C. Clarke, England's widely respected science and science-fiction writer, dwell endlessly on the qualities of space travel; unfortunately they ignore such old-fashioned elements as character and conflict. As the ship arcs through the planetary void it is an object of remarkable beauty-but in an effort to convey the idea...
...only human in the film HAL proves a greater murderer than any of the men. Returning 2001 to the theme of inherent destruction in social and technological progress, Kubrick's chilling last-shot-before-the-intermission (a shot from HAL's point-of-view, lip-reading a conversation of Bowman and Poole deciding to dismantle him if the mistake is confirmed) suggests the potential of machine to control man, the ultimate reversal of roles in a situation where man makes machines in his own image. HAL's success is partial; he murders Poole, then three doctors on the ship...
...physical death: the last of many multi-colored solarized close-ups of his eye appears entirely flesh-colored and, if we are justified in creating a color metaphor, the eye is totally wasted, almost subsumed into a pallid flesh. When man journeys far enough into time and space, Kubrick and Clarke are saying, man will find things he has no right...
...Kubrick's superb film has a problem, it may simply be that great philosophical-metaphysical films about human progress and man's relationship to the cosmos have one strike against them when they attempt to be literally just that. Rossellini's radiant religious films or Bresson's meditative ascetiscism ultimately say far more, I think, than Kubrick's far-more-ambitious attempt at synthesizing genre and meaning...
Nevertheless, 2001: A Space Odyssey cannot be easily judged if only because of its dazzling technical perfection. To be able to see beyond that may take a few years. When we have grown used to beautiful strange machines, and the wonder of Kubrick's special effects wears off by duplication in other Hollywood films, then we can probe confidently beyond 2001's initial fascination and decide what kind of a film it really...