I've seen Kubrick's 1968 classic several times, but the opportunity to see such a visually dynamic film on the big screen again was too good to miss. It's a long watch at two and a half hours (this screening had an intermission), but always engrossing. The plot unfolds in four clearly delineated sections.
A tribe of prehistoric ape-like creatures struggle for survival in a hostile landscape. Their sudden discovery of a tall, black, oblong monolith sparks the moment of creativity when a tribe member realises he can use the bones of dead animals as a club. At once the tapir like creatures they must compete with for food are themselves transformed into a richer and more plentiful supply of protein. and the tribe now have the weaponry to see off rival groups for watering holes. Their evolutionary progress has been assured.
A bone, flung high into the air in triumph, morphs into a space shuttle. On board is an American scientist en route to the moon and the discovery of a tall, black, oblong monolith which has been buried beneath the surface - evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and news that could shake humankind's understanding of itself. The information is kept secret, and eighteen months later....
The Discovery spaceship is on it's way to Jupiter, to which the monolith had directed a signal. On board there are three crew members in suspended animation, two, Dave and Frank, tasked with keeping everything going smoothly on the journey, and HAL, an Artificial Intelligence computer which is able to converse, and maybe even emote, like a human. HAL develops his own ideas about the mission and deliberately sets about killing the crew (predating Stephen Hawking's warnings by almost five decades!), but Dave finds a way to survive and disable HAL's AI capability. In doing so he learns for the first time about the true nature of his mission.
In the final section Dave leaves the ship to encounter yet another monolith, floating in space. From a terrifying transition through to an alternate reality, Dave finds himself in a suite of rooms furnished in a bizarre mix of modernism and Louis Quinze, watching himself age and die, to have the monolith reincarnate his essence as a Star Child, a creature of endless possibilities looking down on the Earth.
With hindsight, the film has a definitively 1960s view of the future, especially the technology. A mix of over optimism, surprisingly practical imagination, and so many laughable anachronisms - there isn't a touch screen in sight. It's a Pop Art vision of the world to come, a directness in attempting to second guess human progress. There's a lot they got right, but something as simple as the way a human being walks in moon gravity isn't there - the film predates Neil Armstrong's immortality moment. Oh, and it looks like the Cold War was still going on!
Despite this there are some lovely details. The velcro zero-gravity shoes, the rotating space station generating it's own gravitational field, the reliance on solar power. Most sixties sci-fi spaceships were sleek, rocket like, so it was revolutionary to have practicality take the lead over looks. There was as much science as fiction involved in the design of the hardware.
The transition sequence near the end of the film is the most purely cinematic experience, both visually and aurally, a psychedelic fairground ride. Best ignore the limited scope of special effects back then, no CGI to call upon, so much of the sequence resembles brightly lit circuit boards and colour shifted mountain ranges, but remains impressive in context. The in-space sequences are generally impressive, even by modern standards.
Kubrick always stuck to the line that the meaning of the film was entirely open to the viewer, who must provide their own interpretation. Many have done so over the decades since so I'm not going to add mine here. This is a film with a power beyond it's meaning, this is art. Simply stunning on the big screen, I have, ever since my first sight of it, carried images in my mind that are brought to life the second I hear Thus Spake Zarathustra or The Blue Danube. Try to see it at least once in your life. It's one of those movies that reminds you just how powerful cinema can be.
(Let's not mention the Bechdel test....)
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