Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world's most advanced super computer.
WHAT I LIKED: '2001: A Space Odyssey' arguably aims higher than any film before it - or indeed after - as Stanley Kubrick remarkably sets out to explore the entire fate of humanity here whilst testing the very limits of cinema's capabilities. But whilst these ambitions clearly lie far outside the usual remit, like with any film one comes away with a response, and reviewing it is then about unpicking the reasons for that and dissecting what the film is really doing.
In the case of 2001 then, in many ways it's a film split very distinctly into three acts. First off, the opening act (or acts if you go by the opinion that 2001 is a four-act film) is effectively a shrewd observation of humanity. Here Kubrick showcases his usual humorous, theatrical style (perhaps seen most overtly in Dr Strangelove) to broadcast human nature; beginning very comedically with apes starting to learn their human tropes and then cutting absurdly over a million years later to observe humans using space travel - all whilst continuing to gently ridicule. There's genuine moments of slapstick comedy, characters seem oblivious to the obvious stakes of everything around them (heck their first priority when coming face to face with a giant alien mass is to take a photo with it), and the music that builds this disjunct between the potential horror of the plot and the human belligerence when faced with all of that is hugely sarcastic. All of that stuff is very Kubrick though if you look at the rest of his filmography, and here it unquestionably makes for a thoroughly amusing and fascinating first act.
But once humanity is established so sarcastically and so brilliantly, we then begin on a mission to Jupiter and the second act begins to morph into a terrifying sci-fi mission where two astronauts are locked out of their ship by an advanced computer. Now the point this is making of course is fairly obvious given that the previous act began plotting the course for the destiny of humanity, but the way it's executed is extremely different. Gone are the jokes and much of the theatricality, and in that place is a far more serious approach where tension is built expertly and you begin to genuinely care about the fate of the characters. This is the part of the film which is most famous, and it's not hard to see why - in fact it's probably Kubrick's best hour of work throughout his entire career, and it proves that he can do serious, subtle, tension-building filmmaking absolutely brilliantly.
That's helped of course by the utter brilliance of his world-building where the chronic attention to detail shines through. His sets are beautifully-designed and absolutely tangible which gives a real grounding to the whole experience, Ray Lovejoy's editing is stark and the sound design is extremely empty and bold which all adds to the sense of terror and fear, and Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography is all-consuming and utterly breathtaking. All of that has had a huge influence on science-fiction films (and indeed all of cinema) since, but here it serves to build tension brilliantly and deliver an interesting message about one exceedingly pessimistic potential for the fate of humanity.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The only thing is, we still haven't mentioned the third act... and that's because this is where the film has its issues in my opinion.
Humanity has now been gently ridiculed and its fate has been put into question against the power of the machine, but now Kubrick is left in a sticky position. He's making a film about the fate of humanity, so at the end of the second act he could of course have ended very pessimistically with the machine winding up on top. But as we know, he very admirably wanted to leave things ambiguous.
What that means for the film though is that man triumphs over machine and then ends up (after what looks like a ridiculously long acid-trip in a rollercoaster) on Jupiter in a palatial room with a couple of old versions of himself and a giant floaty baby. In effect then, Kubrick leaves us with a few weird hints that amount to nothing at all.
Now don't get me wrong, I love an ambiguous ending - it would have been very disappointing (and frankly ridiculous here) to have been explicitly told what happens to our astronaut and the human race. But there's a difference between leaving the door open for the audience to make up their own minds, and digging up the garden path so they have no way of navigating what they've been left with. You can call it what you want and hypothesise how you like, but the bottom line is that this aimless absurdity not only drops the engagement built by the rest of the film, but it also means the whole thing ducks its way out of a proper ending. It's hard to criticise that too much given the difficulty of closing a film with these kinds of ambitions, but it's hard to not feel a little let-down after the mastery that preceded it.
VERDICT: Stanley Kubrick humorously observes the dawn of humanity and its eventual ways and then expertly embarks on a terrifying sci-fi mission to explore its overall fate, '2001: A Space Odyssey' is ridiculously ambitious, and the sheer mastery of those first two acts are enough to bypass the irritating lunacy of its ambiguous third.
