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2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – by James Verniere

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) remains Kubrick’s crowning, confounding achievement. Homeric sci-fi film, conceptual artwork, and dopeheads’ intergalactic joyride, 2001 pushed the envelope of film at a time when Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music ruled the box office.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Review by John Simon [The New Leader]

2001: A Space Odyssey is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines, and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans. For all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, this is a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – Review by John Hofsess

2001 no less than Dr. Strangelove is an apocalyptic vision: it i is an alternate future but no less pessimistic. Beneath its austerely beautiful surface an alarm is sounded for us to examine a problem of which Dr. Strangelove was a pronounced symptom: the possibility that man is as much at the mercy of his own artifacts as ever he was of the forces of nature.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – The Harvard Crimson Review

After we have seen a stewardess walk up a wall and across the ceiling early in the film, we no longer question similar amazements and accept Kubrick’s new world without question. The credibility of the special effects established, we can suspend disbelief, to use a justifiable cliche, and revel in the beauty and imagination of Kubrick/Clarke’s space.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – THE PROLOGUE INTERVIEWS

Kubrick’s original plan was to open 2001 with a ten-minute prologue (35mm film, black and white) — edited interviews on extraterrestrial possibilities with experts on space, theology, chemistry, biology, astronomy.
Kubrick says that he decided after the first screening of 2001 for M-G-M executives, in Culver City, Cali­fornia, that it wasn’t a good idea to open 2001 with a prologue, and it was eliminated immediately.

2001: A Space Odyssey

BEYOND THE STARS – by Jeremy Bernstein

We are happy to report, for the benefit of science-fiction buffs—who have long felt that, at its best, science fiction is a splendid medium for conveying the poetry and wonder of science—that there will soon be a movie for them. We have this from none other than the two authors of the movie, which is to be called Journey Beyond the Stars—Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.

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