The film is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Kubrick the award for his direction of the visual effects. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, including pieces by composers such as Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. The film stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain, and follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists and the sentient supercomputer HAL to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith. Clarke also published a novelisation of the film, in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film's release. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story " The Sentinel" and other short stories by Clarke. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Some of next year’s Academy Awards are already bespoken.2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. However, any annoyance over the ending - if indeed it is widely felt - cannot really compromise Kubrick’s epic achievement, his mastery of the techniques of screen sight and screen sound to create impact and illusion. There are certainly not any answers, but there is reasonable question whether the questions themselves must be murky. I don’t know, and I confess to finding this evasion of a statement, this deliberate obscurantism, just that. A mirror civilization, a periodicity of the whole human experience? One can read anything or nothing into the wordless last half-hour of “Space Odyssey.” Dullea, still in a space suit, is a withered old man exploring an earth-like house, his space pod parked in the bedroom. It is a kind of metaphysics which seems deeply a part of science-fiction’s attraction. Like “Blow-Up,” this ending may be a kind of Cinerama inkblot test, in which there are no right answers to be deciphered but only ourselves to be revealed by our speculations. Ultimately the monolith reappears in a Regency drawing room Dullea confronts himself in various stages of antiquity, and our last view is of a thoughtful green embryo with huge haunting eyes. The computer turns villain (confirming a widely held suspicion) and at last Dullea enters a very psychedelic-looking trip, the aurora borealis viewed from within, and absolutely dazzling, whatever it is meant to mean. Whether they make it, I honestly don’t know. A spacecraft manned by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, three hybernating scientists (to economize on life-support commodities) and a rather epicene talking computer named HAL (“Open the door, please, Hal”) take off for Jupiter. Clues point to Jupiter (I guess things get to be very elliptical and obscure). It’s hushed up, for it can only mean the existence of other intelligent life in space, maybe unfriendly. In 2001, a similar black monolith has been found beneath the moon’s surface. In the desert the apes ponder a curious tall, black monolith, not natural, not theirs, not earthly. The film begins with a fairly pretentious title: “The Dawn of Man,” introducing a long - interminable - sequence (like everything else, beautifully photographed) in which our grandfathers the apes achieve the beginnings of humanity: they divide into warring camps and discover that an old bone makes a killing cudgel. There is plot, of course, and for my money it is right here that the pocketa-pocketa-queeps of malfunction become audible (Let me be clear: I don’t think the sci-fi-faithful will hear the queeps of plotting, but the non addict with a more literal turn of mind may be in greater or lesser degree exasperated.).
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