Grade:        A

Moral:        Space babies rock.

Better to think of 2001: A Space Odyssey not as the best movie ever made, but as the only movie ever made; that is, it stands so far removed from the definitional confines of ‘movie’ that it’s preferable to separate the two, so as to avoid confining Kubrick’s masterpiece and crushing the rest of cinema by comparison. Film has largely been an exercise in missed potentiality since its beginnings, in that its epochal yolking of image and sound has been so disappointingly put in service of a kind of transposed theater, a visualized literature, and at the worst, the pathetic confines of ‘realism,’ as if we’re doomed to fingerpainting our tiny apperceptions onto the screen without ever really daring to pursue the imaginative. Contrarily, 2001 stands in very limited company as a genuine work of pure cinema, an expression particular to, and impossible without, its medium.

The apex of a glorious career, it best exemplifies how deeply Kubrick got film, how he understood intrinsically that, on the artistic spectrum, true cinema plots a lot closer to a symphony than it does a three-act play. The movie is impossibly slow yet rapturously realized, a shearing of all the baggage, noise, and clutter into which movies so typically twist themselves, usually in the desperate belief that sound and fury might someday end up signifying something. For example: most movies play ‘big’ while watching them, and then afterwards (sometimes immediately) in memory they shrink into depleted, irrelevant husks. Conversely, 2001 languorously drifts through its frames and plays so ‘small’ that it almost invites your attention to wander, but afterwards it expands in memory until you’re all but blasting cosmic dust out your ears. Further, in the average movie thousands of things ‘happen,’ none of which matter outside their own constructed universe. In 2001, essentially four things happen, yet it’s the only movie in existence so in tune with existential awe that it itself approaches the mythic.

Of course, following its disastrous release the film has since been reevaluated to death, such that now you have to like 2001 because its important. The tweed-jacketed sit around and endlessly ascribe to it all sorts of affected, literalist meanings, and generally reduce the whole thing to a bunch of specious, overreached symbolism. Ignore, ignore. 2001 doesn’t attempt ‘art-house experimentation,’ the pigeonhole into which so many try to push it, because it’s floating too far out in the Milky Way to be limited even by the boundaries of ‘experimentation.’ Instead, it’s an ecstatic convolvement of sight and sound, an evocation of cinema so genuine it’s nearly a religious experience... if you’re into that kind of thing.