Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, 1968. Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood.

            The fact that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is my favorite movie of all time, begs an inevitable: Why does a movie with sparse dialogue, hard to define plot, and a bewildering, inconclusive ending hold my impression as a “perfect film?”

            “2001" has all of those elements just mentioned, all of them in abundance (or is it deficit?). But the allure of executive producer/director/co-writer Stanley Kubrick’s quintessential masterpiece has all the properties of what truly made a great movie, indeed a revolutionary one.

            First written as a short story called “The Sentinel” by the dean of science fiction writers, Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on the screenplay. Clarke later published “2001: A Space Odyssey” as a novel, the first in a series of four “odysseys” written over 40 years. It took Kubrick three years to make “2001,” setting the standard and pattern for special effects photography by which such later movies as “Star Wars” were judged. When the movie debuted in 1967, the flawless scenes of space travel, zero-gravity environments, planetary and bizarre phenomena were done using models, huge rotating sets, and light overlays. The perfectionist Kubrick used these innovations, long before digital technology, to give his vision the intrinsic continuity needed for a movie that relied less on human interaction and more on visual images to connect the sinews of action to tell the story. It does by showing, not telling; the golden standard in communication.

            And therein lies the true artistic achievement of “2001”: Dependent more on the form of the medium than the traditional oral substance of all storytelling before it. There is dialogue in the movie, but used sparingly with great effect, to give surrealistic connections between humans and the drama in which they find themselves. Actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood live an adventure that takes men from Earth to the orbit of Jupiter to answer (though unaware to them) the question of the origin of alien technology discovered buried near a U.S. base on the moon.

            The real personification in the movie, however, is the use of a computer, the HAL–9000, as the main character. This character, a thinking machine that would be considered revolutionary thirty years from our own time, is both the essential connection to the search for humanity’s meaning and the experience of everyday life within the story. It is HAL’s very human confusion that overwhelms reason when intellect comes in conflict with immature emotion. Even more, the interplay between natural and manufactured instinct gives the audience insight. It gives perspective about the long struggle in that search for purpose and the fate that could lay ahead of humanity as our quest for knowledge propels us beyond the limits of our comfortable personal and world horizons.