![]() If his space vehicles move with agonizing precision, wouldn't we have laughed if they'd zipped around like props on "Captain Video"? This is how it would really be, you find yourself believing. As a single passenger dozes in his seat, a flight attendant with Velcro shoes recovers his floating pen. Perhaps they are, but I can understand his motives. A Pan-Am space shuttle approaches a large spinning space station, its revolutions mirroring those of the apes spinning bone. Some of Kubrick's effects have been criticized as tedious. The stars look like stars and outer space is bold and bleak. ![]() There is not a single moment, in this long film, when the audience can see through the props. What remains fascinating is the fanatic care with which Kubrick has built his machines and achieved his special effects. There is hardly any character development in the plot, then, as a result little suspense. But they behave so strangely - talking in monotones like characters from " Dragnet" - that we're hardly interested. The pilots grow suspicious of the computer, "Hal," which runs the ship. Three scientists are put on board in suspended animation to conserve supplies. The ship manned by two pilots, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. And man, confident of his machines, brashly follows the trail. The action advances to the year 2001, when explorers on the moon find another of the monoliths. Who put the monolith there? Kubrick never answers, for which I suppose we must be thankful. In a million years, man will reach for the stars with the same tentative motion. The apes circle it warily, reaching out to touch, then jerking away. The shock of the monolith's straight edges and square corners among the weathered rocks is one of the most effective moments in the film. Until this moment in the film, we have seen only natural shapes: earth and sky and arms and legs. Thus do man's ancestors become tool-using animals.Īt the same time, a strange monolith appears on Earth. Kubrick begins his film with a sequence in which one tribe of apes discovers how splendid it is to be able to hit the members of another tribe over the head. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe. ![]() And Kubrick's actors seem to sense this they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. But the achievement belongs to the machine.
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