Art house: A fresh look at 2001: A Space Odyssey
Edmund Lee
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was first released in cinemas in 1968, the science fiction epic dreamed up by director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke marked an important cultural milestone with its believable semblance of the world to come.
That was the pre-digital era of cinema, with Kubrick's special-effects spectacle having arrived a year before man actually landed on the moon.
With the benefit of hindsight - and the daunting realisation that Hollywood's big-budget studio productions have only further regressed in the intervening years - the operatic space drama now looks as narratively and conceptually daring as any sci-fi film born in its shadow.
Partly based on Clarke's 1948 story The Sentinel and then novelised by the writer under the film's title, the high-minded work offers such a languorously confusing first impression that it attracted a wide range of philosophical and metaphysical interpretations.
Considered literally - and not just as an allegory - 2001: A Space Odyssey may be said to propose an account of human evolution intervened by extra-terrestrial intelligence. It opens with a prologue, titled "The Dawn of Man", which sees a troop of apes become tool-using animals after coming across a mysterious monolith on earth some four million years ago.
The black rectangular slab will appear on three more occasions, separated by millions of years and kilometres, presumably as a measure of our evolutionary progress by the advanced beings out there.
After the image of a bone being flung into the air in the prehistoric age is cut to that of an elongated spaceship in the 21st century, the film's second segment follows a team of astronauts as they uncover another monolith from deep on the lunar surface, which Kubrick described as "a kind of cosmic burglar alarm".
The action then jumps forward to a year later in the orbit around Jupiter, where the last surviving astronaut of a follow-up mission, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), is forced to confront the self-conscious computer HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) before travelling outside his own solar system and onto the next stage of existence.
2001: A Space Odyssey has few conversations, minimal action, only a handful of characters and a story that dispensed with any conventional notion of plot development. Yet since its divisive reception in the early days, it also has come to be seen as one of the best films ever made on the unknowable place of humankind in the universe.
With its breathtaking photography and a still-unparalleled sense of wonder, the film demonstrated Kubrick's single-minded focus to inspire awe in his audience. It has also been enhanced by a classical soundtrack (featuring works by Aram Khachaturyan, György Ligeti, Johann Strauss II and Richard Strauss) that is a sublime match to the visual splendour on screen.
Rather than an avant-garde effort that was considerably ahead of its time, it feels appropriate today to simply recognise 2001: A Space Odyssey as a timeless masterpiece.
2001: A Space Odyssey, August 15, 9.30pm and August 28, 7.30pm, The Grand Cinema; August 18, 2pm, Hong Kong Arts Centre. Part of the HK Cine Fan programme