2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
96 %
Reviews Counted: 50 Fresh: 48 Rotten:2 Average Rating: 8.8/10
Consensus:
One of the most influential of all sci-fi films -- and one of the most controversial -- Stanley Kubrick's 2001 is a delicate, poetic meditation on the ingenuity -- and folly -- of mankind.
Runtime: 2 hrs 39 mins
Synopsis: A four-million-year-old black monolith is discovered on the moon, and the government (while hiding the situation from the public) sends a team of scientists on a fact-finding mission. Eighteen months later, another team is sent to Jupiter in a ship controlled by the perfect HAL 9000... [More]
Genre: Science-Fiction/Fantasy
Starring: Keir Dullea, William Sylvester, Gary Lockwood, Daniel Richter, Leonard Rossiter
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Reviews
Central to the profundity of the film is the notion that few things are more meaningful than a child's first steps, the emotive impact of this scenario manifest in every one of the film's dizzying set pieces, albeit multiplied to epic proportions.
Comment
11/19/07
2001 certainly is a colossal bore, unless you're on its wavelength, in which case it's one of the greatest films of all time.
11/08/07
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10/27/07
Top Critic
The film's projections of the cold war and antiquated product placements may look quaint now, but the poetry is as hard-edged and full of wonder as ever.
05/08/07
Top Critic
It was a freshening attitude then, though its long-term effects haven't been all to the good.
05/08/07
Top Critic
For all the essential coldness of Kubrick's vision, it demands attention as superior sci-fi, simply because it's more concerned with ideas than with Boy's Own-style pyrotechnics.
06/24/06
It has reached the status of Art, meaning that it's going to go on provoking strong opinions.
04/08/06
Part space opera, part cinematic symphony and part horror story, the film is a shape-shifting painting.
03/20/06
The most influential sci-fi film ever made, 2001 caused culture shock when released, forever changing the conventions, style, and prestige of the previously debased genre
08/13/05
2001 speaks by monolith -- that is, by image, metaphor, poetry, and suggestion.
01/15/05
Doesn't just depict a quantum leap forward in human consciousness — it practically requires such a leap, on an individual scale, from the viewer.
07/09/04
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01/20/04
A beautiful, confounding picture that had half the audience cheering and the other half snoring.
07/30/03
Top Critic
Those who love it as passionately as I do realize this film is about more than dialogue, plot, or space ships. Its uniqueness permits it to transcend the ordinary, becoming a movie not about one human but the entire human species.
03/05/03
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