cult film freak: GLOSSING THROUGH STANLEY KUBRICK'S '2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY'

Gary Lockwood in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Year: 1968 Rating: *****

The greatest cinema epics (from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA before to GOODFELLAS after) have various sequences that feel like their own separate short films that ultimately connect as a whole...

And in that, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is a perfectly multi-tiered vehicle, showcasing both the advanced pioneering of space exploration through orbital technology with the formidable perils of its mere existence...

William Sylvester and Vivian Kubrick in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

By the time William Sylvester's top secret NASA scientist leader Dr. Heywood Floyd is having an initially reluctant, abstruse conversation (as the camera gets strategically closer after each time the dialogue's information/importance heightens) with a group of fellow scientists on a moon shuttle, the DAWN OF MAN intro with evolving apes figuring out survival through weaponry had just ended...

And both Sylvester's Floyd and future BARRY LYNDON actor Rossiter have, coincidentally or otherwise, simian-like features within their otherwise modern and progressed, highly-educated countenance...

Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

It's the final chapter filling the entire last half where the most evolved humans are revealed... in the perfect-looking pair of astronauts, Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman and Gary Lockwood as Gary Poole...

It's almost two-years later, and they're headed beyond the moon to Jupiter, on another secret mission: only known to one of the most creatively sinister antagonists ever filmed — turning 2001 into a bonafide sci-fi thriller...

Keir Dullea in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

The computer, HAL 9000, voiced by stage-actor Douglas Rain, a smooth vocal hybrid of yawning monotone, robotic programming and vulnerable, melancholy reflection, ends up taking over the vessel... before which Gary Lockwood's tightly-muscular Poole is the most grounded and human character yet...

While otherwise reserved, patient and methodical, he's also somewhat glib, aloof, even condescending to HAL unlike Dullea's Bowman... who eventually shifts from a metronomic, concentrating professional into a vengefully-driven, intensely determined hero...

From 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Eventually taking the literal last trip through a colorful "Star Gate" that, in 1968, while the most amazing visually is also perhaps the most dated in its obvious nod to then-current counter-culture psychedelia...

Leading to an epilogue that's confused audiences for decades (and will for decades longer) where Bowman seems to hear... before actually observing... his own self within a Gothic alien enclosure, aging until his fantastical transition into...

From 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Well to attempt explaining the inner-meanings of those last twenty-minutes is futile... while the most intriguing sequences had already occurred during the classical music bridge from prehistoric savagery into outer-space special effects that, while later pepped-up in George Lucas's STAR WARS, still has yet to be equaled...

And is where William Sylvester's cool, surreptitious manner equals the inevitably intense realism of those two astronauts, who ultimately take us home — after having left it far, far behind.