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2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]
Product Details | Similar Products | Customer Reviews![2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5119EXW4FEL._SL160_.jpg) | Starring: ~ Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood William Sylvester Daniel Richter Leonard Rossiter List Price: £12.99 Our Price: £4.97 You Save: £8.02 (62%) Availability: Usually dispatched within 11 to 13 days ![View more information about 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] at Amazon](/i/c/view.gif) |
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 | Product Details: Studio: Warner Home Video Region: 2 Number of Discs: 1 Format: Dubbed, PAL Widescreen Rating:   Sales Rank: 1566 | | Look for similar DVDs by genre: | | Customers who bought this item also bought:
| | Customer Reviews: Boring! (01 January 2009)The music was excellent. The effects were great for its time. but as i sat through the 2 or so hours of that movie, i was bored as heck! Many people find it as a Sci-fi classic, but its the dullest movie i've ever seen! a visually stunning depiction of our future (01 January 2009)Groups of men look to discover the mysterious black object which landed on one of Jupiter's moons many years ago. Stanley Kubrick's picture is a wonderful depiction of monkey to man to machine that generates so many issues and questions and answers so little. Made in a time when technology was advancing so rapidly this film showed a wonderful vision of what the future could possibly hold. Filled with spaceships and alien characters this is a marvellous fantasy that shows a believable view of the future, which starts with a beautifully bizarre introduction. 2 minutes of music on a black screen followed by 20 minutes of apes on a planet and the adventure has only just started. This opening is the most wonderfully weird introduction in Sci-Fi cinematic history. This is unique and almost unbelievable it is that strange. You have to see this introduction to really appreciate the originality and you will not be disappointed. Perhaps slightly overdrawn but still undeniably remarkable. What follows is a mystery charged investigation about a black slab named the Monolith. This simple creation puzzles apes, men and machines alike. The strange object is a wonderfully bizarre instrument in the films picture and is the key element of the story and like Hannibal Lecter, has little screen time but has the biggest impact. The creation of the Monolith is a puzzle and one that is still being debated over today. The Monolith's representation as a devastating and terrifying creature is helped along by one of the best music scores ever created. Richard Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of the finest compositions to ever appear on the big screen as is the use of Gyorgy Ligeti who wrote the majority of the score. The plot further engages audiences with its twisting narrative and enter HAL, the computer who runs the ship heading for Jupiter. HAL is a wonder, a strong minded computer that has a personal edge who makes the film darkly humorous and is one of the finest non human characters in the genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey is cinematic brilliance. A forever changing strange narrative with the finest score ever written, stunning visuals and a mind opening vision of a possible future. 9/10 All time Favourite (31 December 2008)It's curious how all my favourite things - books, music, films, were discovered when I was age 15 or 16. I guess this is the age when such discoveries make the most significant shifts in the foundations of one's outlook? I was 11 when this came out, and space mad. I had huge scrapbooks of all the space race news, both Russia and America. And of course, the Apollo project was heading towards it's climax the following year, and the first manned round trip to the moon and back, Apollo 8, made it a particularly special Christmas that year. I had no adult willing to take me to see the movie, but all the same there was a huge flurry of media interest, with lots of newspaper and magazine articles, and making-of documentaries. I cannot believe there was ever a better time to be an 11 year old boy, obsessed with science. 2001 seemed so far away. I would be old by then, and after a lifetime of developments in space exploration, it seemed a near certainty that I too would have gone into space, and maybe to the moon or beyond by that time. People not born into that era cannot imagine how limitless the horizon seemed. I got to see the film eventually when I was 15 and of course, it blew my mind. I didn't really know how to describe the experience, but I knew that I had seen something that was more then just a film, more than just telling a story in pictures. As my mind was opening to the world of classical music I sensed that the way the film made use of music, in particular the awesomely, eerie, Ligeti vocal works, was something more than just incidental. It was as though the film itself was music, or meta-music, but I didn't have such concepts then, just spooky, ineffable feelings. The feelings the film puts you through: the dawn of mankind and the dawn of human thought. Yes, we could probably CGI the hominids better now, but they are pretty darned good for people in monkey suits. The bone is thrown up and turns into a spaceship - just like that! What a moment in cinema? What a way to make a statement that captures the entire history of our species? Space ships dance with balletic grace and zero gravity is portrayed more convincingly than in anything I have seen since. And space is huge and dangerous. The moon is bleak and cold but full of mystery. And then we move to the Discovery, Jupiter mission. We experience the ennui of deep space flight, with a minimal waking crew of two, filling in time with routine tasks, in the company of an eerily human-like Artificial Intelligence HAL. The remaining crew is in suspended animation in the iconically spooky sarcophagi, around the wall. As a programmer there are still days when I walk into work and switch on my machine and mutter "Good morning Hal - Good morning Dave". The introduction to HAL was to be the beginning of my life-long fascination with AI and with the mind-body problem in philosophy. That we do not have HAL-like intelligent machines is if anything, even more surprising than the way the promise of space-travel fizzled out. The battle of wits between HAL and Bowman is very cleverly conceived, still riviting, and introduced a new kind of villain into the movie landscape. In the final part of the film we have the prolonged psychedelic journey through some unspecified, trans-dimensional void, again accompanied by the amazing music of Mr Ligeti. At 15 I knew not what to make of this aspect of the film beyond finding it compellingly beautiful. With subsequent viewings and exposure to the more demanding but wonderful Russian movie, Solaris, I came to realise that the significance of this section was a depiction of an encounter between humanity and something way beyond it's comprehension, and that such an encounter might not be describable in terms of any conventional narrative. I'm guessing that the more disappointed reviews are coming from people who grew up with Star Trek, and Son of Star Trek, and are just wondering where the plot and explosions got lost. I just ask them to imagine growing up in a time when this movie seemed to be as much predictive documentary as a work of science fiction. Great film,but an acquired taste (31 December 2008)Before anything else, remember that Kubrick made this before the Apollo moon landings,and before the Voyager flybys of Jupiter and Saturn-in other words,a world that people of my age(45) and younger find it hard to imagine;when the moon landings were in the future,not the past. Kubrick and Arthur C.Clarke based "2001" on a short story of Clarke's called "The Sentinel",wherein an alien device is found on the moon,and so we realise we aren't alone in the world.In "2001",the story is fast rewound 3 million years,so the monolith appears to our ape ancestors,and starts them on the voyage to intelligence. Fast forward 3 million years and you have spacecraft manouevreing to the strains of "The Blue Danube",and a delegation to the moon to report on the dicovery of a monolith. Then it's "Discovery" and it's trip to Jupiter.A computer called HAL goes psychotic and tries to kill the human crew-one survives.He goes on to "The Ultimate Trip" and changes dramatically as the end looms-no more,I'll spoil the ending. This film figures in many "Best 10 " or "Best 25" films,and it has spawned a sub-industry of analysis and search for meaning.In my opinion,it's best judged as a historical artefact-how people in the 1960s tried to judge an unimaginable future.After all,people in 1968 were prepared to contemplate manned missions to Jupiter,but how many would have imagined the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the USSR? Words cannot describe.... (30 December 2008)...Just how bad this film truly is. Very overrated: I'm still not sure what the plot was. In fact, I feel like I was abducted for 2 hours: one minute I'm watching the opening credits, the next I'm seeing the end credits and I seem to have lost 2 hours in between. That's 120 minutes (or more) that I'm never going to get back. Avoid at all costs, unless you have cronic insomnia as this will surely put to sleep even the worst of non-sleepers. |
