2001: A Space Odyssey

**A magnificent film, with beautiful music and great visuals... but smug, empty and unforgivably overrated.** Stanley Kubrick is, for me, one of those directors who so quickly impresses us with a great film, as it makes us doubt his competence with an absolutely pathetic trash. I know that the director's fans are going to crucify me, but that's how I think, and I even say more: with each Kubrick film I see, I am more convinced that an aura of unjustified “cult” genius has been created around him. I loved some of his movies like “Spartacus”, “Dr. Strangelove”, “Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut”, but thinking about them and trying to compare them with “Clockwork Orange” and “Full Metal Jacket” is strange. They don't look like the work of the same director. Released in the 1960s, at a time when the space race was at its height and when the future of Humanity seemed, more and more, to be outside our planet, the film addresses the question of the evolution of the human species in a “sui generis” way: it starts with monkeys and goes to the first contacts with extraterrestrial beings. The film was considered one of the defining milestones of sci-fi as a cinematographic genre, and I believe that this is indisputable. It's also one of the rare sci-fi movies that seems concerned with being scientifically credible, yet not without flaws that a good scientist will spot (and we might not). Set in a hypothetical future, the film shows what space explorations and life in colonies made in space and on the Moon would be like. However, it is still ironic that, after the 60s and 70s, space exploration has been so secondary that many questions, even today, whether we really should spend industrial amounts of money and resources on it. The future that Kubrick imagined in 2001 seems, in 2022, even more imaginative and far from happening than when the film was released. However, some things really did happen and are, today, normal: this is the case of video calls and the extraordinary advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. Among the various merits of this film, we have to highlight the extraordinary visual beauty, the way the director worked with the visual and special effects and the excellent camera work. At a time when CGI was a mirage far from a filmmaker's mind, this film gives us images and visuals that look like they were made this year. The film simply hasn't aged a single day: we have clear images, magnificently crafted light and details, excellent sound effects, a cinematography that makes envy to many 21st century films and, also important, a magnificent soundtrack where “Blue Danube” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” stand out, helping to popularize these melodies. Despite these indisputable merits, I think this film deserves to be on the list of the most overrated films I've ever seen. And this is due, in good part, to everything else that I didn't say, and which is essential in a good film. Let's start with the absence of a script and horrible pace: for almost three hours, the film drags on unbearably in scenes of great beauty, but with nothing to say. It's truly exasperating. The only moments where the film really gains interest are when the ship's supercomputer turns against the astronauts, and even that segment feels loose, as if the script were a patchwork quilt. The allusions to aliens didn't fascinate me either, it's a regular cliché when making a movie set in space. One point that also didn't help is the lack of good actors, or any decent work for them to do, and the fact that Kubrick shows us life on the space stations as if it were a stay in a luxury hotel. And what about the extraordinary sense of arrogant conceit that the film conveys? We are the ones who have to recognize if the film is good, it can't be the film telling us that every minute!