2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Year: 1968
USA & UK: Warner Bros
Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter, Leonard Rossiter, Margaret Tyzack, Robert Beatty, Sean Sullivan, Douglas Rain (voice), Frank Miller, Bill Weston, Ed Bishop
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Countries: UK / USA
UK: 149 mins
USA Rated: G
UK Certificate: U
USA Release Date: 21 December 2001 (Limited Re-release - Los Angeles)
UK Release Date: 30 March 2001 (Re-release)

Synopsis

Stanley Kubrick's classic sci-fi movie is now inevitably re-released in 2001. For this piece of movie history Kubrick collaborated with one of the greatest science fiction writers Arthur C Clarke to create a visual feast with about 40 minutes of dialogue in a 149-minute film. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY charts the history of human evolution from the dawn-of-man and the discovery of crude but deadly tools in the film's opening sequence to the journey of the spaceship, plus the discovery and metaphysical birth of the "star child" at the film's end. Not to be forgotten is the film's now notorious computer HAL with what seems to be a mind of it's own. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY has dated with time but it is still a remarkable cinematic effort to reach into the future and open questions, possibly even theological ones, about the meaning of the black, rectangular alien monoliths depicted in the film. a film worth seeing whatever its age.