For a 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey transcends in many levels. One is being a though-provoking science-fiction film. Another is being a visual art. And equally, a mythic contemplation.

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece would have to be one of the most haunting and most successful science fiction. He spanned so many epochs and thousands of years by gathering the most essential periods of man's evolution, and his entrance to the cosmic world. From the start of the film, I was greeted with a different feeling, a kind of weirdness that you couldn't explain because right at my very eyes was a film sparked with so much originality that you couldn't possibly find any other like it. With Kubrick, we have entered the early era of man in the form of apes, and this ancestral beginnings would help explain to us how man conquered intelligence by the simple consideration of curiosity. Here was a group of apes who hunt for food, and learned about brutality, violence and tool-making by the discovery of bones. There was a magnificent in this film where an ape holds a bone from an amimal skeleton in the sand, and structurally, Kubrick depicts the scene very figuratively, with the slow motion and the blue-sky backdrop, you can't help but find perfection here. The use of bones and the discovery of tool-making led these early man-apes to the foundation of violence, in which they used it as weapons against each other. In a few short minutes, they also discovered upon their waking a black monolith in the midst, which came from nowhere, leaving these apes wild with apprehension and constantly touching the surface of the monolith also leading them to the curiosity that man was doomed to be involved with.

In Kubrick's timeline, we are soon transported in the future where man has left Earth and conquers cosmic space, or it seems to foolish to speak about conquering, since man could never conquer space at all. Kubrick made us learn that here. We are then introduced to a man travelling in space, letting us gape with wonder of how closely prophetic this film could be when it was made decades ago but still predicting the happenings of the recent world. There are thousands of development, almost all are accurate, the video chatting, the space exploration and all that jazz. Without so much explanation, Kubrick transports us again into Discovery One, a space shuttled housing probably the most intelligent computer in the whole universe, the HAL 9000. So intelligent that it runs the ship on its own. For the first time in the movie, we feel like we are being told with a story, about this supercomputer that was so perfect that it makes no flaws, or if it makes flaws, it hides them in its own intelligence. He gives us a perspective that man makes his own doom, like inventing the computer, making us almost worthless. And when the character of Dave tells, "Open the doors, Hal." and the so-called Hal never open the doors, there is so much distinction in the film that we could foretell computers has a mind on its own. But then again, as Dave tries to battle against this computer with foreboding panic, man proves to be greater than any other species, with the Hal pleading for his life and singing the last of his mechanical breath. Dave then witnessed more of the odyssey into the greater space when he was involved in a scene where he was travelling with swirling colours and vast landscapes never encountered by man, and also witnessed his own aging and until facing the last black monolith and finally becoming a child again, sent back to Earth. This signals, this Star Child, that man would continually evolve and with a higher-ordered intelligence.

This is a fantastic film. One that has to be contemplated, and not just seen. It's just like looking at a piece of artwork. For the first time you see it, it involves swirling colours and almost incomprehensible imagery, but when you try to step back and see it in its full view, you would get the message it conveys and the inner spectacle beneath its intricate trivial groundwork. Stanley Kubrick is indeed a fine filmmaker, and he believes in what he do. It is because if he never was patient and passionate about his craft, Odyssey would have feel so hurried. Yet, it wasn't. It was crafted with perfect precision and the scenes were constructed carefully, like the slow movements of the spacecrafts, and the slow rendition of the camera in the very bleak and dark outer space. Accompanying the visual adventure was the haunting music, especially the revival of the Blue Danube waltz, perfectly serenading the exploration of space.

2001: A Space Odyssey would have to be the oddest film I've seen in my entire life. It is more on the visual delight than dialogues, but who cares, almost all the scenes were hypnotic and the effect? A ground-breaking landmark.

Rating: A