#506. 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Year: 1968
- Country: Great Britain
- Language: English/Russian
- Production: MGM, 141m
- Director: Stanley Kubrick
- Producer: Stanley Kubrick
- Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, from short story by Arthur C. Clarke
- Photography: Geoffrey Unsworth
- Music: Aram Khatchaturian, György Ligeti, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss
- Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Douglas Rain
- Oscar Wins: Best Visual Effects
- Oscar Noms: Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction
- Blog Club Rating: 9.6/10
Abridged Book Description[]
Influential but still unique, coolly detached, obsessional, pretentious, contentious, bewildering, forever fascinating - 2001 is all of these...Oscar-winning, ground-breaking special effects (designed by the fastidious Kubrick, supervised by pioneering Douglass Trumbull) are a dazzling mix of imagination and science. Meticulous mime work and 1960s' state-of-the-art prosthetics makeup in the first of the film's four distinct acts create the best ape impersonations by humans ever seen at the time. And the movie is strewn with unforgettable images... Its fault - its overblown abstraction and its sketchy narrative of scarcely articulated, unresolved speculation on the origins and destiny of human life - are more than compensated for by its gripping engagement between man and machine, its visual starkness and serenity, and, above all, its rhapsodic wonder at heaven and earth and the infinite beyond.