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From primordial to cosmic, a sort of futuristic Biblical epic. "Dawn of Man," the Zarathustra sunrise over a prehistoric savannah, the ape's nervous eyes in the night. The geometric shape in the jagged wilderness is a vertical stepping stone, the bone of contention is put to use by cracking a rival hominid's cranium. Ancestors turn carnivorous courtesy of the tools of the trade, simian exultation yields to humanoid blankness in the Space Age, what's a few eons between relatives? Waltzing satellites and the dullards within, floating pen and zero-gravity toilet ("Passengers are advised to read instructions before use"). Poe's "The Gold-Bug" for the lunar excavation, then off to Jupiter for mutiny on the Discovery. "I know I've never completely freed myself from the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission." A symphony of evolutionary leaps, the proper format as Stanley Kubrick looks at the stars for the next stage of his artistic gigantism. The metaphysics of technology, question of what's gained and what's lost, the tiny daughter on the digital monitor and sterile mush to approximate the taste of food. Giotto's O in the void, it becomes a circular track for shadowboxing astronaut (Keir Dullea) and weightless camera. HAL the mecha-cyclops, the computer that can't quite hide the neurosis behind the glassy bulge of its orb and the expressive monotone of Douglas Rain's voice. It kills the co-pilot (Gary Lockwood) only to witness its own brain methodically dismantled, "I can feel my mind going," it sings because it can't scream. Strauss, Ligeti and Khachaturian, tones fit for images of staggering vastness and complexity. "Beyond the infinite," nothing less in Kubrick's visionary gambit, cinema's supreme planetarium light-show is founded on the Vertigo nightmare and anchored by the psychedelic retina amid lava-lamp abstractions. "The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses," says Rimbaud. The monolith returns in the extraterrestrial terrarium as both coffin lid and opaque portal, the Star Child's gaze of hope is promptly curtailed by A Clockwork Orange. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott. With William Sylvester, Robert Beatty, and Leonard Rossiter.
--- Fernando F. Croce |