The Monolith Still Wins
Fifty-eight years on, no film has matched its nerve: a blockbuster that trusts silence more than dialogue.
5.0
Fifty-eight years on, no film has matched its nerve: a blockbuster that trusts silence more than dialogue.
The verdict
One for the shelf.
Kubrick cut the explanatory narration two weeks before release, and that decision is the whole movie. 2001 trusts images — a bone, a waltz, an eye — to do what exposition never could.
HAL remains cinema's best villain because he is polite. The horror is procedural.
A perfect score is a claim that a film changed the medium. This one did, twice: once in 1968, and once every time someone watches it for the first time.