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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31 Number 19 August 6, 1968

2001: Bush-babies in orbit

2001: Bush-babies in orbit

"Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a masterpiece, I do not use a word like that freely; I'm not exactly sure what it means, But there are times when no other description seems adequate, and this is one of those times.

"It is an unspeakably beautiful motion picture, a triumph of surpassing technical mastery and probing thematic eloquence. It is everything we ever dreamed it could be. Everything and more. It belongs in the same league with Antonioni's Red Desert, Godard's Alphaville and Emshwiller's Relativity. That's what I mean by a masterpiece."

These emotional opening paragraphs from a one-page review in the Los Angeles Free Press of May this year by Gene Youngblood, are indicative of the reception this film has had in most places.

Time (bogged down by fractory flights of bitchy verbose waffling) eventually declared somewhere, "thus, though it may fail as drama, the movie succeeds as visual art, and becomes another irritating, dazzling achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of the most erratic and original talents in the US cinema."

It is history, now, to know that it took Kubrick five years and $12 million to make. Kubrick, who fashioned cinema into trends with his films, Fear and Desire, The Killing, Killer's Kiss, Paths of Glory, Lolita, Spartacus and Dr Strangelove.

He is only 39 years old, and because of the ambiguities the film contains—the irritating riddles, the enigmatic self-questioning, the efficacy of terminating science fiction as a hallucinogenic Marienbad—he sets it up before the world, in an almost demented orgiastic gallacious fashion, and may gross more money (in New York over $3 million in 11 weeks) than any other film in cinema history.

Youngblood continues, "You sit there completely overwhelmed, numbed, staggered by what you are seeing. You try, but you can't guess how they did it. So you just relax and let it take you in. And when it has taken you in with technological achievements beyond your imagination, then it says something very meaningful and very beautiful. When the curtain closes you sit for a moment recollecting your wits."

Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic, a virile ans sensible critic, unfortunately disliked most of the film: "Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is a major disappointment."