2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (4K UHDBD) [Blu-ray]

As a film, 2001: A Space Odyssey is simply spectacular. Ground-breaking barely seems a strong enough word for what Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick achieved. Between them, they completely broke the mould and, in my opinion, revolutionised the science-fiction genre in both literature and filmmaking. The influence of 2001 can be seen everywhere. So many of the science-fiction books, films and television series that followed owe something to this masterpiece. Even decades later, its scale, visual imagination and sheer ambition remain extraordinary. It is one of those rare films that didn't simply succeed within its genre; it helped redefine what the genre could be. I've seen 2001 many, many times over the years, mostly through television broadcasts and various home releases, so I obviously knew the film extremely well before buying this 4K UHD Blu-ray. What I wasn't quite prepared for was just how much the ultra-high-resolution presentation would add to the experience. The visual impact is genuinely stunning. The detail, clarity and sheer scale of the imagery give the film a renewed sense of presence. Kubrick's extraordinary compositions and the groundbreaking effects work benefit enormously from the 4K presentation. There were moments in a film I've watched countless times where I found myself simply staring at the screen and appreciating details and textures I'd never really noticed before. For a film so dependent on its visual language, seeing 2001 presented with this level of quality makes an already superb film even more impactful. It doesn't feel like watching an old science-fiction film that has been cleaned up for a modern television; it feels like being given the opportunity to properly appreciate the extraordinary craftsmanship that was there all along. If you're already a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey and have the equipment to watch 4K UHD properly, this is an absolutely worthwhile upgrade. A cinematic masterpiece, presented in a way that reminds you just how far ahead of its time it really was.

So far ahead of it's time. Picture quality and sound is awesome.....

This has been my favourite film for decades, but I think it has been bumped by Arrival. Still it's good to see that Kubrick's attempt at edge blending with plastic has been remove from the opening scene and proper edge blending applied.

This is how to up grade 2010

Loved this film since I was a child. Great to see it as it finally deserves.

Pleased with purchase

“I thought 2001, which was many decades ago now, was a very fine film, very authentic in terms of the way space looks and the way vehicles move and trajectories and so on. Many of the more recent space fiction movies have much less realism than 2001 did...” - per Neil Armstrong in his NASA Oral history (at page 96) which he provided, ironically, in 2001. Is there a better more qualified critic than the first to walk on the moon?

Film culte

It was my first time buying a Blu-ray. At first, I was a bit sceptical since a lot of sellers are scamming by sending 3rd quality,ripped Blu-rays or even DVDs. But this guy is genuine. I asked him about the quality and genuinity of the disc. He gave me a walkthrough. After that, I placed the order on Cash on Delivery. Even after ordering, I was still scared of getting scammed until I got the product. 10/10 product and packaging from Heavenly Heroes. If I ever order Blu-rays again, I’ll consider this guy, and you should too :)

The top executives at MGM were stunned after viewing the final cut of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. This was going to be one of the biggest bombs of all time, a complete failure with a hefty price tag over four million dollars over its initial six million dollar budget and sixteen months late. Subsequent screenings for industry bigwigs and the New York critics confirmed the notion. Yet this film made Stanley Kubrick, already well known after “Dr. Strangelove”, a superstar and it went on to become one of the most talked about films of 1968 along with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Rosemary’s Baby”. In language that the executives could truly understand, the film became the second biggest-grossing film of the year, making over fourteen times its budget (and cumulatively is now the #1 box office film of ‘68). You couldn’t blame both the executives or the critics, as Kubrick was making an entirely new kind of film here, a radical departure from nearly everything that had gone before it. The film was mostly silent, with half an hour more or less of dialogue in its 139 minutes, and little of it very notable in itself. There was no narration and the audience was left to figure everything out for itself. The usual science fiction film was a melodrama or action film in fanciful futuristic sets but this film’s long story arc made it seem at times as if nothing was happening at all, a kind of celebration of space hardware over dialog and plot. This was part of the film’s draw, a chance to see remarkably realistic space vehicles in an equally jaw-dropping evocation of space itself on a 70mm Super Panavision screen. Today’s viewers might just think “It looks like “Star Wars” as indeed it does, but this was the film that inspired George Lucas to make “Star Wars”, once he saw the possibilities. One can’t blame the New York critics either. They were mostly raised on films based on Broadway plays where words were everything and everything else was just a setting. They had simply no reference point for a film whose first and last twenty minutes were entirely silent. At least Andrew Sarris retracted his initial negative review and on a second viewing, praised the film. This would become the standard trajectory of all Kubrick’s films: mixed reviews tending toward bewilderment with future reappraisals discovering a masterpiece. The film is more timely today than it was when it was released.The most memorable character is the HAL 9000 computer, a character we now see easily as AI. In 1968 it was a fantasy but now is becoming actually realized. HAL is more complex than the human characters, at least the way he is written. Like current and future AI, no one is sure if HAL actually feels emotion. But he does go on a neurotic trajectory when he finds he has made an error and acts murderously in self defense to avoid disconnection. It seems very prescient when Bowman and Poole need to discuss the situation, they have to retreat to one of the pods to avoid HAL’s all-present surveillance and even then he reads their lips. Today we find ourselves living in a mesh of surveillance and data collection from our phones, computers, televisions and cars. It is disconcerting but not surprising that already, several car manufacturers have submitted patents for lip-reading technology. There is much said about how the film was saved by the youth audience, particularly that segment of the youth audience from the emerging counterculture who were seeing it under the influence of mind altering substances, and this is true. Young people, stoned or not, were ready for something as new as this. But even then, the film would not have been as gigantic an event as it became. Word of mouth brought in the broad movie audience. It was something you simply had to see to believe. It was an astounding advance in visual depictions of technology and space, of remarkably detailed spacecraft and effects that were amazing in their day and still hold up. The film included one of cinema’s great match shots when the hominim tosses the bone into the air and it is suddenly matched by the shot of an orbiting satellite. It was seen as an illustration of how far man had come needing no explanation. (It was even more literal initially as the satellites were originally going to be explained as orbiting atomic weapons, extensions of the original bone, an idea that Kubrick dropped because he wanted nothing in the film that would connect it to “Dr. Strangelove”). Then there’s the Pan Am Orion III shot where the stewardess rotates almost completely to move from one area to another. Kubrick had set out to make “a good science fiction movie” though he had never attempted anything in the genre before (“Dr. Strangelove” is a political satire, not sci-fi as some describe it). This became his standard practice; he always challenged himself with something new, resulting in a small canon of films unlike any other. He co-wrote the screenplay with one of the greatest science fiction writers of the day, Arthur C. Clarke, whose science fiction was very science based yet full of wonder at the cosmos. Using “The Sentinel”, with its monoliths left by aliens letting them know mankind was ready for its next jump in consciousness, as a starting point, they decided to write a novelization first before a screenplay.This way they could let their imaginations run free of considerations of runtime, scene development or budgets. Kubrick had already made the important decision that the film would be visual and not dialog heavy. In fact, the first 25 minutes are completely without dialog. “The Dawn of Man” is very early indeed, and though Kubrick could have shown a scene of food gathering, he instead chose a scenario that illustrated one of the most important facts of life on Earth. The Earth is limited, it is material and obeys general laws of physics. If you have something good like fresh water, someone else will likely want to take it away. The novelization was still being worked on as the film was being shot and it does not follow the film exactly. Clarke explains things literally which are left open in the film, so it’s not to be taken as a final word.The book was to be issued in 1965, before the film’s originally planned 1966 release. This Kubrick switched. He did not want his film to be seen as an adaptation of the novel with all the attendant carping about where it differed, inherently making the film the subordinate form. The novel thus became a novelization of the film, just how the director wanted it. For its visuals, Kubrick turned not to Hollywood, but to people who had worked with NASA, with educational documentaries about space exploration, illustrators of serious magazine space articles and importantly, Graphic Films, which had created “To the Moon and Beyond” for the New York World’s Fair. He wanted to give the audience an experience of what real space exploration not so far into the future would be like, not Hollywood’s usual fanciful Art Deco or Mid Century Modern versions. This team, which launched the career of Douglas Trumbull (“The Andromeda Strain”, “Silent Running”, “Close Encounters”) created the remarkable effects that awed audiences. The Discovery model was 55 feet long and the Werner Von Braun-style space station was 35 feet wide, a far cry from the small models used in earlier sci-fi films. It’s no wonder the film won all the technical awards. Kubrick accepted the award for only himself and not the crew, causing a rift. He tended to see himself as the artist and his assistants as merely functionaries who made his vision possible. While it was previously normal in Hollywood for Oscars to go only to department heads, by 1968 they were mostly shared. The setting also affected the actor choices and acting. They had to approximate the personalities of professional astronauts, not the bunch of dramatic stereotypes that populate most sci-fi films. Critics criticized the actors for being bland and being almost unimportant but they were actually perfect in their roles. Kubrick worked intuitively and each of his films was for him, an immersive experience. Here, his intuition was working at maximum inspiration. He abandoned Alex North’s film score and instead used the placeholder classical music he had used to fill space during production. His wife had discovered the obscure, amorphous music of Gyorgi Ligeti on BBC radio and when Kubrick heard it, he immediately knew it was a perfect fit. The juxtaposition of the familiar nineteenth century “Blue Danube” with the spacecraft and rotating space station made it an instantly relatable, soaring space ballet for the audience. It’s also notable that the film is also without music for very long periods of time. This included even the tensest moments, when most soundtracks would be taut with intense music as when Poole is cut loose and sent soaring into the void. The deafening silence of an uncaring universe could never be better shown. The depths of the black void and the twinkling stars had never been even vaguely approximated before. Even the film’s delayed release due to the director’s perfectionism, worked in its favor. A fall 1966 release date would have been too early. By 1968 so much cultural change had occurred that the audience was ready for a film as unusual as this,“The Ultimate Trip”. EXTRA NOTE: There has always been a lot of grumbling about “2001” not winning the Best Picture Oscar, and it going to “Oliver!” (one of my other favorite films from 1968). Let me clear this up by noting that 2001 was not even nominated for Best Picture. It was nominated for and won some deserved technical awards and one for its adapted score, but that was it. All science fiction was looked down upon by the Academy as a B-movie genre. The top Academy Awards were for prestigious dramas and historical films in their stuffy mindset. Stuck in a received view of film importance, they rarely even nominated comedies, much less sci-fi.

This 4k remastering of this movie is a must have especially at the $25 price point. I first saw the movie when released in 1968. The 4k colours are fantastic and there is a blue Ray and DVD. The cassette it came in is also worth mentioning due to its top notch presentation.

Excelente Pelicula, calidad estandar en paquete, buena opción para colección Digital.