Happy Holidays everyone! I hope it was safe and relaxing. Mine was hectic as always but a great way to close out the year. Just before Christmas I picked up a copy of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on
Blu-ray. I watched New Years day and I'll give you a short review. As a side note I watched the film on a new Panasonic 50 inch 1080p plasma TV connected to a Sony
BDP s350
Blu-ray player.
The Lowdown: It is the dawn of man, 3,000,000 years ago and damn dirty apes walk the earth. They are vegetarians and territorial but lack the tools to advance to the next stage of evolution. Enter the mysterious black monolith that appears one day to these primitive creatures and emits a strange buzzing signal. The apes recoil in fear, but one comes forward and dares to touch the strange object. Later on while picking through a pile of bones the same ape picks up a leg bone and utilises it like a club and clobbers him some dinner. The group becomes meat eaters now out of necessity because of the sparse vegetation. Further on still, at the local watering hole the group of new carnivores bludgeon a group of fellow rivals in what could be called the first gang fight. Flash forward to the year 1999 A.D. and Dr. Heywood Floyd is on a flight to the moon to investigate a similar object found in a crater. Upon investigation the monolith sends out a high pitched signal directed to the orbit of Jupiter. Now cut to 2001 the spaceship Discovery is en route to Jupiter to investigate strange happenings. While most of the crew are in suspended animation, we meet Dave Bowman and Frank Poole who are piloting the ship to her destination. We are also introduced to HAL 9000 a sentient computer who controls all aspects of the ship. Hal starts to act irrationally causes all sorts of malfunctions. He murders Frank and attempts to eliminate Dave as well but Dave survives and begins to deactivate HAL. As Discovery reaches Jupiter orbit Dave finds thousands of monoliths that are acting as inter dimensional gateways. I won't spoil the rest for you, but needless to say it is mind blowing.
The Video: This film looks way too good for forty plus years hardly a speck of dust or grain the picture looked outstanding. The color reproduction looks outstanding the reds and blues of the control panels jump right out at you. The cinema mode was active on the display was active so the film played back in 24 frames/second. I could pick out so much detail on the hulls of the spacecraft that at some points it was distracting. You could count individual hairs on the actors heads.
Unfortunately, the actors in the ape costumes look like they are in costume. The masks don't stand up as well in hi-def.
Extras: Good selection of material including a vintage promo piece, a retrospective piece filmed in 2001 hosted by James Cameron and some production design skits. I have yet to listen to the commentary by actors
Kier Dullea(Dave) and Gary Lockwood(Frank) but I will have to on repeat viewings.
Overall: 5 out of 5 most reccomended for a hardcore scifi fan or videophile that wants to show off the hi-def format to non-adopters. The movie is long 141 minutes but is rewarding and challeges your beliefs as to our place in the cosmos. The set design and the realism put the viewer in that world of the future. It must have been exciting to see all these things at the time , of what was to come.
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