STANLEY KUBRICK's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY had its world premiere April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C.
The famously sniffish Renata Adler got to weigh in during her
short-lived reign at the New York Times: "There is one ultimate
science-fiction voyage of a man (Keir Dullea) through outer and inner
space, through the phases of his own life in time thrown out of phase
by some higher intelligence, to his death and rebirth in what looked
like an intergalactic embryo... Its real energy seem to derive from
that bespectacled prodigy reading comic books around the block. The
whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games,
bodybuilding exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp
bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss
music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone
calls... [T]he uncompromising slowness of the movie makes it hard to
sit through without talking—and people on all sides when I saw it were
talking almost throughout the film. Very annoying. With all its
attention to detail—a kind of reveling in its own I.Q.—the movie
acknowledged no obligation to validate its conclusion for those, me for
example, who are not science-fiction buffs. By the end, three
unreconciled plot lines—the slabs, Dullea's aging, the period
bedroom—are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications
of theology. This is a long step outside the convention, some extra
scripts seem required, and the all-purpose answer, 'relativity,' does
not really serve unless it can be verbalized."
Lien
