![]() ![]() From the sleek Orion spaceliner that brings Dr. ![]() But every meticulously-designed, made and filmed model in “2001” is beautiful to behold. Kubrick went for “accuracy” when depicting the pitch-blackness of space, and its silence. What connects “2001” to the latest “Avatar” most directly are the shimmering, pristine images put on the screen. And every so often, the design flourishes of “2001” - from its shimmering spaceport Hilton airport lounge to the suits the space bureaucrats wear to meetings to discuss what astronaut miners have found in the lunar crater named Tycho - make a comeback. But the astronauts on board the spermatozoa-shaped Discovery One spaceship bound for Jupiter can communicate and watch videos from tablets. Paying passenger space flight was and is still in its infancy and Pan Am is long dead and gone. Watching “2001” now, I was struck by how modern the graphics still seem, even if the switches and keyboards and mostly-cathode-ray-tube screens give away how dated the film is.īack in 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of its release, writers revisited “2001” to note how much of “the future” it predicted actually came true. There was not much in the way of computer-generated-imagery in the era when computers were all mainframes with less versatility and utility than your average smart phone of today. “The Abyss,” “Terminator 2” and “Jurassic Park” brought us to “Avatar.” “2001” was the breakthrough film that allowed “Star Wars” to come to thrilling life less than a decade later. The new documentary “Jurassic Punk” brings “2001” to mind as well, as it is about the next era of Hollywood effects innovation - the transition from “optical effects” and camera tricks and hand-made models to computer generated effects. ![]() So much had to be invented - effects tricks and low-light celluloid camera lenses - so much imagined, extrapolating from our “Space Race” present to thirty-three years into the future. As a teen I devoured books on it and the obsessive eccentric who made it, Stanley Kubrick. It has been analyzed, parsed, investigated and written about more than virtually any other movie of its era. One of the duller stretches between the combat sequences and alien life showcase moments of “Avatar: The Way of Water” gave me a few minutes to ponder what other movies produced visuals this stunning, this far beyond the Hollywood state-of-the-art of their era.Īnd that instantly brought to mind “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a landmark of science fiction cinema, a quaint artifact of the 1960s and undeniably one of the most beautiful, majestic films of all time. ![]()
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