Reviews

Still, perhaps, still the most ambitious, majestic and challenging science-fiction film ever made. We can only be amazed at Stanley Kubrick's audacity in presenting MGM with a roadshow epic, over two years in the making, with no big-name stars and no dialogue whatsoever for the first 15 minutes (and not all that much more thereafter), and whose most sympathetically humane character is a computer.

The three-part story structure, too, defies narrative norms - a mysterious featureless slab jump-starts human evolution (from ape to modern man to almost God-like celestial being).

It's all observed in Kubrick's characteristically detached and dispassionate style, keeping the viewer at a distance, the action captured in formal, meticulously arranged and lit (and mainly static) pictorial compositions.

It includes, of course, one of the single most brilliant cuts in cinema - an ape throws a bone (which he has discovered how to use as the first tool) triumphantly into the air, which seamlessly becomes an orbiting spaceship. The breathtaking sequence that follows, as the Pan-Am clipper craft waltzes with the revolving space-station, is one of cinema's most visually poetic tour-de-forces. It's also revolutionary in Kubrick's use of classical music (Strauss' The Blue Danube) instead of the cliched electronic synths that until then had typified sci-fi films (Kubrick said Strauss' music perfectly conveyed the sensation of turning, just as his use of Khachaturian's Gayane later so hauntingly evokes the loneliness of space).

There are other memorable single images in the mise en scene. The astronauts watching the shuttle-ship descend smoothly to the lunar surface; the moon-bus flitting silently across ghostly, airless plains; the distant shot of the Discovery spaceship as meteoroids hurtle indifferently into the foreground; even the instructions notice for a zero-gravity toilet. (This, remember, was made the year before the first moon-landing, when it was widely assumed mankind actually would go on to develop the space-faring infrastructure predicted here).

If the stroboscopic psychedelia experienced by astronaut Keir Dullea when he falls into the space warp isn't quite as mind-blowing as it was in 1968, the final section of the story as his life passes in an ornate but sterile apartment is as enigmatic as ever. Who or what is the unseen intelligence that is guiding human destiny - divine, extra-terrestrial or what? The blank anonymity of the mysterious slabs is presumably deliberate, an avatar we can project our own answers onto.

In what is in effect a sub-plot - despite taking up much of the film - Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C Clarke even pose a further moral conundrum for us when HAL, the failing super-computer, asserts its right to defend itself against the brain-death of disconnection.

Much more than a historic genre landmark, 2001: a Space Odyssey remains as awe-inspiring, controversial, infuriating, and (to say the least) thought-provoking as ever. It has stretched the boundaries not just of the sci-fi genre but of cinema as a whole.

LP Hartly's wonderfully poignant novel ('The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'), with its subtle observations of social class and its metaphorical sexual summer-heatwave and zodiacal references, should have been natural territory for director Joseph Losey.

Alas the problem is the adaptation by Losey's celebrated screenwriter Harold Pinter (they collaborated memorably on The Servant and Accident). The shifting chronology is ingenious (Losey even filmed the 'modern-day' scenes on a different film stock to accentuate the difference) but one suspects the ending will leave viewers who haven't enjoyed the book's straightforward narrative structure rather baffled. It makes The Go-Between a coldly formal and dispassionate film, robbing it of the novel's sad revelation of a damaged, wasted life.

And while it can boast a Best-of-British cast, Julie Christie, though delightful, is too old for the heroine. We never get to know her character quite enough. Alan Bates, meanwhile, stumbles a bit with his Norfolk accent. Dominic Guard, however, is very good as the hapless young messenger.

But Gerry Fisher's superlative cinematography is worthy of Constable country (it's set in turn-of-the-century Norfolk), while Michel Legrand's piano score imposes a hauntingly foreboding edge (arguably perhaps a bit too strident).

A good film but not a great one.