Beyond the Infinite

I was lucky enough to notice one of my all-time favorite films, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was playing at the Aero in Santa Monica tonight.

The film is very difficult to describe, and even more challenging to view.

Mankind in its apelike form shows our earliest impulses of humanity: fear, curiosity, wonder, and the discovery of tools. A primate discovers a bone, finds its uses for hunting for food, and eventually for bludgeoning a fellow primate to death over a territorial battle. This tool is triumphantly thrown into the air as we cut to the spaceship millions of years later where mankind has reached the limits of its evolution and outer limits of space.

The entire story is told with absolutely beautiful sound and immaculate visual engineering, Bruce Logan who had worked on the film with Kubrick gave an extensive talk about his work before the start of the movie. The special effects were so far ahead of their time it is very difficult to believe that the film is about 40 years old and was in production before the first images of outer space and the moon had even reached Earth.

The film reel was an apparently-rare 70mm print, with 6 channels of sound. This meant that despite the obvious effect of aging and scratches, the picture was in the absolute highest resolution that ever existed for the film. For nearly any other film I wouldn't be so picky, but for anyone who has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, you would understand just how important this is.

I hadn't seen the film in almost a decade, but it hit me just as hard as it did the first time I saw it. From the painful silence and breathing as the HAL9000 murders one of the scientists to blaring orchestral score that preceded and concluded the film, it was truly a journey beyond the infinite. As I left the theater, it was very disorienting to be back in Santa Monica, California after it had felt as if you'd been taken to the far limits of space.