The Movie: Ahhh, the classic science fiction movie by Stanley Kubrick based on the book by Arthur C. Clarke, also incidentally from 1968. This movie simply looks beautiful. The camera work is awesome, and I can't say enough about the special effects, especially when you consider the year in which this movie was made! The ballet of the ship docking with the spinning space station comes to mind... I have no idea how one would even make such a thing look so good with a computer, yet at the time this movie was made, no one had any idea that you'd be able to make something like that on a computer since this was before the days when computers even had monitors!

And what an amazing vision of the future they had -- the computers in this movie have monitors, even though no such thing was ever conceived of in reality before! Most of today's moviegoers would probably consider the pacing of this movie to be very slow. It dwells alot on objects floating through space which today we have seen in movies millions of times, but at the time I don't think there ever was such a level of detail or realism in any movie before it.

The sound design is also very sparse. There is no music that's just "background music"... every sound has a definite purpose. Also, unlike most space movies, any time the camera is actually in space, it's completely silent -- just as it would be in real life, since there is no sound in space. Ah and the camera work! What amazing camera work! This movie just looks so beautiful in every shot it blows my mind.

And the story... what a great story... spanning millennia, featuring the HAL 9000 computer with it's haunting voice... the monolith... and that ending that is guaranteed to make your brain melt if you try to figure out what it means. Like woah. This is definitely one of the greatest science fiction movies ever created. I just wish I could have seen this movie the way it was meant to be seen -- on a giant Cinerama screen with the screen wrapped around the audience!

The DVD: The 2.21:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of this movie comes from restored film and looks amazingly clean, crisp, and clear. This movie has probably never looked better! At least, not for home viewing, anyway. The 2.21:1 aspect ratio is the original one used for the first "roadshow" run of this movie. My research discovered that for later runs for smaller theaters, a non-cinerama 35mm print was made, cropped down to a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which is not the "original". I did notice some significant artifacting in areas of gradients, such as fog or bright light. This is typically one of the more difficult types of images to encode well to the DVD format, and it definitely shows here. But other than that, this movie looks great.

The design, as I noted earlier, is very sparse, but the audio also sounds pretty damned good. It's technically a 5.1 surround mix, but it's mostly centered around the front speakers and the rears don't do a whole lot during this movie. But as I noted before, the overall sound design is pretty sparse. The only special feature is a theatrical trailer... pretty disappointing when you consider the importance of this film.

This DVD is definitely one that is worth checking out, and actually I think most people should own this. It's just one brilliant example of filmmaking, and this DVD definitely does the movie justice. I can't get over how good it looks. And I'll leave you with a shot from one of the more brain-melting sections of this movie...