2001: A Space Odyssey (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray) [4K UHD]

A classic film that looks beautiful in 4K. Excellent picture and sound, the details just pop. A must-have for film collectors!

Definitely very interesting movie I’m glad I watched it and it was definitely a trip if you know what I mean. It’s a classic and it’s highly recommended.

So happy I get to experience this masterpiece in 4k quality! It is amazing how far this media has come.

This movie is very obtuse in it's grand meaning. It's one of those moves that's better if you sit back and burn one or eat a handful of magic mushrooms. In fact, that's how the studio re-marketed it after it was released and had very few seats sold except for those filled by stoners. They had new movie posters that I can't remember the exact wording but it referenced a ultimate trip or something like that. I suppose if you live in New Mexico where it is legal to have mushrooms it would be very cool to watch a movie like this. There isn't much dialog and the best dialog belongs to the infamous H.A.L. artificial intelligence computer. His name is in reference to I.B.M. because if you go up one letter in the alphabet on each letter in the acronoym that's what it spells. At the time there weren't all these computer hardware and software companies I.B.M. was it and obviously made some like the director Stanley Kubrick paranoid. In general I love his movies and this one doesn't dissapoint. He is the director's director. His films tend to speak a lot though visuals so as to make you interpret the film as much or (in 2001's case) more. The art direction and special effects are way way ahead of it's time. No Robbie the Robot here. Except for the lasers the art direction isn't any worse then Star Wars which came out 8 years later. It's really hard to believe this movie is from the 1960's when you see how great everything stands up to time all limitations considered. As of this writing it's been awhile since I've seen this movie but since Amazon has emailed me 3 times to review it even though I don't have it yet I figured I'd just go with the broader sense then the specifics of this movie. Too me it's getting more and more ridiculous to buy movies with everything on demand and how good it looks but this is one of the few movies that is a mush have in your blu-ray collection. It's always in the top 100 movies list and there is good reason why. It's a movie that lets you sit back and contemplate without having to engage your attention for every spoken word or miss the meaning of the movie. You can easily watch it with a friend and have a conversation about the film while it is playing (another reason why stoners like it so much). If you like classic cinema, trippyness, thought provoking cinema by one of the masters of 20th century film-making you cannot go wrong with this film but of course I'm biased because I like all of Kubrick's work. Anyway, Amazon always has it cheap so that should be incentive as well. Buy it and you will not regret it. Edit* By the way I see a lot of reviews saying this movie is too slow. If you think this is slow don't go anywhere near the far inferior sequel 2010. Talk about a snooze fest!

I’ve loved going back to this movie many times. The early prehistoric segments are too long. The light show at the end is cool but just cut most of it. It’s like Vyger in Trek. Ok first time it’s ok as it was intended but repeats aren’t kind to it. Excellent movie though. That’s why I bought it

This review covers the film — not the specific BluRay presentation. I’ll review that later. Within the industry and art form of motion pictures, the importance and influence of Kubrick’s “2001: a space odyssey” cannot be overstated or even overestimated. There is quite possibly no other film that has had the level of impact and inspiration on subsequent generations of filmmakers and the art of filmmaking that 2001 has had. Yet for many modern film viewers, the movie is often perceived as dull, opaque, unfathomable and pretentious. In fact, when 2001 debuted it received many of the same criticisms. The film was pilloried by critics and at premiere screenings audiences booed and even walked out of theaters. But despite this initial reaction, audiences lined up to see the movie. The film became not just a commercial success, but a popular phenomenon with the younger generation of movie-goers in the 60s. Partially fueled by the drug and counter-culture of the time — 2001 was ultimately accepted in the way Kubrick had intended — people went to “experience” the movie. Instead of being told a clear, specific story with conflicts and resolutions, 2001 presented the audience with a grand mythological journey — from the origins of humans to their technological future and beyond. And it did so by abandoning the conventions of storytelling and asking the viewer to simply absorb the sights and sounds of the film and allow themselves to have an instinctual, emotional response. 2001 is not a movie that delivers the standard conventions of plot and character in a 3 act structure. It does not follow the rules and precepts of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero Of a Thousand Faces” that so many thousands of screenwriters were told to adhere to lest they lose the audience’s attention and interest. 2001 is a narrative. But it is a meta narrative. Its story concerns the very nature of existence. It proposes a secular solution to the mystery of life. How did we get get here? Are we alone? Clarke and Kubrick imagined a a story that answered the notion of why humans are self aware and technologically capable by way of a mythology that is based on the mystery of science. Science so deep and advanced, we cannot distinguish it from magic. Kubrick wanted a movie that told the story of mankind’s evolution in the universe — from lowly ape to early man to eventually a Superman. The next step in higher intelligence. Kubrick was drawn to an Arthur C. Clarke short story that suggested an advanced alien race travels the universe looking for nascent intelligence and then once discovered, helps it along in critical next steps steps of cognitive abilities. Just enough to see if the formative intelligence becomes capable of developing technology that allows that to start traveling their local solar system and exploring their origins. The aliens leave a buried artifact on the closest nearby moon that — when uncovered — signals to the aliens that — yes indeed — this group of intelligence has made the leap — and are now possibly ready for the next step in evolution. To achieve this — Kubrick felt that trying to tell this story in ordinary fashion with lots of dialogue and conversations and drama would come off as pretentious or hokey — or at the very least would drain the mystical and magical quality he felt the film needed. He knew he had to get the audience to experience such moments of alien contact and alien manipulation of the human mind in way that felt experiential — magical and holy. He knew he needed viewers to have a personal, spiritual experience with the film — not a dramatic one. What Kubrick was seeking was much closer to the experience one has when walking quietly through a massive cathedral — one of the grand medieval cathedrals of Europe — where the person is overwhelmed by the stunning beauty and grandiosity and silence of the cathedral — Kubrick knew he needed the viewer to experience space in this manner. And that is why the movie seems slow to many modern, younger viewers. Kubrick needed you to sit in the cathedral of space — and in the austerely beautiful technology of 2001 — in order that you could absorb the reality of the mind-bending spiritual myth he was laying on you. SPOILERS In traditional narrative-sense, Kubrick actually moves the story along at quite a clip. Man-apes are fighting for shrubs in a desert. Alien artifact appears. Man-apes learn to use weapons. First murder in human history. A bone club weapon cuts to an orbital nuclear weapon 200,000 years later in 2001. Mystery of something dug up on a moon base. It’s the same artificat we saw with apes. It sends a signal to Jupiter. Humans follow that signal to Jupiter to find out where alien artifact came from — or is leading them to. Along the way, humans murder the first machine intelligence it ever created. A test? The last vestige of violence humans will leave behind? END OF SPOILERS All along the way — Kubrick is telling you the story with an incredibly efficient, fast moving narrative structure — but he also needs the viewer to settle into the elongated time-scape of space travel. Why? Because it’s vital the viewer experience the space mission in a way that gets them to fully believe in what’s happening. To get them to accept what they are watching is real. So that the viewer stops thinking they’re watching a movie. Think of it this way — you’ve gone to see your Dr and you’re placed in a Waiting room — expecting bad news. The longer you sit, the more you absorb all the various specific elements of the waiting room. All the mundane details and objects you see become more than just real — they become important — and the stakes about what you’re going to hear gather weight. Now imagine your Dr is about to tell you mind-bending news about having cancer and needing chemo therapy. Your body is about to be transformed. That long, long moment in the waiting room is all about accepting the reality of that journey. In 2001, humans are in a waiting room about to meet their alien doctor — their alien overlord — who will deliver the prognosis of their future. Life, death or transformation awaits. In other words the “boredom” of 2001 is not a flaw — it’s a feature. A vital feature. Beyond that — it’s nearly impossible to explain to the young film movie-goer how far advanced the effects of 2001 were at their time. Today’s films have the advantage of powerful computers to easily create seamless special effects of almost type. But back in 1966-67 there were no computer—generated effects. No CGI. It was all created on film. Analogue film. Multiple shots on differed strips of films are combined in an optical printer to look like they are all in one shot. Think of it as “artisanal” special effects — hand-crafted special effects. Even Doug Trumbull’s breakthrough slit-scan device that created the very computer-generated-looking Star Gate sequence that gives a dizzying sensation of flying through a wormhole of wildly colorful light — was a hand-built machine that achieved the illusion of fast movement with stop-motion animation — requiring days of filming to create just seconds of screen time. Same with the interior sets. All real. All painstakingly built by hand. Many of them rotated. The giant centrifuge set for the Discovery set was a massive Ferris wheel. Cameras and actor bolted to floor while it turns. The Dawn of Man man-apes were created with costume designs that were decades ahead of their time — all donned by a mime troupe that spent months studying real ape movements. The effect was so convincing that many people simply assumed real apes had been trained to “act out” the scenes. To the point where make-up and costume designer Stuart Freeborn’s amazing accomplishment was completely overlooked by the Academy awards — giving best make-up effects instead to the much more primitive and unconvincing “Planet of the Apes.” In the end, 2001 is not a film to be seen like one would go see Star Wars or a Marvel movie. It’s not entertainment. Its not a consumable flight of fancy — no matter how enjoyable those types of movies are. As pretentious as this sounds — 2001 is a work of art. It’s meant to challenge the viewer. To stimulate their senses and creat an instinctive impression. It’s not meant to be easily understood. It is a film that was made to present a mythology of how humanity came into existence. So it’s meant to be an experience. You can’t have normal movie expectations when you watch it. There’s no bad guy. No good guy. Justice is not served. It’s much bigger than that. It’s more — “What if we’re here because of alien intervention? And what if we passed the aliens’ first test? And they want us to take the next step in evolution? Evolution that will open our minds the inner workings and mysteries of the universe? We will become beings that will be capable of transforming matter and energy in a way that appears entirely magical to us now? Kubrick knew he couldn’t tell that story in normal Chris Nolan terms. Not even in Marvel Thanos Iron Man Capt Marvel tesseract terms. That’s why 2001 is not a normal movie to watch. It’s a cinematic experience the likes of which we have never seen before.

So far ahead of it's time. Picture quality and sound is awesome.....

Magnificent 4K transfer. Both accompanying blu rays are region-free. Disc 1 contains the HD print and disc 2 houses all the special features, which are mostly the same carried from the 2-disc DVD release.

Legenda e dublagem em português, filme maravilhoso!!!

This 4k remastering of this movie is a must have especially at the $25 price point. I first saw the movie when released in 1968. The 4k colours are fantastic and there is a blue Ray and DVD. The cassette it came in is also worth mentioning due to its top notch presentation.

The disk doesn't work. It says bad disk on my player.. I reported the problem to the seller and he refunded the money as there was no other copy available Thanks