The Monolith Still Wins

Silence as spectacle Kubrick cut the explanatory narration two weeks before release, and that decision is the whole movie. 2001 trusts images — a bone, a waltz, an eye — to do what exposition never could. HAL remains cinema's best villain because he is polite. The horror is procedural. Why this rating A perfect score is a claim that a film changed the medium. This one did, twice: once in 1968, and once every time someone watches it for the first time.