Now that we're merely a year away from 2001, one can only assume that Stanley Kubrick, who died in the spring of 1999, was disappointed in the state of humanity.

It was Kubrick, after all, who envisioned us reaching a higher state of consciousness at the dawn of the new millennium. Yet the best we've been able to come up with is the ability to download porn and buy stuff over the Internet -- a cyberspace odyssey.

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey is as elliptical and inscrutable as its director. It has become the touchstone for all SF films, despite the fact that it offers about as much action as watching your toenails grow.

Kubrick, of course, collaborated with SF legend Arthur C. Clarke on the script. Though many have said the film is based on Clarke's story "The Sentinel", the author himself has characterized that assessment as "a gross oversimplification," that the film only takes the kernel of its main themes from that 1948 short story.

Today's generation is probably under the impression that 2001, the movie was based on 2001, the book. Strangely enough, Clarke wrote the novel while working on the screenplay as a way of channeling creative energy into both projects. Although 2001, the book wasn't released until several months after the film, the former is more a conjoined twin than a novelization.

The movie opens with our prehistoric ape ancestors frolicking around an African plain that strangely resembles the Arizona desert. They're a happy bunch, to be sure, fighting off leopards, hunting prey, generally goofing around, and -- wait a minute -- isn't this movie supposed to be a space odyssey? What's the deal with all these apes? You half expect Charlton Heston to come strolling by.

Nearly 10 minutes of film passes before these happy-go-lucky primates discover a giant black monolith bursting forth out of the ground. They are, understandably, freaked out.

As the primate posse ponders this growth that disrupts their party, one particularly rambunctious ape throws a bone up in the air, which segues into a spaceship. The suggestion here is that man has always been dependent on his weapons, whether they be bones or spaceships.

Flash forward some millions of years and our odyssey moves into space while Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube" waltz plays.

We find ourselves aboard a Pan Am space shuttle -- a laughable prospect today, as it's hard to imagine Pan Am flying from New York to Miami, let alone to the moon, but it was an exciting bit of corporate realism in 1968.

An investigative team heads to the moon to check out a now-familiar black monolith found inexplicably protruding from the surface. Now the ape sequence begins to make sense -- the suggestion (Kubrick always suggests, rarely tells) being that some intelligent entity not of this earth has deliberately placed these objects for us to ponder.

Viewers often read the monoliths as signposts of our discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Shortly after the film's release, however, Kubrick told a New York Times reporter that it's more a matter of the other beings discovering us. Hard to say which is the more frightening prospect.

What's most striking about this entire sequence is the prescience of the technology for a film made more than 30 years ago. We see video monitors affixed to the back of the shuttle's seats, voiceprint identification kiosks and videophones (fortunately, we've thus far managed to avoid the zero-gravity toilet).

The moon docking sequence, which predated the actual moon landing by a year, looks remarkably accurate when compared with the footage of Neil Armstrong hopping around. No wonder so many people believe the Apollo 11 landing was filmed on a Hollywood soundstage -- Kubrick had already done it, and he made it look easy.

As Clarke wrote in his nonfiction account of the making of the film, The Lost Worlds of 2001, "We had to outguess the future. One way of doing that was to be so far ahead of the present that there was no danger of the facts overtaking us. On the other hand, if we got too far ahead, there was grave risk of losing contact with the audience."

One of the more crucial elements of 2001 is the lack of sound -- or the presence of the sounds of silence, if you prefer -- that dominates the film. It only makes sense, of course, that there would be no sound in space (no atmosphere means no medium for sound transmission, after all).

This simple fact renders the bombastic fury of Star Wars and its progeny silly, while making Kubrick's film seem like a work of stark realism. And in a movie that runs 2 hours 19 minutes, there are only 46 minutes of dialog. Kubrick himself referred to words as "a terrible straitjacket," which certainly explains his reticence in granting interviews.

After everything's been said, much of the remaining soundtrack in 2001 comes from Kubrick's keen use of music. The music of the two Strausses plays an integral role in the film -- Johann's "The Blue Danube" and Richard's "Thus Spake Zarathustra."

Unlike the music in so many contemporary films, these two pieces draw the viewer into the scene and enhance the action rather than reduce the soundtrack's role to music video. It's hard to listen to either piece today without first thinking of 2001.

 Dial "HAL" for murder

HAL is one of cinema's all-time great villains. In the movie's tensest sequence, Discovery crewmen David Bowman and Frank Poole (played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, respectively) attempt to disable the computer after the stability of his programming becomes suspect. Omnipotent in their microcosmic on-board setting, HAL doesn't take kindly to this suggestion. Bowman and Poole hole themselves up in space pod to engage in what they think is a private conversation. HAL, however, watches, reading their lips.

Later, Poole is lured outside the ship by HAL's false report of a failing antenna. As he makes repairs, he is cast adrift by HAL. Bowman ventures outside in a pod to rescue his partner. Now the cyber-guardian has the humans where he wants them. When Bowman returns with Poole's body, he asks HAL to open the pod bay door so they can return to the Discovery. As the pod floats in silent space with its limited supply of air, HAL responds with a line creepy enough to make even Norman Bates' skin crawl:

So long, David Bowman. Or so HAL thinks.

For all the film's majesty and visual delights, so many of 2001's separate parts are downright incomprehensible. For example, there is The "Star Gate" sequence in which Bowman travels through some sort of wormhole and experiences a kind of vision.

"In a moment of time too short to be measured, Space turned and twisted upon itself," Clarke wrote in the novel.

In the film, the Star Gate is a sound and light sequence that amounts to the longest acid-trip sequence in film history (arguably surpassing the video to "In A Gadda da Vida").

And just what are we to make of the sequence of Bowman growing old and alone in a neo-Victorian dwelling?

More than anything, 2001 is Kubrick's philosophical statement about our place in the universe, about where we as humans rate in the pecking order of life -- feral, intelligent and hyper-intelligent.

The famous Star Child at the end of the film indicates that something has reached a higher level of consciousness. Despite the fact that humanity remains more or less earthbound in the real world, Kubrick -- though his strange, serious, infuriating and terribly necessary movie -- has opened all our eyes.