2001 - A Space Odyssey [HD DVD] by Stanley Kubrick, starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter, Leonard Rossiter: DVDNear.com

2001 - A Space Odyssey [HD DVD]

2001 - A Space Odyssey [HD DVD]
by Stanley Kubrick

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Daniel Richter, Gary Lockwood, Keir Dullea, Leonard Rossiter, William Sylvester
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cinematographer: Geoffrey Unsworth
Producer: Stanley Kubrick
Writer: Stanley Kubrick
Editor: Ray Lovejoy
Producer: Victor Lyndon
Writer: Arthur C. Clarke
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language); Russian (Original Language); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 141 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-23
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Studio: Warner Home Video

Movie Reviews of 2001 - A Space Odyssey [HD DVD]

Movie Review: A Review of the HD-DVD Version
Summary: 5 Stars

I first saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" at the age of 12 in a grand old movie palace that had been retrofitted with a Cinerama screen and projector. It was one of the great entertainment experiences of my life. After the film's initial run, the only way I was able to view it was on scratched-up 16mm or 35mm prints at a discount rerun theater or college auditorium, then on pan-and-scan VHS tape, then on the poorly-mastered first DVD release, then on the somewhat better subsequent DVD with anamorphic standard-definition. None of these came close to recapturing the original cinematic experience. But the new HD-DVD release does. It's like going back 40 years in time to the grand Cinerama palace (which is now a flea market).

Many (perhaps most) of the reviews on this page pertain to one of the standard-definition DVD versions, not to the HD-DVD disc, which was just recently released. For those of you who are not yet familiar with high-definition technology, please be warned that the HD-DVD version will not play on a standard DVD player. You'll need an HD-DVD player connected to your HDTV via an HD-compatible cable such as HDMI, DVI, or analog component video. However, if you get an HD-DVD player you'll still be able to use it to play your old standard-def DVDs and audio CDs.

I currently have a 4-year-old Sony 42" Grand Wega high-definition LCD rear-projection TV with 720p resolution, which by now is quite obsolete. Nonetheless, the picture quality of the "2001" HD-DVD, played on my Toshiba HD-A1 player over a DVI cable, is absolutely jaw-dropping. The HD-DVD version is mastered in the correct aspect ratio in which the movie was originally filmed. You have the option of selecting the new Dolby TrueHD soundtrack, which is losslessly encoded on the disc. If your system is set up to handle TrueHD sound, you'll notice a big improvement in the quality of the musical score. The dialog (what little of it there is) remains slightly fuzzy, perhaps due to the limitations of movie-set audio recording equipment in the mid-1960s. How they managed to clean up the music track so well, I don't know. But it sounds phenomenal.

And there are a lot of great extra features on the HD-DVD version, most of which are not to be found on either of the two DVD versions that I own. The main movie and all of the extra features fit on a single HD-DVD disc, so you don't have to hassle with multiple discs. The disc includes just the right amount of extra material, too, in my opinion. Enough to be highly satisfying but not so much as to overwhelm (i.e. they didn't pad it with a lot of junk, as sometimes happens with special collectors' editions).

My next step will be to purchase a 60" - 70" HDTV with 1080p resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate, capable of accepting a 1080p/24 input signal. I'm currently looking at this one: Sony Bravia SXRD KDS-60A3000 60" 1080p Rear Projection HDTV. 1080p/24 is the format in which the HD-DVD disc is actually encoded, to match the original 24 frames per second of the film. On my current setup, the HD-DVD player converts the 1080p/24 signal to 1080i/60, which then gets converted to 720p/60 by my TV. So I'm not quite at home-theater nirvana yet. When I get there, I'll invite a select group of friends over to re-live the big-screen 2001 experience.

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2001 - A Space Odyssey [HD DVD]