Five days ago What The Flick‘s Christy Lemire, Alonso Duralde and Matt Atchity riffed about Chris Nolan‘s unrestored 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they didn’t even mention the differences in color tones between the Nolan version and Warner Home Video’s 2007 Bluray.

It would be one thing to say, “Yes, we know 2001 looks different on the Bluray but we prefer the yellowish, less sharp, teal-tinted-sky version that Nolan has given us….in the French chateau finale Dave Bowman‘s face is slightly gray and lacking in detail behind his space-helmet mask, but we prefer it that way.” But they don’t even mention the Bluray. Nor do they discuss the upcoming 4K version, which will almost certainly resemble the 2007 Bluray only better.

Here’s my Cannes Film Festival review, posted on 5.13.18.

Lemire: “You can interpret [2001] a lot of ways!” HE: Not really. The super-aliens who sent the monolith to earth to awaken the man-apes and turn them into bone-wielding carnivores, give them intelligence and the will to gradually evolve into homo sapiens are the sires of our species — our Gods, our fathers, our evolutionary architects. They planted one of their monoliths under the surface of the moon, knowing that sooner or later humans would fly there and uncover it, which would alert them to our evolutionary progress. At the very end ancient Dave Bowman sees the monolith at the foot of his deathbed and reaches out as a dying Christian would to a crucifix or a dying alcoholic to a fifth of Jack Daniels. And then he’s reborn into a star fetus, etc.

In short, it’s about the origin and the destiny of our species. Precisely and unambiguously. John Simon nailed it early on: 2001 is a “shaggy God story.”