AS A FILM about progress--physical, social, and technological--Stanley Kubrick's huge and provocative 2001: A Space Odyssey remains essentially linear until its extraordinary ending. In the final transfiguration, director Kubrick and co-author Arthur Clarke (Childhood's End) suggest that evolutionary progress may in face be cyclical, perhaps in the shape of a helix formation. Man progresses to a certain point in evolution, then begins again from scratch on a higher level. Much of 2001's conceptual originality derives from its being both anti-Christian and anti-evolutionary in its theme of man's progress controlled by an ambiguous extra-terrestrial force, possibly both capricious and destructive.

If the above seems a roundabout way to open a discussion of an eleven-million dollar Cinerama spectacular, it can only be said that Kubrick's film is as personal as it is expensive, and as ambitious an attempt at metaphysical philosophy as it is at creating a superb science-fiction genre film. Consequently, 2001 is probable commercial poison. A sure-fire audience baffler guaranteed to empty any theatre of ten per cent of its audience, 2001 is even now being re-edited by Kubrick to shorten the 165 minute length by 15-odd minutes. 2001, as it is being shown in Boston now, is in a transitional stage, the theatre currently exhibiting a spliceridden rough-cut while awaiting new prints from the MGM labs.

Although some sequences are gone, most of the cutting consists of shortening lengthy shots which dwelled on slow and difficult operation of space-age machinery. Kubrick probably regrets his current job of attempting to satisfy future audiences: the trimming of two sequences involving the mechanics of entering and controlling "space pods," one-man space ships launched from the larger craft, may emphasize plot action but only at the expense of the eerie and important continuity of technology that dominates most of the film. 2001 is, among other things, a slow-paced intricate stab at creating an aesthetic from natural and material things we have never seen before: the film's opening, "The Dawn of Man," takes place four million years ago (with a cast composed solely of australopithecine, tapirs, and a pre-historic leopard), and a quick cut takes us past the history of man into the future.

KUBRICK'S dilemma in terms of satisfying an audience is that his best work in 2001 is plotless slow-paced material, an always successful creation of often ritualistic behavior of apes, men, and machines with whom we are totally unfamiliar. In the longer version, the opening of Astronaut Poole's (Gary Lockwood) pod scene is shot identically to the preceding pod scene with Astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea), stressing standardized operational method by duplicating camera setups. This laborious preparation may appear initially repetitive until Poole's computer-controlled pod turns on him and murders him in space, thus justifying the prior duplication by undercutting it with a terrifyingly different conclusion. Throughout 2001, Kubrick suggests a constantly shifting balance between man and his tools, a dimension which largely vanishes from this particular scene in cutting the first half and making the murder more abrupt dramatically than any other single action in the film.

Even compromised in order to placate audiences, Kubrick's handling of the visual relationship between time and space is more than impressive. He has discovered that slow movement (of space crafts, for example) is as impressive on a Cinerama screen as fast movement (the famous Cinerama roller-coaster approach), also that properly timed sequences of slow movement actually appear more real--sometimes even faster--than equally long long sequences of fast motion shots. No film in history achieves the degree of three-dimensional depth maintained consistently in 2001 (and climaxed rhapsodically in a shot of a pulsating stellar galaxy); Kubrick frequently focuses our attention to one side of the wide screen, then introduces an element from the opposite corner, forcing a re-orientation which heightens our sense of personal observation of spontaneous reality.

His triumph, both in terms of film technique and directorial approach, is in the audience's almost immediate acceptance of special effects as reality: after we have seen a stewardess walk up a wall and across the ceiling early in the film, we no longer question similar amazements and accept Kubrick's new world without question. The credibility of the special effects established, we can suspend disbelief, to use a justifiable cliche, and revel in the beauty and imagination of Kubrick/Clarke's space. And turn to the challenging substance of the excellent screenplay.

2001 begins with a shot of an eclipse condition: the earth, moon, and sun in orbital conjunction, shown on a single vertical plane in center screen. The image is central and becomes one of three prerequisites for each major progression made in the film.

THE initial act of progress is evolutionary. A series of brief scenes establishes the life cycle of the australopithicine before its division into what became both ape and man--they eat grass, are victimized by carnivores, huddle together defensively. One morning they awake to find in their midst a tall, thin, black rectangular monolith, its base embedded in the ground, towering monumentally above them, plainly not a natural formation. They touch it and we note at that moment that the moon and sun are in orbital conjunction.

In the following scene, an australopithicine discovers what we will call the tool, a bone from a skeleton which, when used as an extension of the arm, adds considerably to the creature's strength. The discovery is executed in brilliant slow motion montage of the pre-ape destroying the skeleton with the bone, establishing Kubrick and Clarke's subjective anthropological notion that the discovery of the tool was identical to that of the weapon. The "dawn of man," then, is represented by a coupling of progress and destruction; a theme of murder runs through 2001 simultaneously with that of progress. Ultimately, Kubrick shows an ambiguous spiritual growth through physical death.

The transition from pre-history to future becomes a simple cut from the bone descending in the air to a rocket preparing to land at a space station midway between earth and moon. A classic example of Bazin's "associative montage," the cut proves an effective, if simplistic, method of by-passing history and setting-up the link between bone and rocket as the spectral tools of man, one primitive and one incredibly sophisticated.

On the moon, American scientists discover an identical black monolith, apparently buried over four million years before, completely inert save for the constant emission of a powerful radio signal directed toward Jupiter. The scientists examine it (touching it tentatively as the apes did) at a moment when the earth and sun are in conjunctive orbit. They conclude that some form of life on Jupiter may have placed the monolith there and, fourteen months later, an expedition is sent to Jupiter to investigate.

TWO major progressions have been made: an evolutionary progression in the discovery of the tool, and a technological progression inherent in the trip to Jupiter. The discovery of the monolith has preceded each advance, and with it the conjunction of the sun and moons of a given planet, as well as the presence of ape or human at a stage of development where they are ready to make the significant progression. The monolith, then, begins to represent something of a deity; for our own purposes, we will assume that, given the three conditions, the inert monolith actually teaches or inspires ape and man to make the crucial advance. Therefore, it becomes a major force in man's evolution: man is not responsible for his own development, and perhaps the monolith even brings the men to it at the precise moment of the conjunctive orbits.

To Kubrick, this dehumanization is more than the result of the undefined force exerted by the monolith and proves a direct consequence of advanced technology. Kubrick is no stranger to the subject: The Killing and Lolita both involve man's self-expression through the automobile; Spartacus's defeat comes because he is not adequately prepared to meet the advanced military technology of the Roman army; Dr. Strangelove, of course, contains a running motif of machines assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in 2001. The central portion of 2001, the trip to Jupiter, can, as an odyssey toward a final progression of man, concern itself largely with Kubrick's persistent preoccupation of the relationship between man and his tools.

KUBRICK prepares us for the ultimate emotional detachment of Bowman and Poole; his characterization of Dr. Floyd, the protagonist of the moon sequence and the initiator of the Jupiter expedition, stresses his coldness, noticeably in a telephone conversation with his young daughter, a dialogue which suggests a reliance on manipulating her more than it demonstrates any love for her. These men, all professional, are no longer excited by space travel: they sleep during flights and pay no attention to what-we-consider extraordinary phenomenon occurring before their eyes (the rapid rotation of the earth in the background during the telephone scene).

Bowman and Poole are inhuman. Their faces register no emotion and they show no tension; their few decisions are always logical and the two always agree; Poole greets a televised birthday message from his gauche middle-class parents on Earth with complete lack of interest--he is, for practical purposes, no longer their child. With subtle humor, Kubrick separates one from the other only in their choice of food from the dispensing machine: Poole chooses food with clashing colors and Bowman selects a meal composed entirely within the ochre-to-dark brown range. In a fascinating selection of material, Kubrick omits the actual act of Poole's murder, cutting to his body in space directly after the mechanical pod-hands sever his air hose, thus taking emphasis off any identification we might suddenly feel and turning the murder into cold, further dehumanized abstraction.