The 4K Blu-ray for 2001: A Space Odyssey arrived from Warner Bros. back in December of 2018. It supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision, so essentially every HDR-capable device is covered. The quality on display is quite sublime, as over the course of the movie’s nearly 150-minute runtime we venture across numerous environments, each presenting a unique color scheme. The orange and yellow-dominated African veldt of the Dawn of Man sequence, followed by Blue Earth seen from orbit. The stark contrast between glowing human-made space stations and vehicles and the blackness of space, notably lacking overly-twinkling stars because 2001 aimed for scientific accuracy as much as possible.
Then the surface of the moon, a very rocky and detail-laden place that’s obviously different from the real moon, as the movie was made years before video from the lunar surface was available to the public.
Of course, then we get the interior of Discovery 1, the big ship were astronauts Bowman and Poole spend their time traveling to Jupiter together with the notorious HAL-9000 supercomputer. Details, colors, nuances: the 4K Blu-ray simply looks fantastic in HDR, showing careful attention to color calibration on the part of the mastering team. The streamed version simply can’t hope to compete.
By the time the psychedelic Starchild sequence comes along, you’ll be very happy if you’re watching on a big screen with proper 4K HDR rather than the adequate but ultimately disappointing edit purveyed by the streamed counterpart.