I saw it for the first time when I was in middle school. I thought it was the worst movie ever. Then, some time later, as an adult, I rewatched it and was amazed at how wonderful it was. It was so beautiful and magnificent that I could not believe it was made in 1968, and I thought it was an unprecedented and solemn historical work, like Goethe's "Faust" in literature, one of the greatest masterpieces of cinema that mankind has ever possessed. First of all, it is a film in which dialogue is reduced to the utmost limit, and even if it had been in black and white, I could have watched it ten times without getting tired of it, regardless of whether I could have endured the "silence. It's Kubrick's magic that you can watch this film without any annoying sound effects like in "Jaws" but with classical music and with your heart rate regulated like in Charlie Chaplin's silent films. I don't know how well this film was received in the U.S. at the time, but in Japan, many people shy away from it, saying it is difficult to understand.
