2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed and Produced by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke
Starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and a little red dot
Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth
Edited by Ray Lovejoy
Production company Stanley Kubrick Productions
Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Yes, I did see 2001 on the big screen when it first came out, but I was in a chemically-augmented state at the time, so while I gloried in the special effects, the plot was, um, well, what plot? Monkeys, Moon, spaceship run by glowing red eye. If there was a monolith probing me to see if I was ready to advance to the next level, I never would have passed.
I saw the film a couple of years later on TV, and while the effects weren’t quite as impressive, the plot was the strong point. Of course, I had read Clarke’s book at that point, which helped.
I watched a documentary on Amazon Prime, 2001: The Making of a Myth which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the film’s release. It’s a fun viewing, in that they explained how much effort it took to make a pen look like it was floating in air (it was pretty ingenious) and how people walked to 90 degrees from vertical and ran in a centrifuge (the entire set rotated!). There were some old interviews with Clarke obviously taken at his Sri Lankan estate, and first hand accounts of Kubrick’s obsession with both detail and verisimilitude.
So now it’s been 53 years since it came out? How did it hold up?
Amazingly well. Not perfect, but the level of accuracy far exceeds pretty much any SF movie made before or since (and it was made in a time when “science fiction movie” usually meant some rubber monster stomping Tokyo flat). There were some errors. I imagine that back then, NASA people watched Dave take an utterly unnecessary untethered space walk from a half mile from the Discovery One and slapped their foreheads and pulled their cheeks down at the mere thought. The computer graphics were dated, but extraordinary feats in and of themselves. This was 1967, and the only computer smaller than a bank of filing cabinets was John Brunner’s Shalmaneser, who would have been the world’s first desktop computer except for the fact that he was fictional. Christ, what an imagination I’ve got. Your phone has more computing power than did the Apollo missions, and we’re probably only a few years away from a computer that can reason and have self-interest like HAL. (And 2001 stands as a great warning note about AI: true artificial intelligence will have self-interest, rendering it useless as a computer because of the built-in bias).
The pace of the movie is slow, and modern kids, with their six second attention span and familiarity with the eye-popping special effect of today, might find it boring. And it’s unusual for a science fiction movie to the thoughtful; there aren’t that many. Solaris (which has an even slower plot), Moon, The Martian (despite ridiculous ending) and a handful of others—they’re pretty rare, really.
But we’re well past 2001, and obviously we didn’t have AIs or manned trips outside of Earth orbit (with a half-dozen exceptions about the time the movie came out) so how does it hold up?
It’s still the greatest science fiction movie ever made. It has an element few other movies of the genre have: a deep probing curiosity, and a sense of awe at the splendor of space.
You’ll know your kids have matured when they see it—and recognize its value.