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2001: A Space Odyssey (movie) <span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is perhaps the ultimate SF film (or “the ultimate trip,” as it was billed). One of several groundbreaking works by Stanley Kubrick, the director of Dr. Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and The Shining (1980), the movie is profound, enigmatic, deliberately paced, breathtakingly beautiful, and a virtual Rorschach test, subject to a wide variety of interpretations over the years. A monumental work, 2001 stands far above most genre films—and most films overall—like the evolution-boosting monolith that towers over the man-apes in its first scene. Marking a major financial commitment by a major studio, MGM, it ushered in a new era of critical and commercial respectability for a genre too often dismissed, although it was far from universally praised upon its release. The acorn that grew into this cinematic oak was The Sentinel, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1948 story about a sort of cosmic alarm clock, concealed on the Moon and activated by humankind’s arrival. In an unusual move, Clarke and Kubrick collaborated simultaneously on the script and a bestselling novel (which, at Kubrick’s suggestion, was published under the Clarke byline alone). Like George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), co-written by Robert A. Heinlein, 2001 was both a rare foray into filmmaking by an established SF author and a painstaking attempt to portray space flight accurately, according to the scientific knowledge of its time. It admirably achieved the latter goal with state-of-the-art special visual effects, which remain unsurpassed even in the CGI era.
 At the Dawn of Man, a black monolith appears, inspiring a tribe of man-apes to use bones as weapons and ensuring their ascendance over other tribes. A famed jump cut takes us from the bone tossed into the air by a triumphant Moonwatcher (Daniel Richter) to Pan Am’s commercial shuttle Orion, which is transporting Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) to a space station. Floyd’s destination is the moon, where a second monolith, buried for thousands of years, has been excavated. When hit by the rays of the sun, it emits an electronic shriek that is directed at Jupiter, en route to which David Bowman (Keir Dullea), Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and their HAL 9000 computer (voiced by Douglas Rain) then travel aboard the Discovery I in 2001. It is often said that 2001’s human characters are more mechanical than HAL, as if they are at the same sort of dead end as the man-apes from the Dawn of Man. Kubrick “projected that in the year 2001, astronauts…would be chosen for having a kind of psychological profile, that they would be very low-key and it would take a lot to make a ripple in them,” as Dull ea recounted in an interview with journalist Matthew R. Bradley. The mission’s purpose is unknown to Bowman and Poole, and after shutting down the life-support systems of three other astronauts in hibernetic sleep, HAL lures Poole outside the ship with the pretext of a minor repair and kills him with a space pod. Bowman, who hastily boarded his pod without a helmet while trying to retrieve the body, must blast back in through an emergency airlock. Against the advice of his scientific and technical consultant, Frederick I. Ordway, Kubrick eliminated scenes and narration that would have made these events significantly clearer. Clarke has also expressed regret that the rationale for HAL’s behavior—i.e., he was essentially driven mad by contradictory programming calling for him to both assist and eliminate the astronauts—was unexplained. When Bowman shuts down HAL’s higher brain functions, a tape reveals the purpose of the mission, and as the ship approaches Jupiter it encounters and then enters a third monolith in space, the Star Gate. After a psychedelic journey, Bowman watches himself age in a sterile white room, and as another monolith looms above his deathbed, the Star Child appears, signaling another stage in humankind’s evolution. 2001 received an Academy Award nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, as did Kubrick’s direction and the script. Kubrick was also awarded the Oscar for its special visual effects, although the team included veterans Tom Howard—a winner for Tom Thumb (1958)—and Wally Veevers, plus newcomer Douglas Trumbull, who went on to direct Silent Running (1972). Clarke revisited the territory with his novels 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). The first was filmed simply as 2010 (1984) by writer-producer-director-cinematographer Peter Hyams, who reunited Rain and Dullea with meticulous recreations of the Discovery sets, while Roy Scheider assumed the role of Dr. Floyd. Floyd joins a U.S.-Soviet mission to salvage Discovery I, as a Cold War crisis unfolds on Earth. HAL is cautiously revived by his creator, Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), who explains what was left unclear in the first film, and the combined crew witnesses yet another evolutionary leap as monoliths turn Jupiter into a new sun, providing warmth and light to life on its moon, Europa. Bowman appears briefly as a kind of ghostly spokesman for the monoliths, promising that “something wonderful” is afoot. Hyman's message is hardly subtle (referring to the other worlds orbiting the new sun, Bowman bids both governments, “Use them together; use them in peace”), but adds tension to the film, with extra star power provided by John Lithgow and Helen Mirren. Broadcast History
Categories: Movies | Movies featuring humans against machines | Space exploration movies | Oscar Nominated movies | Hugo Nominated movies | 1960s movies | MGM movies | Stanley Kubrick movies | Arthur C. Clarke movies | Keir Dullea movies | Gary Lockwood movies | William Sylvester movies | Daniel Richter movies | Leonard Rossiter movies | Margaret Tyzack movies | Robert Beatty movies | Douglas Rain movies | Sean Sullivan movies
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
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