1968
DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER: STANLEY KUBRICK SCREENPLAY: STANLEY KUBRICK, BASED ON A STORY BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE STARRING: KEIR DULLEA (DR. DAVID BOWMAN), GARY LOCKWOOD (DR. FRANK POOLE), WILLIAM SYLVESTER (DR. HEYWOOD FLOYD), DANIEL RICHTER (MOON-WATCHER), LEONARD ROSSITER (SMYSLOV), MARGARET TYZACK (ELENA), ROBERT BEATTY (DR. RALPH HALVORSEN), DOUGLAS RAIN (VOICE OF HAL 9000)
2001: A Space Odyssey
MGM • COLOR, 148 MINUTES
In the near future, the United States sends a manned spacecraft run by a sentient computer to Jupiter in search of intelligent life.
Once in a while a movie comes along that redefines the cinematic experience. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a prime example of such a movie. Light-years more ambitious and sophisticated than anything that had come before it, Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously crafted journey into deep space is revered even by today’s standards for its technical brilliance and unforgettable imagery. Much has been made of its importance, but the landmark film remains a classic primarily because it is so enjoyable to watch. 2001 is a feast for the eyes and ears, a work of idea-driven art that retains its power to shock, mystify, and entertain generations of viewers.
Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood
After touching on science-fiction themes in his 1964 nuclear-disaster satire Dr. Strangelove, director Stanley Kubrick turned his attention to outer space. “I became interested in extraterrestrial life forms in the universe, and was convinced that the universe was full of intelligent life,” he said. “And so it seemed time to make a film.” When Kubrick decided to tackle science fiction, he envisioned a movie the likes of which had never been attempted, an epic “about man’s relation to the universe.” Spanning the early days of human-ape evolution to our first awareness of extraterrestrial life in the year 2001, the epic would feature a mysterious black monolith planted on the moon by an advanced race of aliens. The genesis of 2001 was the 1950 short story “The Sentinel” by Arthur C. Clarke, who spent a full year collaborating with Kubrick on the script.
During that year, Kubrick exhaustively researched his subject. He worked with NASA engineers to develop realistic-looking spacecraft and consulted with IBM, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, and General Mills to determine what their products might look like in thirty-five years. He even researched a zero-gravity space toilet, a subject the movies had never dared to broach. For his astronauts, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, the director handpicked actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood because, as Kubrick told Lockwood, they could “do a lot without doing a lot.” Kubrick saw the man of the future as stoic and emotionally detached, almost more so than the computers surrounding him. The HAL 9000, vocalized by Douglas Rain, is a darkly prophetic emblem of our society’s increasing dependence on technology. HAL runs the spaceship Discovery better than any human could, his seemingly affable personality making him all the more dangerous.
The spaceship Discovery
Edwina Carroll as an outer-space stewardess
Kubrick spent four years (and went $4 million over budget) on what would be his magnum opus: a majestic space symphony set to classical music. From the bold “three-million-year jump cut”—in which an ape-man tosses a bone in the air and Kubrick cuts to a spacecraft—to the iconic image of a space station orbiting to Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” waltz, 2001 broke ground as an advanced form of silent film—primarily visual, with minimal dialogue. The Star Gate sequence is pure mind-melting psychedelia; planes of color blast across the screen like a fluid kaleidoscope of lights. To realize that the special effects (supervised by Douglas Trumbull) were created without computers truly boggles the mind.
When 2001 premiered, it made all the flying-saucer movies that preceded it look like amateur theatrics. This was science fiction’s coming of age, or as George Lucas observed, “It was the first time people really took science fiction seriously.” Lucas, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, Sydney Pollack, Ridley Scott, and Robert Zemeckis are among the legion of young filmmakers who saw the movie and were inspired to explore the outer limits of cinematic craft.
Now recognized as a masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey was judged by many in 1968 as slow, self-indulgent, and impossible to comprehend. Kubrick has also been criticized for ignoring the civil rights and feminism movements; every character in his vision of the future is Caucasian, and the astronauts are all men (the only women in space are serving refreshments). But almost everyone agreed that, whatever they were seeing, it was a spectacular cinematic achievement. The film won the Special Visual Effects Academy Award, and was nominated in the fields of directing, art direction, and writing. According to Arthur C. Clarke, the reason 2001 wasn’t recognized for Best Makeup was “because judges may not have realized the apes were actors.”
The film’s enigmatic finale—in which a progressively aging Dave Bowman inhabits a Louis XVI–appointed region of his mind, then becomes an embryonic infant floating in space—left audiences dumbfounded. Movie critic Charles Champlin deemed the ending “a kind of Cinerama inkblot test, in which there are no right answers to be deciphered but only ourselves to be revealed by our speculations.” As a sublime evocation of the wonders of space, 2001 can be enjoyed without being completely understood.
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MIND-BLOWING MOMENT
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