Two thousand one: A Space Odyssey (film)
"2001: A Space Odyssey" is a landmark science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-created with author Arthur C. Clarke. Originally titled "Journey Beyond the Stars," the film's screenplay draws from Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," which features astronauts discovering an ancient pyramidal monolith on the moon. The narrative begins with proto-humans encountering a black monolith that catalyzes their evolution, ultimately leading to humanity's spacefaring era. As the story unfolds, astronauts are sent to investigate a second monolith that emits a mysterious signal towards Jupiter. The film explores themes of evolution, technology, and human existence, highlighted by the conflict with the sentient computer HAL, which jeopardizes the mission. Visually stunning and thematically rich, "2001: A Space Odyssey" is notable for its minimal dialogue and emphasis on visual storytelling, revolutionizing the science fiction genre. Its ambiguous ending invites analysis and interpretation, contributing to the film's enduring legacy and influence in cinema. A sequel, "2010," based on Clarke's subsequent novel, was released in 1984, though it did not achieve the same iconic status.
Two thousand one: A Space Odyssey (film)
Released 1968
Director Stanley Kubrick
A stunning cinematic marvel. This science-fiction film revolutionized special effects in terms of scale and realism and proved highly provocative in its suggestion of extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution.
Key Figures
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), film director
The Work
Originally titled Journey Beyond the Stars, 2001: A Space Odyssey evolved over several years of close collaboration between director Stanley Kubrick and the English science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. The screenplay was based on Clarke’s story “The Sentinel,” in which astronauts on a roving mission to extract mineral samples from the mountains of the moon discover a pyramidal structure left by space travelers eons before, presumably as a kind of cosmic signpost for those terrestrial creatures who might evolve sufficiently to be able to journey to the moon and find it.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first such signpost is a black monolith, a slender slab of smooth marble, which proto-human apes discover in their desert habitat. Touching the slab creates the spark of realization that leads to the use of tools and in an unsettling preview of human history weapons. The man-ape who touches the slab understands that the bone in his hand is useful not only for obtaining food but also for dominating other apes. In a famous scene, a triumphant man-ape tosses his bone-weapon into the air, and the bone’s trajectory dissolves into the orbit of a twenty-first century manmade spacecraft high above the earth, transporting the audience instantaneously and dramatically to the age of human space travel.
The rest of the film follows the astronauts on their quest for the meaning of the mysterious second signpost an identical black monolith discovered on the moon in the year 2001. The astronauts’ attempt to retrace the monolith’s signal (the sudden and brief emission of a beam of energy aimed at one of the moons of Jupiter) is endangered by the on-board computer HAL, who runs chillingly amok. The one surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), manages to disconnect HAL and pilots a single pod of the spacecraft toward the presumed destination, a black monolith aligned mysteriously with Jupiter and its moons. What follows is a tour of the universe a dynamic visual roller coaster that careens past awesome galactic and planetary systems. At the end of the journey, the astronaut faces not the extraterrestrials who left the signposts that guided him there but himself in the imploded present, past, and future. He is simultaneously young, old, dying, and in the dramatic final scene cosmically reborn as a star-child.
Impact
With 2001: A Space Odyssey, the genre of science-fiction films came of age. The film achieved a level of unity of theme and visual effect that had never before been reached. The videotape, or “flat,” version of the film is a pale derivative of the visual and aural experience created by Super Panavision projection and its accompanying stereo technology. 2001: A Space Odyssey is strikingly original for a science-fiction film of the 1960’s in that, among other things, it does not feature monstrous aliens or the effects of radiation and lacks romance or sex. Implicit in the film’s execution minimal dialog and strong visuals is the idea that ultimate reality would be experienced nonverbally, that is, primarily through the sense of sight. The enigmatic ending, the result of many revisions and rather too patly explained in the novel published after release of the film, is perhaps the most superb example of the film’s evocative power.
Related Work
A film based on Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel, 2010, was released in 1984, with Roy Scheider in the starring role. Critics praised the film’s ambition, but as Robert Corliss of Time magazine quipped, the film was an “amiable footnote” to Kubrick’s classic.
Additional Information
The fascinating story of the making of the four-year, $11 million film and its critical and popular reception is told in Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, published in 1970.