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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an immensely popular and influential science fiction film and book; the film directed by Stanley Kubrick and the book written by Arthur C. Clarke. The story is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, most notably The Sentinel (1951). Kubrick and Clarke collaborated on the screenplay, from which Kubrick created the movie and Clarke wrote the novelisation. For an elaboration of their collaborative work on this project, see The Lost Worlds of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, Signet., 1972.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
NOTE: Due to the fact that the film conveys almost all ideas visually and ambiguously, the film can be interpreted in many ways. The following synopsis is merely one interpretation of the film.
In the background to the story in the book, an ancient and unseen alien race uses a mechanism with the appearance of a large black monolith to investigate worlds all across the galaxy and, if possible, to encourage the development of intelligent life (these monoliths perhaps being Von Neumann probes, although the segment explaining this was cut from the film). The film shows one such monolith appearing briefly in ancient Africa, three million B.C., where it influences a group of our hominid ancestors, causing them to learn how to use weapons.
The film then leaps millennia (via one of the most innovative jump cuts ever conceived) to the year 2001, showing humans travelling to Clavius base on the Moon and investigating a magnetic anomaly in the Tycho crater, dubbed TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly #1). When excavations there uncover a second monolith and expose it to sunlight, it emits a powerful signal toward the outer solar system. The movie then focuses on a subsequent manned mission to the LaGrange point between Jupiter and its moon Io to investigate the signal's receiver.
(The book version instead details a trip to Iapetus—a moon of Saturn—by way of Jupiter, using an interplanetary navigation technique known as a gravitational slingshot). According to Clarke, in the foreword to the 30th anniversary edition of 2001, this destination was removed from the movie version because Kubrick felt the special effects created to depict Saturn and its rings were not realistic enough. Special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull eventually re-used much of his early designs for Saturn in his 1972 film Silent Running.
The ship is manned by a crew of astronauts and a on-board computer called HAL 9000, which sees through several distinctive wide-angle cameras located around the spacecraft and emits a human-like voice, having been designed to function in similar way to the human brain. The scientists sent to investigate the signal's receiver have been placed in suspended animation, and the live crew—unlike Mission Control, HAL, and the sleeping scientists—are unaware of the discovery of the Tycho monolith or the nature of their mission.
On the outbound trip, after discussing apparent anomalies in the ship's mission with the ship's captain, David Bowman, HAL reports an unverifiable error in the ship's antenna control system. Two of the members discuss the possibility that HAL might be malfunctioning and should therefore have his higher brain functions disabled. HAL discovers their plans, and because of contradictions in his mission plans and directives, decides to eliminate all the humans on board. To do this, he attempts to work around several safety measures in the ship, but Bowman manages to outwit him. These events gave rise to the catch phrase "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that", when HAL refuses to allow Bowman back into the ship.
A video recording then informs Bowman of the truth about the mission, whereupon he proceeds to complete it in one of the most memorable film conclusions ever. In a special-effects-laden sequence he travels through a stargate to meet the creators of the monoliths. The creators are never seen directly: Bowman arrives into a hotel room, which has since become a science fiction cliche for situations where a vastly powerful being must construct a benign environment for a human. He undergoes a transcendence, ending the story as a "star child" with some of the godlike powers of the monolith creators.
While the film's supposed estimate for our technical progress was, with the benefit of hindsight, overly optimistic (though in many cases through lack of political will rather than any technical reason), Kubrick's attention to technological accuracy was unprecedented for a science fiction film, especially since the Moon based scenes were filmed before the 1969 Moon landing of Apollo 11. Moreover, the film's profound themes about the past, present and potential future of humanity still resonate powerfully today.
The film and Arthur C. Clarke novel of the same name share an interesting developmental history, with the book being modified by Clarke based on some of the film's daily rushes, with feedback in both directions.
The film was also noted for its use of classical music. Previously, films were usually scored with music written especially for them, but Kubrick, in an interview with Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you are editing a film, it's very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene...Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary tracks can become the final score." 2001 uses works by several classical composers, such as Aram Khachaturian and Johann Strauss II, and is especially remembered for Richard Strauss's opening from Also sprach Zarathustra ("Thus spoke Zarathustra"), which has come to be strongly associated with the film and its imagery and themes. The film's soundtrack also did much to introduce the modern classical composer György Ligeti to a wider public, using extracts from his Requiem, Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna and (in an altered form) Aventures. Kubrick had actually commissioned a soundtrack from Alex North, who was unaware that his soundtrack had not actually been used until he saw the movie. North's soundtrack has since been released separately. Similarly, Ligeti was unaware that his music was in the film until alerted by friends. In addition, the film was one of the few science fiction films to accurately portray space (a vacuum) as having no sound.
In general, the film is extremely realistic: spaceships produce no sound while traveling through space; space travels, being common, are presented as boring; telephone numbers have a greater number of digits than in the 60's; computers are ubiquitous. Amongst the few "errors", one can notice the computer interfaces (numerous small screens displaying FORTRAN code, instead of unique large screens with multiple windows and graphical outputs), the height of lunar mountains (which was overestimated at the time, before lunar expeditions of the Apollo program, because meteoric erosion was underestimated), and the absence of radiators on Discovery, which were originally intended to be included, but were canceled because they looked too much like wings.
A sequel to the film, titled 2010: The Year We Make Contact was based on Clarke's book 2010: Odyssey Two and was released in 1984. (The book was released in 1982.) However, Kubrick was not involved in the production of this film, which did not have the impact of the original. Arthur C. Clarke went on to write 2061: Odyssey Three (1987) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997).
2001: A Space Odyssey is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #22 on AFI's 100 Years, 100 Movies and #40 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, and been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
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