The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Science fiction

DIRECTOR

Stanley Kubrick

WRITERS

Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick

STARS

Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Douglas Rain

BEFORE

1964 Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick’s Cold War black comedy, shows man’s self-destructive nature.

1968 Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes sends an astronaut (Charlton Heston) into the future.

AFTER

1971 A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick’s darkly comic vision of a near-future dystopia.

1984 2010, Peter Hyams’ sequel to 2001, returns to the mystery of the Monoliths.

All science fiction is about the unknown, but few movies have embraced it as fully as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s journey to the dark side of the solar system. While he and cowriter Arthur C. Clarke draw on familiar science-fiction story elements—the dangerous mission, the homicidal supercomputer, humanity’s first contact with alien intelligence—Kubrick arranges them in an unfamiliar way to give audiences something unique and unforgettably strange.

The movie is loosely structured around a series of turning points in human evolution, but despite the grandiose five-note fanfare of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra—the movie’s famous musical motif—these moments are not epiphanies. They only serve to deepen the mystery of humankind’s role in the universe.

2001’s opening scene centers on Moon-Watcher, a prehistoric ape whose tribe is fighting another for water and comes into contact with a mysterious black object known as the Monolith. The appearance of the Monolith triggers a shift in the apes’ culture; they turn old bones into tools—and weapons—and the human race’s long journey to the stars begins in earnest.

Completed a year before the first Moon landing and 30 years before a chess computer beat the world champion, Kubrick’s space-age vision remains extraordinarily compelling.

“Its origin and purpose are still a total mystery.”

Mission Control’s last words / 2001: A Space Odyssey

From ape to astronaut

This odyssey is represented by a now iconic cut from one image to another, as a bone hurled by Moon-Watcher becomes a spaceship twirling through the void. Suddenly the action shifts to the future, where astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) are on a mission to Jupiter in the spaceship Discovery. Their lives are in the care of Discovery’s computer, HAL 9000 (voiced with chilling detachment by Douglas Rain), who malfunctions and grows politely mutinous. When the crew try to shut him down, HAL fights back. “I’m sorry, Dave,” he tells Bowman when given an order. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Here Kubrick is showing the audience another turning point in humanity’s evolution—the point at which the tools begin to turn on the apes.

"The picture that science-fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them."

Charles Champlin
Los Angeles Times, 1970

Mystery and meaning

As Discovery’s mission descends further and further into disaster, the Monolith appears again. What can it mean? Is it the emissary of an alien race? Proof of the existence of God? The scientists are baffled, and so is the viewer. Kubrick refuses to supply any easy answers; he’s more interested in taking the audience on a journey than he is in revealing the destination.

The final act of 2001 abandons conventional storytelling as the audience follows Bowman through a tunnel of light and into an otherworldly chamber, possibly the construct of an extraterrestrial host, where the Monolith is waiting for him. He sees himself as an old man and is then transformed into the Star Child, a strange, fetal being floating in space—and this is where the movie ends. As a final image, the Star Child is both obscure and crystal clear. We don’t know what it is, or how it came to be, or where it is going, but we know what it means: hope, and the beginning of another journey for our species.

Bowman finally finds himself alone in the space pod. Time appears to become warped as an older version of himself appears, followed at the end of the movie by the fetuslike Star Child.

Douglas Trumbull was just 23 years old when he started working on the special effects for 2001. He had come to Stanley Kubrick’s attention for his work on a documentary about space flight called To the Moon and Beyond. He was one of four special effects supervisors on 2001, and was responsible for creating the psychedelic star gate sequence. He went on to win Oscars for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and Blade Runner.

1968 2001: A Space Odyssey

1972 Silent Running

1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1982 Blade Runner

What else to watch: Destination Moon (1950) ✵ The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) ✵ Planet of the Apes (1968) ✵ Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ✵ Alien (1979) ✵ Gravity (2013) ✵ Interstellar (2014)