2001: a Space Odyssey

In 1964 film director Stanley Kubrick approached science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke seeking a plot for "the proverbial goodscience fiction movie." They worked together to craft a story inspired by Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," in which an astronaut discovers a mysterious pyramid on the moon. As Clarke wrote a novel derived from their script, Kubrick created a unique movie which continues to amaze and frustrate viewers, the 1968 MGM film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A scene from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film presents an abbreviated and speculative version of human evolution. The story opens at "The Dawn of Man" as pre-human man-apes discover a large, upright black slab. The apes are drawn to the monolith as it sings to them. After this, one ape, Moon-Watcher (Daniel Richter), discovers that a bone can be used as a club and learns how to use the club's power to acquire food and to dominate the emerging ape society. The setting shifts in one of the most famous cuts in film history: Moon-Watcher tosses his club into the air; as it falls, the club suddenly transforms into a spaceship sliding through space. The plot now focuses on Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), an official with the National Astronautics Council, who is traveling to the moon to investigate a mysterious black monolith discovered there. The monolith had obviously been created by intelligent extraterrestrial beings and deliberately buried in a lunar crater. When Floyd arrives at the monolith, it emits a piercing shriek.

The setting shifts again to the Discovery, a spaceship en route to Jupiter. The ship carrying three scientists in suspended animation is staffed by astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and the HAL 9000 computer (voice of Douglas Rain). After a mysterious equipment failure, Dave and Frank become suspicious of the supposedly infallible HAL. The astronauts conspire to disconnect HAL but the all-seeing computer learns of their plot. HAL murders the sleeping scientists, sets Frank adrift in space, and traps Dave outside the ship. After he manages to reboard the Discovery via an airlock, Dave dismantles HAL's memory, reducing the computer to infancy and, finally, death. As HAL's red eye goes black, a video begins to play in which Floyd explains the Discovery's secret mission. The moon monolith's shriek had been a transmission aimed at Jupiter, and the Discovery had been sent in search of the signal's destination. In the film's final segment ("Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite"), Dave flies a pod toward a monolith floating in space near Jupiter and is transported through a stargate (depicted as a psychedelic lightshow) into a surreal, symbolic world where he ages and dies in ornate but sterile white rooms. His death seems to produce a celestial fetus, the next stage in human evolution.

The film polarized the critics; their responses tended to be either strongly positive or strongly negative. The film was daringly different from other major studios' big-budget releases. It did not have a clear storyline or a central protagonist. There was little dialogue, and what dialogue there was was deliberately innocuous. Overall, 2001 presented a cold universe in which humans behave like passionless automatons and in which the most sympathetic character is the homicidal computer HAL. Some critics responded to 2001's uniqueness as a step forward in the art of filmmaking. For example, Mike Steele, reporting in The Minneapolis Tribune, saw 2001 as a step "closer to the purity of the film" and away from a sequential storyline imposed by literary aesthetics. Other critics found the movie to be a confusing muddle. In The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie a "thoroughly uninteresting failure" and the ending "an exercise in mystifying abstract fantasy in the open temple of High Art." As 2001 found its audience, several critics who had panned itwrote second reviews to reassess the movie's merits under a different set of criteria. Although Sarris, for his part, wrote a second review only to say that his opinion had not changed.

Despite the confusion and disfavor of many viewers, 2001 quickly gained the status of a "cult film," a movie which inspires fanatical devotion in a relatively small audience. The film continues to be a film for several cults. For science fiction fans, it is a realistic depiction of space travel. No other movie in the genre before or since has remained so true to the laws of physics. For film buffs, it presents a dazzling experiment with the elements of filmmaking. While viewers accustomed to conventional American movies may bemoan the long sequences of play with sight and sound which do not advance a linear plot, lovers of the filmmaker's art delight as a spaceship and a space station waltz to Johann Strauss' "On the Beautiful Blue Danube." For devotees of the hallucinogenic drug culture, the surreal imagery, particularly in the final segment, was "The Ultimate Trip" promised by the tagline of a 1974 re-release. 2001 remains an active part of the popular imagination and is often imitated, referenced, and parodied in various media. In the 1996 film, Independence Day, for example, David Levinson (played by Jeff Goldblum) opens his laptop, and HAL's red eye appears on its screen.

Kubrick succeeded in offering the "proverbial good science fiction movie" because 2001 addresses universal, eternal questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of God? What is the destiny of humanity? Are we alone in the universe? What is the relationship between humans and their machines? One of the aspects of the movie that frustrates viewers is that Kubrick provides no clear answers to these questions, but the nature of the questions is that they are unanswerable. As Clarke put it, "If you understood 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise more questions than we answered." The film poses ancient questions in a relatively new language, science, and in a new medium, film. The extraterrestrial monoliths seem to be guiding human evolution; thus, they serve as a metaphor for the hand of God or destiny. However, 2001 explores theological issues outside of the framework of any religion or established mythology. It forces its audience to rethink the assumptions such a framework might provide.

Perhaps the most memorable ingredient of 2001 is HAL, the fullest development of a sequence of human tools which began with the bone club. One of the major issues of science fiction has been whether a machine capable of independent thought would be "human." In 2001, HAL is a terrifying monster, but he also seems to be more human than the humans. The audience cannot help but find the computer sympathetic as he begs for his life; we see that HAL only killed out of fear. As interaction with computers becomes increasingly a part of everyday life, HAL remains a powerful symbol of both the peril and the promise of artificial intelligence. Fans have noticed that if each letter of HAL is replaced by the next letter in the alphabet, HAL becomes IBM (Clarke denies that this was intentional). In 1997 (the year HAL was supposedly created), David Stork published a collection of essays, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, in which scientists explore how close current technology comes to creating a HAL 9000.

Agel, Jerome, editor. The Making of Kubrick's "2001." New York, New American Library, 1970.

Bizony, Piers. "2001": Filming the Future. London, Aurum, 1994.

Clarke, Arthur C. The Lost Worlds of "2001." New York, New American Library, 1972.

Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York, New American Library, 1968.

Coyle, Wallace. Stanley Kubrick: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston, G. K. Hall, 1980.

Geduld, Carolyn. Filmguide to "2001: A Space Odyssey." Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1973.

Stork, David, editor. Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997.