2001 space odyssey travel scene

When viewers filed into the seats to see 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time in 1968—shown in 70 millimeter and on wide, deeply curved Cinerama screens—they saw astronaut David Bowman travel on a voyage to Jupiter. (Spoiler alert: Things don’t quite go as planned.) When the film premiered, director Stanley Kubrick’s vision of Jupiter was also one of the first fully realized impressions audience members likely had of the planet. Unlike today, where images of the planets are high-definition and widely available, when 2001 premiered the only photos of Jupiter were fuzzy and taken from ground-based telescopes.

That left Kubrick and a team of what he called special photographic effects artists to create those stunning visuals for the audience. Among those artists was Doug Trumbull, then just 23 years old, who would go on to design some of the film’s most memorable sequences.

Everything was new and different than anything that had ever come before.

Trumbull describes himself as a filmmaker with an expertise in special effects; he directed the science-fiction films Silent Running (1972) and Brainstorm (1983), and worked on classics in the genre, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982). It was his work on a film called To the Moon and Beyond , screened in a planetarium at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, that caught Kubrick’s eye.

When Trumbull began work on 2001 , he was responsible for animating the read-outs created by HAL, the film’s sentient computer—a challenge to design because the graphics in the film were beyond what computers of the day were capable of. Trumbull’s creativity and knack for tackling tough problems in new ways earned Kubrick’s trust, and soon he began working on some of the most complex sequences in the film. 

“Kubrick was very specifically interested in departing from conventions of cinema and making this immersive experience,” Trumbull said. That helped guide 2001 , from plot to characterization to design aesthetic, and gave Trumbull the space to try new techniques never used before. 

“We had to build new equipment, we had to build new types of cameras, we had to build lighting systems,” he said. “Everything was new and different than anything that had ever come before.”

Trumbull was responsible for one of the film’s most iconic and experimental scenes, called the “Star Gate” sequence.  Trumbull experimented with slit-scan photography, shooting the scene over and over again, to come up with the final result. In fact, Trumbull said, a portion of that scene was shown to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to help the studio understand Kubrick’s vision.

It was thanks to that culture of experimentation and trial and error (plus, Trumbull  notes, some lights, motors, and pulleys) that Kubrick and the special effects team were able to create imagery that leaves audiences today as in awe as they were 50 years ago.

“We wanted the audience to feel like they were actually going to space and on this adventure themselves, not just through the characters, but participating.” Trumbull said.

Experience an immersive art experience inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey at our Museum in Washington, DC. Reserve your tickets before the exhibition closes on May 28.  

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Step Inside the Most Iconic Scene of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

We’re not breaking new ground by saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most iconic movies ever — for lovers of film , art, and space. The Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke masterpiece was ( is ) transcendent, progressive, and decades ahead of its time. Now, thanks to Washington, D.C. ’s Smithsonian Museum, we can appreciate the film in a whole new way: by stepping inside it.

To honor the landmark film’s 50th anniversary, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has unveiled a meticulous, life-sized recreation of “ The Barmecide Feast ” by Hong Kong-based, British artist Simon Birch . The bedroom scene is among the most recognizable in film history: a beautiful, alien, and sterile melange of Louis XVI-style decor (including Renaissance sculptures and paintings) all set atop a cold, illuminated white floor.

Near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey , cosmonaut Dr. David Bowman awakens unexpectedly in this bizarre bedroom. He proceeds to watch himself transition through various stages of life. Finally, as an old man lying in bed, he sees a black, imposing monolith at the foot of his bed. He reaches for it and suddenly becomes a wide-eyed fetus staring outward from inside a glowing orb of light. It’s largely because of this monolith — and this entire scene — that the film has endured as a subject of discussion for decades. What is the monolith? Where did it come from? Who are we and can we ever hope to move beyond this existential crisis?

That anyone was able to painstakingly recreate the set when Kubrick was known for destroying his immediately after filming is nothing short of a miracle. Even the production sketches of the original set designed by NASA-engineer Harry Lange were demolished after production wrapped in 1968. But, as luck would have it, Birch’s own architect , Paul Kember, had surprisingly close ties to the film. Two of Kember’s uncles were draftsman on the original set and had access to the reference materials necessary to recreate it. The only thing missing from the set is the looming black monolith.

The bedroom exhibit was previously on temporary display in Los Angeles at Simon Birch’s The 14th Factory in 2017. The Smithsonian reboot is hoping to draw even more attention and is encouraging visitors to photograph and share their visit on social media.

Admission to the one-of-a-kind exhibit is free. However, timed tickets must be booked in advance through the official Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website . Groups of just six visitors will be allowed inside at a time, and only for two minutes. We imagine this will sell out very, very quickly, Dave.

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Sustainable aviation fuel is an emerging technology that offers similar performance yet lower emissions when compared to petroleum-based fuels. United’s addition of SAF to its O’Hare hub follows its use at other locations, including Los Angeles International Airport, London’s Heathrow Airport, San Francisco International Airport, and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. United Airlines continues to be bullish on the fuel's future. 

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The sweeping renovation includes updates to 511 guest rooms/suites, along with revisions to the 100,000-square-foot Kaleiopapa Convention Center. Not only that, but the addition of the Piko Coffee & Wine Bar brings libations from California, New Zealand, Italy, and France, and coffee by Big Island Roasters, with a blend of Kona and Ka’u ingredients.

A Rare Stanley Kubrick Interview Explains 2001: A Space Odyssey's Ending

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• 2001: A Space Odyssey 's ending has been the source of debate for over fifty years.
• Stanley Kubrick confirmed that Dave Bowman is transformed into a "super-being" and sent back to Earth.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey 's ambiguous ending likely wouldn't work in modern cinema.

Since its release in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has been revered by many as one of the most influential movies ever made. The special effects, depiction of space travel, and manner of storytelling were way ahead of their time. More importantly, the movie showed that science fiction filmmaking could be an art form, revealing the genre's potential and permanently demolishing the myth that it was strictly for kids. It painted a vision of humanity both wondrous and bleak while providing a long, dark stare into the mysteries of the cosmos.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that decades after its release, movie-goers still debate back and forth about the true meaning of the iconic sci-fi movie's infamously ambiguous ending. 2001: A Space Odyssey 's ending reveals its answers obliquely at best, running against the time-honored Hollywood tradition of being as clear to the audience as possible. Its deliberate enigmas have baffled film lovers to no end, and indeed are a part of what so many people find so fascinating about it. There have even been thousands of articles and YouTube analyses attempting to explain the conclusion, yet few realize that Kubrick himself gave a rare interview explaining exactly what happened.

Updated May 20, 2024, by Arthur Goyaz: 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time, envisioned by legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. The film continues to ignite heated debates regarding its mind-bending ending decades after its release, and there's no shortage of theories about what Kubrick meant to say with his fascinating images. The article's content has been updated, and the formatting changed to reflect current CBR guidelines.

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The Epic Sci-Fi Plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur c. clarke and stanley kubrick teamed up to write a movie and a book.

2001: A Space Odyssey 's roots begin with Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "The Sentinel." Stanley Kubrick was inspired by Clarke's story and wanted to work it into a film, so he requested Clarke's assistance in putting together a plot. Instead of working from Clarke's short story alone, Clarke and Kubrick teamed up to craft a full-length novel to work as the basis for what eventually became 2001: A Space Odyssey ​​​​​​. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey 's controversial ending, the story was pretty easy to follow.

The beginning of the film follows the dawn of mankind as a group of apes discovers a black monolith mysteriously placed at their camp. They soon harness the power of tools — or more accurately, weapons — suggesting that the monolith had something to do with their evolution into more sophisticated beings. Then, in one of cinema history's most iconic cuts, a bone flying through the air transitions to a floating space station, or more specifically, a weapon pointed at a nation below. The message is subtle but unmistakable; millions of years later, humanity still hasn't escaped the violent instincts of those apes.

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In the alternate future in which 2001: A Space Odyssey is set, a mysterious monolith is found on the moon, confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The artifact sends out a screeching signal to Jupiter, suggesting all the answers humanity is looking for might be hiding there somewhere. Accompanied by the super-computer HAL 9000, who predates the popular AI trope in the sci-fi genre , a team of astronauts set out to follow this mysterious transmission to get some answers — and all of that is just in the first act.

The middle section of 2001: A Space Odyssey turns into an almost perfect wrinkle on the Frankenstein story, where the creation turns against its creators. Believing that humans are a detriment to the mission, HAL attempts to murder everyone on board, with astronaut David Bowman being the last survivor. The conflict ends with a chilling battle of wits: Bowman escapes a seemingly foolproof trap to shut down the homicidal machine. Though neither of them is entirely aware of the implications at the time, at stake is the potential first contact with an alien species. Would a human being do that? Or a machine that had itself "evolved" to surpass its creators?

This is where 2001 takes a turn, as David discovers another monolith on Jupiter. It gives him an abstract vision filled with various shapes and colors. He then finds himself in a cleanly lit room and watches himself rapidly age into an old man. As David lies withered in bed, he reaches out to the monolith and becomes a baby. 2001: A Space Odyssey 's final shot showed this child floating above planet Earth. That, of course, it's just what Kubrick's images impose on a surface level. Beyond the absurdity that unravels onscreen, there are plenty of symbolism to dissect.

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During an interview for Japanese audiences in 1980, Kubrick is asked what 2001: A Space Odyssey 's last scene meant, and he explains that Dave was "taken in by godlike entities; creatures of pure energy and intelligence." This is what the colors and hallucinations are supposed to represent. He then describes the room as "a human zoo," where Dave is observed and has no sense of time. The idea for the strangely decorated room comes from the way zoo enclosures attempt to mimic the wilderness but are never completely authentic. That also explains Dave's often jarring shift through time, appearing to observe himself as an increasingly older man before shifting perspective. If humanity's understanding and experience of time are just another part of the "zoo enclosure," it might not work quite the way its occupants expected.

Explaining the most confusing part of the movie's ending , Kubrick says, "He is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth... and we have to only guess what happens when he goes back." This suggests that finding the Jupiter monolith allowed David to move on to the next step of human evolution, though the implications of that remain unclear. Some fans dislike Kubrick's choice to explain the ending, as he says, "I try to avoid doing this," since it runs the risk of ruining the thought-provoking experience.

It does give the film a strange sense of closure, however, beginning with the moment that an ape becomes something more and ending with humanity's next step up the ladder. It's the story of the species from start to finish, and its cryptic questions can't eclipse the satisfying perfection of Kubrick's explanation, since the aliens and their purpose are never truly revealed. Most will agree that his personal interpretation doesn't diminish 2001: A Space Odyssey 's charm, as the climax's deeper meaning is still open for debate.

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Fans of the movie might interpret Kubrick's clarification as proof that the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey comes down to the evolution of the human species through time, but it may suggest something else: as scary as it seems, this so-called evolution presented by Kubrick might not be about humanity at all. 2001: A Space Odyssey delivers a fascinating A.I. story : fans witness HAL outsmarting the Discovery One crew members one by one, exploring the consequences of creating a machine that is much smarter than most humans. Kubrick explores HAL's strengths and weaknesses with a careful look: while it's true that Dave gets the upper hand over the computer in the end, HAL's haunting pleas of mercy suggest that the machine can learn to replicate human emotions with terrifying accuracy.

Alternatively, Kubrick suggests that Dave is turned into a super being and sent back to Earth for reasons that aren't explained, although one may as well expect the worst. There's an argument to be made that the lack of existence of extraterrestrial life means that humanity is propelled to evolve on its own terms, but the presence of the monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, set in a prehistoric period, suggests that humanity might've been manipulated by a higher force all along. In that sense, the evolution meant by Kubrick might as well apply to other species, or worse, to the machines. At last, humanity is destined to fade away.

The Complexity of 2001: A Space Odyssey Influenced Generations to Come

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Few movies work as ideal products of their time as 2001: A Space Odyssey does: the film was released one year before man first landed on the moon, breaking the bond between humanity and its place of origin. The massive influence of Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece has a lot to do with its placement in an era of technological evolution, pioneering themes that would reshape the sci-fi genre as audiences knew it.

A good part of the film's merit comes from the assumptions that 2001: A Space Odyssey rightfully makes about the future: while it's true that the year 2001 depicted in the movie is much more advanced than the present year viewers are experiencing, it brings about relevant discussions about artificial intelligence, the depths of space, and mankind's overreliability on technology. If the topics presented by Kubrick are still relevant to this day, one can only imagine the extent of 2001: A Space Odyssey' s influence on a nation that was about to witness a man's first contact with outer space. An outer space, by the way, depicted with terrifying precision by Kubrick.

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To say the film was ahead of its time is an understatement. 2001: A Space Odyssey came out a few months before another little movie called The Planet of the Apes , another sci-fi masterpiece that similarly explores how humanity's self-destructing nature and greed will likely open the door for another species to take their ruling place. However, Kubrick's movie directly reflected the ongoing Space Race between USA and the Soviet Union, calling for immediate attention to how intellectual superiority can be synonym for utter destruction.

There's a reason why 2001: A Space Odyssey is so ambiguous, choosing to expose its messages through visual symbolism rather than clear explanations. The movie understands that the sci-fi genre, at its best, isn't about humanity looking for answers in the unknown, but rather looking for themselves in the unknown. The film's complexity challenges viewers to think about what they're watching: it's the only way to make up what's unfolding onscreen. No wonder there are so many speculations about 2001: A Space Odyssey 's true meaning even after Kubrick's statement. More than anything, contemporary cinema needs more movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey , inviting the audience to tell what they're watching rather than being told.

Would 2001: A Space Odyssey's Open Ending Work Today?

2001: a space odyssey is an unbeatable classic, the unusual reason 2001: a space odyssey's props are so rare.

Even though 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most revered classics of all time, most of the film's iconic props are nowhere to be found.

While 2001: A Space Odyssey is considered by many to be one of the greatest movies of all time , cinema has changed drastically in the fifty-six years since its release. Films are very rarely conceived of as standalone projects anymore, and even 2001 received a sequel in 1984's 2010: The Year We Made Contact . With the rise of sequels, prequels, spinoffs, franchises, and cinematic universes, films are perceived as being part of a larger story in which every question is answered sooner or later. As a result, audiences very rarely receive a truly ambiguous ending to a film. While films like Joker may try to do so, these endings are often undercut by sequels, as Joker : Folie á Deux proves.

Audiences are changing the way they consume movies, choosing to remain in specific franchises more often than galavanting around brand-new worlds, and few big-budget movies have ever risked baffling audiences the way 2001 does. Indeed, traditional storytelling instincts demand that the plot stay as clear as possible, so viewers won't become lost. Kubrick flew directly in the face of that, but he was one of filmmaking's true geniuses, which can't be readily duplicated.

As such, it might be best if 2001: A Space Odyssey is an unbeatable classic never remade , instead remaining a time capsule signifying a different age of moviemaking. On the other hand, because so few films of its caliber are made today, audiences may be yearning for something more akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey , including its ambiguous ending. Just as Dave Bowman evolves but remains the same at his core, audiences still want to be entertained and even challenged by the movies they see. As a result, going back to a simpler, more erudite way of ending a film could reinvigorate audiences who have so long had endings spoon-fed to them.

2001: A Space Odyssey 's ambiguous ending may not be as challenging as it once was, thanks to Stanley Kubrick's clarifications. However, the film and its ending still leave a major mark on cinema, standing as hallmarks of a different era of moviemaking. As beloved as 2001 is to this day, it likely would never have been made today.

2001: A Space Odyssey

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Behind the Scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Strangest Blockbuster in Hollywood History

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took more than four years to develop and make, at a cost of more than $10 million—a formidable price tag in mid-1960s Hollywood. Kubrick’s project promised the moon and then some, but executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feared they had a disaster on their hands when the picture was finally ready for release, 50 years ago, in the spring of 1968. Some audience members had fidgeted and talked through the movie’s first private screening; a few had walked out. At a subsequent press screening one skeptic was overheard sniping, “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.” Many early reviews were just as dismissive.

The film was finally released to the public on April 3, 1968, four days after President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election in the face of increasing opposition to the war in Vietnam, and just a day before Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated. You might have thought escapism would be in vogue, and 2001 offered that, but moviegoers in this uneasy but heady era were also in a mood to be provoked and challenged, even baffled, and they had never seen anything like 2001 —literally, in terms of the film’s painstakingly realistic portrayal of inter-planetary space travel, with special effects that still hold up, and figuratively, in the sense that 2001 ’s elliptical storytelling was as confounding to many viewers as, for others, the film’s cosmic scale, mythic reach, and wordless, psychedelic finale were exhilarating (if still confounding). An art film made on a big-boy budget, it became the highest-grossing picture of 1968—“perhaps the most offbeat blockbuster in the history of U.S. pic playoff,” as Variety put it in early 1969.

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke co-authored the 2001 screenplay with Kubrick, as well as a companion novel. Clarke may have prefigured the reaction of audiences when, with the film still two long years from completion, he described 2001 ’s making as “a wonderful experience streaked with agony.” It was all that, and more: a feat of sustained innovation, even improvisation, led by one of the most controlling and obsessive directors in movie history. That MGM, traditionally the stodgiest of studios, gave Kubrick the freedom to set off toward an end point even he wasn’t entirely sure of—and this was half a decade before Hollywood would make a thing of indulging visionary young directors—is almost as astonishing as the film that resulted.

“It’s certainly one of the last of its kind,” Ivor Powell told me. He should know, having worked on the film in a variety of capacities, including as an assistant to the art and special-effects departments, and then gone on to help produce two other science-fiction landmarks, Alien and Blade Runner . “God knows,” he continued, “you just wouldn’t have that kind of autonomy today where you can start making a picture on that scale and basically have no end to it and no sort of supervision, really.” Powell referred to 2001 as “an open canvas”—and it clearly was, arguably the largest open canvas in movie history. “Looking back,” Powell said, “it’s unbelievable.”

Photos: Behind the Scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Kubrick was 36 years old in 1964 and enjoying a commercial and critical success with his just-released nuclear black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb . That film, and his audacious 1962 adaptation of Lolita, along with his bitter anti-war movie Paths of Glory (1957), had earned him a reputation as an enfant terrible. He was maybe outgrowing the enfant half of the equation, but the terrible persisted, his public image that of an eccentric, secretive, obsessive-compulsive genius—a European-style auteur with a Bronx accent. All of which was true, though he was as prickly about his control-freak reputation as he was, inevitably, controlling. In the Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, I found a directive issued to 2001 ’s publicity team, presumably signed off on if not dictated by Kubrick, which read in part: “Mr. Kubrick is not an exhibit in a sideshow. What he likes or dislikes, how he lives, any of his personal habits—these are not for publication and are not publicity fodder. He and he alone will say what he thinks.” (The majority of documents I quote in this piece came from the Kubrick Archive.)

The director would say he got the first inkling for 2001 when “somewhere along my wandering reading” he came across a Rand Corporation report that suggested the universe was, in Kubrick’s words, “crawling with life.” He took U.F.O.’s seriously, too, though insisting he was above the “kook approach.” Nevertheless, he thought he had spotted one flying at some distance over Manhattan on the evening in May of 1964 when he and Clarke celebrated their agreement to collaborate by stepping out onto the veranda of Kubrick’s East Side penthouse. (Kubrick’s flying saucer turned out to have been Echo 1, NASA’s first experiment with passive communications satellites.)

Two months earlier Kubrick had reached out to Clarke through a mutual friend, writing that he “wanted to discuss with you the possibility of doing the proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie.” The director continued:

My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character. The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future.

When Clarke was in New York for business a few weeks later, the two men met over lunch at Trader Vic’s, the tiki-themed restaurant where generations of under-age New York preppies learned to love mai tais—not the most propitious setting to launch a path-breaking futuristic film, but Kubrick was a fan. They ended up brainstorming for eight hours and continued talking over the next several weeks before settling on six short stories of Clarke’s to use as springboards for a plot they were still grasping at. Kubrick optioned the stories for $10,000 and agreed to pay Clarke another $30,000 to write a novelized treatment for their film, which they would then publish as a lead-up to the film’s release. It was an unusual arrangement, but Kubrick had never been enamored of screenplays as a medium, believing it was better to hash out a film’s narrative and themes in prose before figuring out how to tell the story through action and images. “Working on an original story in the screenplay form is like trying to put the cart and the horse in the same place at the same time,” the director is quoted as saying in some draft 2001 publicity material.

An enduring narrative problem, stubborn through multiple treatments and scripts and well into production, was the ending—and how, or even whether, aliens would be depicted. There were discussions of creating some kind of extraterrestrial city possibly inhabited by, according to various notes and drafts, “squat cones with tube-like legs” or “elegant, silvery metal crabs supported on four jointed legs,” or “slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease.” At one point, Kubrick and Clarke asked Carl Sagan for advice. “They had no idea how to end the movie,” he later wrote.

Clarke gave Kubrick a completed draft of what was initially called * Journey Beyond the Stars* around Christmas 1964, and in the new year Kubrick’s lawyer sent it to MGM with a narrow window in which to respond. The decision fell to Robert O’Brien, an atypically unflamboyant Hollywood executive whose career in pictures had heretofore been confined to administrative backwaters. But in 1963, at the age of 58, he had been elevated to MGM’s presidency in order to right the studio’s financial ship, awash in red ink after its lavish remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, with Marlon Brando, bombed in 1962.

“I’m no mogul,” O’Brien insisted to The New York Times. Nevertheless, he took a Selznick-size gamble on Kubrick and Clarke’s project, then in the form of a 250-page “film story.” The structure of the finished movie was largely present: a prologue set in prehistoric Africa where proto-humans are taught the use of weapons by an alien artifact; a journey to the moon in the year 2001, where a similar artifact has been uncovered near a lunar base; and a subsequent voyage to Jupiter, where the astronaut Dave Bowman enters some kind of space-time portal that takes him to the far side of the universe and a final encounter with a God-like alien intelligence. But so many of the most memorable things about the finished 2001 are nowhere in evidence, including the battle of wits with HAL, the vain and homicidal computer, which would provide the only real conflict and suspense in the finished film, giving its second half a brief glimpse of a conventional narrative spine.

Instead, O’Brien committed to a treatment full with a largely eventless series of space voyages and a climax that asked the studio to believe that, decades before the advent of digital effects, Kubrick would somehow realize sequences such as this one, which occurs after Bowman has entered “an enormous hole or slot, extending deep into the heart” of one of Jupiter’s moons:

Finally Bowman leaves the slot and enters a brilliant, starry sky, obviously airless, with an enormous planet nearby . . . Then he comes to another planet, and sees that it is completely covered with a yellow sea. He is, somehow, pulled to a tower, one of many coming through that sea, and his capsule falls down into it for about a mile.

“I think there were a lot of other people at MGM who weren’t sure about this film, like the board of directors,” said Keir Dullea, the actor who would play Dave Bowman, offering what is probably an understatement. “But Robert O’Brien was very supportive of Stanley. He was a real ally.” Kubrick surely knew his story needed work. But script problems are one thing; as the director would write of the film’s climactic and “most important” scenes, “If the sequence is to be as wonderful as I hope it can be, it will take a great effort; we are, after all, thinking of the unthinkable.”

When MGM issued a press release touting the deal in February 1965, it announced that the film “should be ready for release in the fall of 1966.” That “should” was a canny hedge, likely Kubrick’s. A draft of his contract with MGM states that delivery of the film “shall be made to us no later than October 20, 1966.” On his copy Kubrick underlined that date and wrote next to it, “Unlikely?”

Consensus is hard to come by where Stanley Kubrick is concerned. One person who worked on 2001 described him to me as “rather terrifying” with “dark and penetrating eyes.” (While making 2001 he would grow the beard that, along with his uncombed hair, owlish eyes, and love of chess, would define his public caricature for the last half of his life.) Another recalled, “He kind of treated you more or less like, well, I wouldn’t say an equal, but equal in the way . . . if you started talking to him, he always helped himself to one of your cigarettes. He’d literally lean across and take one out of your pocket.”

Kubrick at his production desk; the director on the centrifuge set with crew members and actors Dullea and Gary Lockwood (seated).

Kubrick could be generous and collegial but also demanding and cutting: an autodidact with a restless, wide-ranging mind, but also a perfectionist with an ability to focus ruthlessly on whatever problem was at hand. In the vernacular, a control freak. All the same, Kubrick was open to ideas from colleagues, actors, even assistants. According to Andrew Birkin, who started on the film in the production office as a “tea boy” and eventually helped manage the art and effects departments, “One of the things that had been instilled in me and I think instilled in everyone starting out in film is, if you come to the rushes, do not give your opinion afterwards, even if you’re asked for it, or if you are asked for your opinion, just say, ‘It’s great.’ But Stanley really wanted to know what you thought. So occasionally I’d brave my own opinion, and he would listen. In fact, he was the first person in my entire life who not only gave me responsibility but who really listened to my opinion without in any way appearing condescending.” Birkin, by the way, was 19 when he started on 2001 . (He is also the younger brother of Jane, the model, actress, singer, and namesake of the Birkin bag.)

When Kubrick was displeased, however, his criticisms could be blunt and direct, though also, if viewed with generous eyes, bracingly to the point. “I think it’s terrible, banal, uninteresting, unnecessary, obvious, what more can I say,” he wrote Clarke, dismissing a new chapter for the novel with efficiency if not tact. IBM, one of dozens of companies consulting on the film, had sent elaborate specifications for what it thought a computer capable of running an inter-planetary spaceship might look like. Kubrick wrote back to an intermediary that the drawings were “useless and totally irrelevant to our needs. . . . I am extremely bored and depressed by all this. . . . There is no time to waste. Even having to write this letter adds chips to what seems to me to be a completely lost hand.” He signed himself, “Annoyed and depressed but lovingly, S.”

He would call collaborators at all hours, always probing for new ideas, thinking several steps ahead on any topic at hand. As Ivor Powell told me, “He was like a sponge. He would soak up information and absorb it all at a phenomenal rate, and then instantly come back with ‘Well, why can’t we do this?’ or ‘Why can’t we do that?’ Which I think is what drove one of the original effects guys, Wally Gentleman, mad, because Stanley was never satisfied.” Gentleman, who had done the special effects for a 1960 space documentary, Universe, quit less than a year into toiling on 2001, citing a medical condition and parting on a conflicted note endemic among Kubrick’s collaborators. The project was “a morass,” he wrote, but a “stimulating” one. As Ken Adam, the production designer who had worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove, wrote the director while turning down an invitation to work on 2001, “I know I must be a masochist but . . . I also miss the stimulus of your company, though it could be trying at times.”

One problem for 2001 ’s production team was that the novel/screenplay kept changing. For coherence’s sake, the script relied on over-explicit narration, intended to undergird most of the film: “You are on an expedition to the unknown, so far from Earth that even radio waves take two hours for the round trip,” and so forth. But the ending, even in a surviving copy of the shooting script, still left much to the imagination: “The intention here is to present a breathtakingly beautiful and comprehensive sense of different extraterrestrial worlds. The narration will suggest images and situations as you read it.” But what does this bit of narration suggest to you: “In a moment of time, too short to be measured, space turned and twisted upon itself. THE END.”

As Keir Dullea told me, “Reading the script, it was hard to imagine what the film would be like.”

“It’s hardly a script by today’s standards,” said Ivor Powell.

Another factor that added to the production’s physical complexity—and presumably its budget overruns—was Kubrick’s desire for flexibility in shooting scenes with his actors. Accordingly, the sets were larger, more extensive, and more minutely detailed than is typical, built out and dressed in places the camera would likely never see. “The reasons for this were twofold,” Andrew Birkin said. “It gave the actors a great sense of reality, and it also allowed Stanley to change his mind. He might decide to put the camera here—or there. But it seemed like a ridiculous extravagance to many. The crew, being British and supercilious, respected him, but they thought he was completely crazy.”

According to an “Approved Casting” rider attached to Kubrick’s draft contract, MGM had already signed off on Keir Dullea to play Dave Bowman, the lead astronaut on the film’s Discovery mission to Jupiter. Dullea was an up-and-coming young actor who had received critical praise for his role as a mentally ill teenager in the 1962 film David and Lisa . The role of Frank Poole, Bowman’s doomed colleague, went to Gary Lockwood, a former U.C.L.A. football player who had acted mostly on TV. For Heywood Floyd, the National Council of Astronautics scientist who voyages from Earth to space station to moon base, MGM wanted an actual box-office draw, or something in that vicinity, suggesting Henry Fonda and George C. Scott, among others. Ever acquiescent, the studio settled for William Sylvester, an American actor living in England whose highest-profile credit was arguably Gorgo (1961), a British rip-off of Godzilla . Envisioning a 21st century populated by machine-tooled technocrats, Kubrick presumably viewed brand-name movie-star charisma as counterproductive.

Kubrick had worked out favorable financial terms with MGM to use the studio’s Borehamwood facility, outside London, where most of the 10 soundstages would be occupied by 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the film was now titled. (Kubrick, ever watchful, scolded Variety for styling the title with an em dash.) Shooting finally began on December 29, 1965, with the sequence set on the moon, where Floyd and other scientists first encounter the black rectangular slab (eerily prefiguring a giant iPhone) which Kubrick had finally settled on for the shape of his alien artifact, after toying with translucent cubes and tetrahedrons.

By March the production had moved onto its most elaborate set of all: the Discovery’s work and living area, a centrifuge that rotated to simulate gravity. Kubrick’s production team had taken six months to build an actual centrifuge, with a diameter of 40 feet and a weight of 40 tons. Dressed for its entire 360 degrees, the set could turn forward or backward, at a top rate of three miles an hour, creaking and groaning as it got up to speed. For some scenes the actors had to be strapped in place by hidden harnesses as they spun upside down, with props such as meal trays and video pads glued or bolted in place. Depending on the shot, the set’s entire circumference might be aglow with lights, the actors locked inside and forced to turn on the camera themselves before hitting their marks. In production photos the set resembles a demented and unlikely torture device, a hybrid of jewelry tumbler and blistering heat lamp. With God knows how many megawatts surging through the entire setup, lights frequently exploded while unsecured props and overlooked pieces of equipment plummeted as they reached the top of the arc, narrowly missing actors and crew members. “A portentous spectacle, accompanied by terrifying noises and popping light bulbs,” as Clarke described it.

Even at this late date major plot points remained unresolved. Kubrick and Clarke were still trying to figure out how HAL would get wind of Bowman and Poole’s plan to disconnect him when Lockwood suggested that the computer read the astronauts’ lips. To voice HAL, Kubrick had originally hired Martin Balsam but decided he sounded too distinctively American. An English actor had been rejected for parallel reasons. (Kubrick eventually split the American-British difference and used a Canadian actor, Douglas Rain.)

Dullea in his space pod; inset, choreography notes from the “Dawn of Man” sequence.

Another sticking point in the script was how Bowman, having ventured out in his space pod without his helmet in a futile effort to rescue Poole, would get back into the main ship when HAL refuses Bowman’s order to “open the pod bay doors.” After calling in reams of research on how long a helmetless human might survive in deep space (e.g., “The Effect on the Chimpanzee of Rapid Decompression to a Near Vacuum”), Kubrick pitched Clarke the idea that Bowman would use an emergency escape hatch to blow himself into an open air lock. “I had thought of this gambit and it’s quite OK,” Clarke responded. “Also crawling with Freudian symbols, as you are doubtless aware.”

This shot, with the astronaut hurtling toward the camera, then bouncing back and forth until he manages to grab onto a handle that allows oxygen into the chamber, proved somewhat harrowing for Dullea, who, with no helmet to hide behind, had to forgo a stunt double. Though seemingly horizontal, the scene was filmed with the camera at the bottom of the air-lock set looking up. Dullea, perched on a hidden platform two stories above, had to dive headfirst through the escape hatch, secured by a hidden rope attached to a harness underneath his costume. As the actor fell, the rope sped through the gloved hands of a circus roustabout; it was only the roustabout’s grip and a carefully measured knot that kept Dullea from smashing into the camera. “I think that was the only time on 2001 I got something on the first take,” the actor said. “Thank God.”

I asked if there had been a fail-safe in case the knot slipped through the roustabout’s hands. “I would have been dead,” Dullea replied, not sounding too concerned. “I had been working with Stanley for months, and I totally trusted him. Nothing could go wrong if Stanley was in charge.”

Shooting of the Discovery scenes continued through the spring of 1966. The physical production then paused for more than a year while Kubrick figured out where and how to film the opening “Dawn of Man” sequence. He had first intended to go on location in Africa, then sought out landscapes in Britain that might pass for African desert (no dice), then finally settled on building sets using an experimental “front projection” system to create deep-focus, photographic vistas. The credibly simian man-ape costumes—at the director’s insistence, one female was given breasts that could actually expel milk, though the baby chimpanzee playing a nursing Australopithecus failed to latch on on-camera—were designed and manufactured amid tight security, as Kubrick feared spies from the Twentieth Century Fox film Planet of the Apes, then in production as well. It would be a matter of some bitterness among the 2001 crew when the far more cartoonish (though effective) makeup from Planet of the Apes won an honorary Oscar while 2001 ’s was ignored.

Meanwhile, the art-department and special-effects teams, along with a crew of more than 100 model-makers, were toiling on the film’s intricate special-effects shots. Prodded by the director’s demands for unprecedented realism, the effects team, led by Tom Howard, Con Pederson, Douglas Trumbull, and Wally Veevers, went to heroic lengths, their breakthroughs well documented in two books by the writer Piers Bizony and in numerous film-journal articles. One overriding difficulty was that Kubrick insisted there be no second- or third-generation degradation of the film image when shots were composited; thus every element of a given scene—a spaceship, say, plus a star field, and maybe a planet or actor or both—had to be shot on the same film negative, with separate passes through the camera sometimes coming more than a year apart. More complex shots might have 7, 8, even 10 elements. If a new pass was wonky—if stars showed through the edge of a spaceship—the negative would be scrapped and the entire sequence begun over. As Kubrick wrote Clarke, “We are getting magnificent shots, but everything is like a 106-move chess game with two adjournments.”

That letter is dated January 1, 1967, several months after the originally scheduled opening date for 2001 . The relationship between Kubrick and Clarke had grown tense by this point, since delays on the film, and the ongoing evolution of its plot, had also pushed back publication of the novel, the profits from which Clarke claimed he was in quite desperate need of. Kubrick had arranged a bank loan for Clarke, but Clarke was not mollified. Citing his agent’s and publisher’s warnings that delaying the book would substantially diminish its earnings, he wrote Kubrick, “You can afford to take that risk—I can’t; and surely you will agree that if you are wrong, and we do lose a hundred thousand or so between us, you will at least be under a moral obligation to me!” Kubrick’s irritated reply to a subsequent plea (while offering to lend Clarke another $15,000 himself): “As you can imagine, there is a considerable amount of money involved in the film, too, and as many good reasons for people wanting it finished. The only difference has been that instead of continual pressure and oblique recriminations there has been an objective understanding of the problem, something that would be greatly appreciated regarding the novel.” It was eventually published, quite successfully, several months after the film’s release—perhaps Kubrick’s intent all along, not wanting the book to step on the picture.

MGM was far more patient with Kubrick than Clarke had been, even as the film’s budget began to inflate. In the fall of 1966 Variety reported that 2001 ’s cost had crept up from just over $6 million to $7 million. Robert O’Brien remained sanguine. “Stanley is an honest fellow,” he told Variety, explaining that Kubrick had been up front about cost overruns. “Now for $6,000,000 we could have had a Buck Rogers sort of thing, but . . . why have Buck Rogers at $6,000,000 when you can have Stanley Kubrick at $7,000,000?”

Kubrick—who had chosen to film in England in part to keep MGM at a very long arm’s length (he would soon relocate there personally)—didn’t always repay O’Brien’s indulgence. In response to the studio’s request for two and a half minutes of “sizzle reel” footage to show at a theater owners’ convention, the director groused, “Everything like this now becomes nuisance and a time consuming thing [keeping me from] getting the picture done. . . . I don’t think I’m very happy now about trying to select 2 1/2 minutes.”

Around the same time that O’Brien was reassuring Variety all was well with his space epic, he and several other executives flew over to England to make certain. According to Andrew Birkin, who along with Ivor Powell was responsible for maintaining the meticulous charts that tracked all the special-effects work, “On a particular day Stanley called us in and said, ‘Gee, fellas’—this was his catchphrase, ‘Gee, fellas’—’Metro is sending over the guys next Saturday,’ because by then they were getting very concerned that the completion date was forever being extended. So Stanley said, ‘Can you get together some charts that look impressive and stick them up around the conference room? Don’t worry. They don’t have to mean anything. They just have to look good.’ We just made whatever came into our heads. At some point I got called into the conference room, and Stanley said, ‘Oh, this is Andrew,’ and then, ‘Andrew, could you please explain these charts?’ I just had to wing it, sort of bluffed, and they were suitably impressed and went off and wrote another check. And so the film continued.”

Special-effects work, editing, and other postproduction labors continued right up to the April 1968 premiere in Washington, D.C., with Kubrick setting himself up with an editing bay on the Queen Elizabeth as he re-crossed the Atlantic by sea. In the end, he forwent depicting aliens, figuring any life-form that human beings could design would not be otherworldly enough, by definition. Clarke had come up with the idea of Bowman turning into a fetus-like “star child” at the end of the film. Whether that image was meant literally or metaphorically is your call, but Kubrick’s archive includes a cable to a Chicago biological-supplies company requesting “preserved human embryos” in various states of development, presumably a product of Kubrick’s need to research any concept to the nth degree. (The company replied in a terse cable that it was unable to “SUPPLY HUM EMBRYOS . . . SORRY.”)

It might sound funny to say this about a glacially paced 2-hour-and-19-minute movie that some people find crushingly dull, but in the editing room Kubrick pared away ruthlessly at 2001, the storytelling growing ever more elliptical. What he was after, he later said, was a “non verbal statement.” Gone now was the heavy-handed narration. Gone too were chunks of expository dialogue, including an entire scene in which, following HAL’s “death,” Mission Control explains what went wrong with the computer. (Faced with a conflict in his programming, “he developed, for want of a better description, neurotic symptoms.”)

The last of the film’s elements to fall into place was its soundtrack. Kubrick had hired the composer Alex North, with whom he had worked on Spartacus (1960), to score 2001 . Beginning in December 1967, North was put up in an apartment in London, where without being allowed to see much of the still-evolving film, he wrote his score and ultimately recorded upwards of 40 minutes’ worth of music. But the director was fond of the classical and modern orchestral music he had been using as temporary tracks, pieces by Johann Strauss II, Richard Strauss, György Ligeti, and Aram Khachaturian. Kubrick warned North he might end up using the temp pieces but waffled as North continued working on the first part of his score. Flummoxed by Kubrick’s indecision and a tight deadline, the composer began suffering from back spasms so severe he couldn’t conduct and had to be taken to recording sessions in an ambulance. In notes to himself (now in the collection of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) he seemed to vent his frustration: “DELAYING ME—liked stuff, then changed his mind . . . psychological hang up . . .”

At the end of January, Kubrick informed North that his services were no longer needed. “I’m really sorry it all had to end this way without some discussion in connection with the music I had written,” North wrote Kubrick somewhat bitterly. But like so many spent collaborators, he could still summon admiration, ending his letter on an upbeat note (ellipses are North’s): “All the best to you on the film . . . what I saw is pretty sensation[al] . . . so good luck man!!!”

There is a Hollywood legend that 2001 was initially a big bust: dismissed by critics, ignored by ticket buyers, and on the verge of being yanked out of theaters when it was at last discovered and embraced by “a lot of young people smoking funny cigarettes,” as Keir Dullea put it. There is a kernel of truth in that, but only just.

As Dullea recalled the preview screenings, “people walked out, wondering, What is this meaningless bullshit?” Early reviews trended toward mixed-to-negative. In The New York Times, Renata Adler wrote that 2001 exerts a “very special sort of boring fascination.” But the film was a hit with young audiences right off the bat. Variety reported that initial ticket sales were 30 percent ahead of numbers for David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago (1965), MGM’s biggest hit of the decade to that point. Kubrick’s picture won an Oscar for special effects—awarded solely to him under rules then in place—and received nominations for direction, original screenplay, and art direction. Best director was an honor Kubrick would never receive, inexplicably, despite four nominations across the course of his career.

He had been confident enough in his work on 2001 that, shortly before its release, he had bought $20,500 worth of MGM stock in the belief his film would goose the studio’s profits. (It did, but O’Brien couldn’t survive a shareholder revolt, and in 1969 the company fell into the hands of financier Kirk Kerkorian, who sold off the studio’s most valuable assets, including rights to its glorious library of films such as Gone with the Wind and Singin’ in the Rain, and left behind a corporate husk.) Still, the early bad reviews continued to irk Kubrick. “New York was really the only hostile city,” he told Playboy later that year, still touchy months after the fact. “Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.”

“I did hear through the grapevine that he was pretty disappointed” by the film’s initial reviews, Ivor Powell said, which Andrew Birkin, who continued working with Kubrick on an aborted Napoleon movie, seconded: “I think like most geniuses he had an innate confidence in his own brilliance. But at the same time, you want to be appreciated by others. He showed me a lot of letters from children that he’d received, which I think gave him more pleasure than anything else, that children seemed to grasp something from the movie that went beyond a straightforward story line.”

As it happens, I know all about that, if you will indulge me in a personal note. I was 10 when I saw 2001, a year or so into its initial release. I had no idea what to make of it, really, beyond that the lonely, empty distances of space travel seemed creepy and sad; the monolith was both seductive and forbidding; and the finale, with the pounding timpani of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” behind the image of the wide-eyed, planet-size star child, had terrified me. What it “meant”—who knew? But the picture had taken me . . . somewhere, and I felt a need to continue grappling with it. I read the novel. I listened to the soundtrack album—the first LP I ever bought. (I was an odd kid.) I couldn’t have articulated it like this at the time, but movies, I now understood, could be more than just Disney-style fun. I was hooked by something—by cinema (there, I said it)—which has proved to be a lifelong reward. And here I am, still grappling with * 2001: A Space Odyssey.* A real-life moon base would have been cool, but passion is more than consolation.

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Bruce Handy

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The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in "2001: A Space Odyssey," but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, “2001" is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

No little part of his effect comes from the music. Although Kubrick originally commissioned an original score from Alex North , he used classical recordings as a temporary track while editing the film, and they worked so well that he kept them. This was a crucial decision. North's score, which is available on a recording, is a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for “2001" because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action -- to give us emotional cues. The classical music chosen by Kubrick exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals.

Consider two examples. The Johann Strauss waltz “Blue Danube,'' which accompanies the docking of the space shuttle and the space station, is deliberately slow, and so is the action. Obviously such a docking process would have to take place with extreme caution (as we now know from experience), but other directors might have found the space ballet too slow, and punched it up with thrilling music, which would have been wrong.

We are asked in the scene to contemplate the process, to stand in space and watch. We know the music. It proceeds as it must. And so, through a peculiar logic, the space hardware moves slowly because it's keeping the tempo of the waltz. At the same time, there is an exaltation in the music that helps us feel the majesty of the process.

Now consider Kubrick's famous use of Richard Strauss' “Thus Spake Zarathustra.'' Inspired by the words of Nietzsche, its five bold opening notes embody the ascension of man into spheres reserved for the gods. It is cold, frightening, magnificent.

The music is associated in the film with the first entry of man's consciousness into the universe - -and with the eventual passage of that consciousness onto a new level, symbolized by the Star Child at the end of the film. When classical music is associated with popular entertainment, the result is usually to trivialize it (who can listen to the “William Tell Overture'' without thinking of the Lone Ranger?). Kubrick's film is almost unique in enhancing the music by its association with his images.

I attended the Los Angeles premiere of the film, in 1968, at the Pantages Theater. It is impossible to describe the anticipation in the audience adequately. Kubrick had been working on the film in secrecy for some years, in collaboration, the audience knew, with author Arthur C. Clarke , special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull and consultants who advised him on the specific details of his imaginary future -- everything from space station design to corporate logos. Fearing to fly and facing a deadline, Kubrick had sailed from England on the Queen Elizabeth, doing the editing while on board, and had continued to edit the film during a cross-country train journey. Now it finally was ready to be seen.

To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong, for many of those who remained until the end knew they had seen one of the greatest films ever made. But not everyone remained. Rock Hudson stalked down the aisle, complaining, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'' There were many other walkouts, and some restlessness at the film's slow pace (Kubrick immediately cut about 17 minutes, including a pod sequence that essentially repeated another one).

The film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with the astronaut inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie.

What he had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it.

The film falls into several movements. In the first, prehistoric apes, confronted by a mysterious black monolith, teach themselves that bones can be used as weapons, and thus discover their first tools. I have always felt that the smooth artificial surfaces and right angles of the monolith, which was obviously made by intelligent beings, triggered the realization in an ape brain that intelligence could be used to shape the objects of the world.

The bone is thrown into the air and dissolves into a space shuttle (this has been called the longest flash-forward in the history of the cinema). We meet Dr. Heywood Floyd ( William Sylvester ), en route to a space station and the moon. This section is willfully anti-narrative; there are no breathless dialogue passages to tell us of his mission. Instead, Kubrick shows us the minutiae of the flight: the design of the cabin, the details of in-flight service, the effects of zero gravity.

Then comes the docking sequence, with its waltz, and for a time even the restless in the audience are silenced, I imagine, by the sheer wonder of the visuals. On board, we see familiar brand names, we participate in an enigmatic conference among the scientists of several nations, we see such gimmicks as a videophone and a zero-gravity toilet.

The sequence on the moon (which looks as real as the actual video of the moon landing a year later) is a variation on the film's opening sequence. Man is confronted with a monolith, just as the apes were, and is drawn to a similar conclusion: This must have been made. And as the first monolith led to the discovery of tools, so the second leads to the employment of man's most elaborate tool: the spaceship Discovery, employed by man in partnership with the artificial intelligence of the onboard computer, named HAL 9000.

Life onboard the Discovery is presented as a long, eventless routine of exercise, maintenance checks and chess games with HAL. Only when the astronauts fear that HAL's programming has failed does a level of suspense emerge; their challenge is somehow to get around HAL, which has been programmed to believe, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.'' Their efforts lead to one of the great shots in the cinema, as the men attempt to have a private conversation in a space pod, and HAL reads their lips. The way Kubrick edits this scene so that we can discover what HAL is doing is masterful in its restraint: He makes it clear, but doesn't insist on it. He trusts our intelligence.

Later comes the famous “star gate'' sequence, a sound and light journey in which astronaut Dave Bowman ( Keir Dullea ) travels through what we might now call a wormhole into another place, or dimension, that is unexplained. At journey's end is the comfortable bedroom suite in which he grows old, eating his meals quietly, napping, living the life (I imagine) of a zoo animal who has been placed in a familiar environment. And then the Star Child.

There is never an explanation of the other race that presumably left the monoliths and provided the star gate and the bedroom. “2001'' lore suggests Kubrick and Clarke tried and failed to create plausible aliens. It is just as well. The alien race exists more effectively in negative space: We react to its invisible presence more strongly than we possibly could to any actual representation.

“2001: A Space Odyssey'' is in many respects a silent film. There are few conversations that could not be handled with title cards. Much of the dialogue exists only to show people talking to one another, without much regard to content (this is true of the conference on the space station). Ironically, the dialogue containing the most feeling comes from HAL, as it pleads for its “life'' and sings “Daisy.''

The film creates its effects essentially out of visuals and music. It is meditative. It does not cater to us, but wants to inspire us, enlarge us. Nearly 30 years after it was made, it has not dated in any important detail, and although special effects have become more versatile in the computer age, Trumbull's work remains completely convincing -- more convincing, perhaps, than more sophisticated effects in later films, because it looks more plausible, more like documentary footage than like elements in a story.

Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. “2001: A Space Odyssey'' is not about a goal but about a quest, a need. It does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

141 minutes

William Sylvester as Dr. Heywood Floyd

Frank Miller as Mission Controller

Sean Sullivan as Michaels

Keir Dullea as Bowman

Robert Beatty as Halvorsen

Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher

Gary Lockwood as Poole

William Sylvester as Heywood Floyd

Leonard Rossiter as Smyslov

Margaret Tyzack as Elena

Gary Lockwood as Frank Poole

Keir Dullea as David Bowman

Photographed by

• Geoffrey Unsworth
• John Alcott

Screenplay by

• Arthur C. Clarke

Produced and directed by

• Stanley Kubrick

Directed by

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“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made

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Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” had its premières across the country. In the annals of audience restlessness, these evenings rival the opening night of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in 1913, when Parisians in osprey and tails reportedly brandished their canes and pelted the dancers with objects. A sixth of the New York première’s audience walked right out, including several executives from M-G-M. Many who stayed jeered throughout. Kubrick nervously shuttled between his seat in the front row and the projection booth, where he tweaked the sound and the focus. Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick’s collaborator, was in tears at intermission. The after-party at the Plaza was “a room full of drinks and men and tension,” according to Kubrick’s wife, Christiane.

Kubrick, a doctor’s son from the Bronx who got his start as a photographer for Look , was turning forty that year, and his rise in Hollywood had left him hungry to make extravagant films on his own terms. It had been four years full of setbacks and delays since the director’s triumph, “ Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb .” From the look of things, the Zeitgeist was not going to strike twice. A businessman overheard on his way out of a screening spoke for many: “Well, that’s one man’s opinion.”

“2001” is a hundred and forty-two minutes, pared down from a hundred and sixty-one in a cut that Kubrick made after those disastrous premières. There is something almost taunting about the movie’s pace. “2001” isn’t long because it is dense with storytelling; it is long because Kubrick distributed its few narrative jolts as sparsely as possible. Renata Adler, in the Times , described the movie as “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” Its “uncompromising slowness,” she wrote, “makes it hard to sit through without talking.” In Harper’s , Pauline Kael wrote, “The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space.” Onscreen it was 2001, but in the theatres it was still 1968, after all. Kubrick’s gleeful machinery, waltzing in time to Strauss, had bounded past an abundance of human misery on the ground.

Hippies may have saved “2001.” “Stoned audiences” flocked to the movie. David Bowie took a few drops of cannabis tincture before watching, and countless others dropped acid. According to one report, a young man at a showing in Los Angeles plunged through the movie screen, shouting, “It’s God! It’s God!” John Lennon said he saw the film “every week.” “2001” initially opened in limited release, shown only in 70-mm. on curved Cinerama screens. M-G-M thought it had on its hands a second “ Doctor Zhivago ” (1965) or “ Ben-Hur ” (1959), or perhaps another “ Spartacus ” (1960), the splashy studio hit that Kubrick, low on funds, had directed about a decade before. But instead the theatres were filling up with fans of cult films like Roger Corman’s “ The Trip ,” or “ Psych-Out ,” the early Jack Nicholson flick with music by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. These movies, though cheesy, found a new use for editing and special effects: to mimic psychedelic visions. The iconic Star Gate sequence in “2001,” when Dave Bowman, the film’s protagonist, hurtles in his space pod through a corridor of swimming kaleidoscopic colors, could even be timed, with sufficient practice, to crest with the viewer’s own hallucinations. The studio soon caught on, and a new tagline was added to the movie’s redesigned posters: “The ultimate trip.”

In “ Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece ,” the writer and filmmaker Michael Benson takes us on a different kind of trip: the long journey from the film’s conception to its opening and beyond. The power of the movie has always been unusually bound up with the story of how it was made. In 1966, Jeremy Bernstein profiled Kubrick on the “2001” set for The New Yorker , and behind-the-scenes accounts with titles like “ The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 ” began appearing soon after the movie’s release. The grandeur of “2001”—the product of two men, Clarke and Kubrick, who were sweetly awestruck by the thought of infinite space—required, in its execution, micromanagement of a previously unimaginable degree. Kubrick’s drive to show the entire arc of human life (“from ape to angel,” as Kael dismissively put it) meant that he was making a special-effects movie of radical scope and ambition. But in his initial letter to Clarke, a science-fiction writer, engineer, and shipwreck explorer living in Ceylon, Kubrick began with the modest-sounding goal of making “the proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie.” Kubrick wanted his film to explore “the reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life,” and what it would mean if we discovered it.

The outlines of a simple plot were already in place: Kubrick wanted “a space-probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.” (The finished product opts for Jupiter instead.) But the timing of Kubrick’s letter, in March of 1964, suggested a much more ambitious and urgent project. “2001” was a science-fiction film trying not to be outrun by science itself. Kubrick was tracking NASA ’s race to the moon, which threatened to siphon some of the wonder from his production. He had one advantage over reality: the film could present the marvels of the universe in lavish color and sound, on an enormous canvas. If Kubrick could make the movie he imagined, the grainy images from the lunar surface shown on dinky TV screens would seem comparatively unreal.

In Clarke, Kubrick found a willing accomplice. Clarke had served as a radar instructor in the R.A.F., and did two terms as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. His reputation as perhaps the most rigorous of living sci-fi writers, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, was widespread. Kubrick needed somebody who had knowledge and imagination in equal parts. “If you can describe it,” Clarke recalls Kubrick telling him, “I can film it.” It was taken as a dare. Meeting in New York, often in the Kubricks’ cluttered apartment on the Upper East Side, the couple’s three young daughters swarming around them, they decided to start by composing a novel. Kubrick liked to work from books, and since a suitable one did not yet exist they would write it. When they weren’t working, Clarke introduced Kubrick to his telescope and taught him to use a slide rule. They studied the scientific literature on extraterrestrial life. “Much excitement when Stanley phones to say that the Russians claim to have detected radio signals from space,” Clarke wrote in his journal for April 12, 1965: “Rang Walter Sullivan at the New York Times and got the real story—merely fluctuations in Quasar CTA 102.” Kubrick grew so concerned that an alien encounter might be imminent that he sought an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London in case his story got scooped during production.

Clarke was the authority on both the science and the science fiction, but an account he gave later provides a sense of what working with Kubrick was like: “We decided on a compromise—Stanley’s.” The world of “2001” was designed ex nihilo, and among the first details to be worked out was the look of emptiness itself. Kubrick had seen a Canadian educational film titled “Universe,” which rendered outer space by suspending inks and paints in vats of paint thinner and filming them with bright lighting at high frame rates. Slowed down to normal speed, the oozing shades and textures looked like galaxies and nebulae. Spacecraft were designed with the expert help of Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway, who ran a prominent space consultancy. A senior NASA official called Kubrick’s studio outside London “ NASA East.” Model makers, architects, boatbuilders, furniture designers, sculptors, and painters were brought to the studio, while companies manufactured the film’s spacesuits, helmets, and instrument panels. The lines between film and reality were blurred. The Apollo 8 crew took in the film’s fictional space flight at a screening not long before their actual journey. NASA ’s Web site has a list of all the details that “2001” got right, from flat-screen displays and in-flight entertainment to jogging astronauts. In the coming decades, conspiracy theorists would allege that Kubrick had helped the government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. “2001” is, in part, a fastidious period piece about a period that had yet to happen. Kubrick had seen exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair, and pored over a magazine article titled “Home of the Future.” The lead production designer on the film, Tony Masters, noticed that the world of “2001” eventually became a distinct time and place, with the kind of coherent aesthetic that would merit a sweeping historical label, like “Georgian” or “Victorian.” “We designed a way to live,” he recalled, “down to the last knife and fork.” (The Arne Jacobsen flatware, designed in 1957, was made famous by its use in the film, and is still in production.) By rendering a not-too-distant future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: thirty-three years later, his audiences would still be around to grade his predictions. Part of his genius was that he understood how to rig the results. Many elements from his set designs were contributions from major brands—Whirlpool, Macy’s, DuPont, Parker Pens, Nikon—which quickly cashed in on their big-screen exposure. If 2001 the year looked like “2001” the movie, it was partly because the film’s imaginary design trends were made real.

Much of the film’s luxe vision of space travel was overambitious. In 1998, ahead of the launch of the International Space Station, the Times reported that the habitation module was “far cruder than the most pessimistic prognosticator could have imagined in 1968.” But the film’s look was a big hit on Earth. Olivier Mourgue’s red upholstered Djinn chairs, used on the “2001” set, became a design icon, and the high-end lofts and hotel lobbies of the year 2001 bent distinctly toward the aesthetic of Kubrick’s imagined space station.

Audiences who came to “2001” expecting a sci-fi movie got, instead, an essay on time. The plot was simple and stark. A black monolith, shaped like a domino, appears at the moment in prehistory when human ancestors discover how to use tools, and another is later found, in the year 2001, just below the lunar surface, where it reflects signals toward Jupiter’s moons. At the film’s conclusion, a monolith looms again, when the ship’s sole survivor, Dave Bowman, witnesses the eclipse of human intelligence by a vague new order of being. “2001” is therefore only partly set in 2001: as exacting as Kubrick was about imagining that moment, he swept it away in a larger survey of time, wedging his astronauts between the apelike anthropoids that populate the first section of the film, “The Dawn of Man,” and the fetal Star Child betokening the new race at its close. A mixture of plausibility and poetry, “real” science and primal symbolism, was therefore required. For “The Dawn of Man,” shot last, a team travelled to Namibia to gather stills of the desert. Back in England, a massive camera system was built to project these shots onto screens, transforming the set into an African landscape. Actors, dancers, and mimes were hired to wear meticulously constructed ape suits, wild animals were housed at the Southampton Zoo, and a dead horse was painted to look like a zebra.

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For the final section of the film, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” Ordway, the film’s scientific consultant, read up on a doctoral thesis on psychedelics advised by Timothy Leary. Theology students had taken psilocybin, then attended a service at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel to see if they’d be hit with religious revelations. They dutifully reported their findings: most of the participants had indeed touched God. Such wide-ranging research was characteristic of Clarke and Kubrick’s approach, although the two men, both self-professed squares, might have saved time had they been willing to try hallucinogens themselves.

The Jupiter scenes—filled with what Michael Benson describes as “abstract, nonrepresentational, space-time astonishments”—were the product of years of trial and error spent adapting existing equipment and technologies, such as the “slit-scan” photography that finally made the famous Star Gate sequence possible. Typically used for panoramic shots of cityscapes, the technique, in the hands of Kubrick’s special-effects team, was modified to produce a psychedelic rush of color and light. Riding in Dave’s pod is like travelling through a birth canal in which someone has thrown a rave. Like the films of the late nineteenth century, “2001” manifested its invented worlds by first inventing the methods needed to construct them.

Yet some of the most striking effects in the film are its simplest. In a movie about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick faced a crucial predicament: what would the aliens look like? Cold War-era sci-fi offered a dispiriting menu of extraterrestrial avatars: supersonic birds, scaly monsters, gelatinous blobs. In their earliest meetings in New York, Clarke and Kubrick, along with Christiane, sketched drafts and consulted the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst. For a time, Christiane was modelling clay aliens in her studio. These gargoyle-like creatures were rejected, and “ended up dotted around the garden,” according to Kubrick’s daughter Katharina. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of thinned and elongated humans, resembling shadows at sundown, were briefly an inspiration. In the end, Kubrick decided that “you cannot imagine the unimaginable” and, after trying more ornate designs, settled on the monolith. Its eerily neutral and silent appearance at the crossroads of human evolution evokes the same wonder for members of the audience as it does for characters in the film. Kubrick realized that, if he was going to make a film about human fear and awe, the viewer had to feel those emotions as well.

And then there is HAL , the rogue computer whose affectless red eye reflects back what it sees while, behind it, his mind whirrs with dark and secret designs. I.B.M. consulted on the plans for HAL, but the idea to use the company’s logo fell through after Kubrick described him in a letter as “a psychotic computer.” Any discussion of Kubrick’s scientific prescience has to include HAL , whose suave, slightly effeminate voice suggests a bruised heart beating under his circuitry. In the past fifty years, our talking machines have continued to evolve, but none of them have become as authentically malicious as HAL . My grandfather’s early-eighties Chrysler, borrowing the voice from Speak & Spell, would intone, “A door is ajar,” whenever you got in. It sounded like a logical fallacy, but it seemed pleasantly futuristic nonetheless. Soon voice-command technology reached the public, ushering in our current era of unreliable computer interlocutors given to unforced errors: half-comical, half-pitiful simpletons, whose fate in life is to be taunted by eleven-year-olds. Despite the reports of cackling Amazon Alexas, there has, so far, been fairly little to worry about where our talking devices are concerned. The unbearable pathos of HAL ’s disconnection scene, one of the most mournful death scenes ever filmed, suggests that when we do end up with humanlike computers, we’re going to have some wild ethical dilemmas on our hands. HAL is a child, around nine years old, as he tells Dave at the moment he senses he’s finished. He’s precocious, indulged, needy, and vulnerable; more human than his human overseers, with their stilted, near robotic delivery. The dying HAL , singing “Daisy,” the tune his teacher taught him, is a sentimental trope out of Victorian fiction, more Little Nell than little green man.

As Benson’s book suggests, in a way the release of “2001” was its least important milestone. Clarke and Kubrick had been wrestling for years with questions of what the film was, and meant. These enigmas were merely handed off from creators to viewers. The critic Alexander Walker called “2001” “the first mainstream film that required an act of continuous inference” from its audiences. On set, the legions of specialists and consultants working on the minutiae took orders from Kubrick, whose conception of the whole remained in constant flux. The film’s narrative trajectory pointed inexorably toward a big ending, even a revelation, but Kubrick kept changing his mind about what that ending would be—and nobody who saw the film knew quite what to make of the one he finally chose. The film took for granted a broad cultural tolerance, if not an appetite, for enigma, as well as the time and inclination for parsing interpretive mysteries. If the first wave of audiences was baffled, it might have been because “2001” had not yet created the taste it required to be appreciated. Like “Ulysses,” or “The Waste Land,” or countless other difficult, ambiguous modernist landmarks, “2001” forged its own context. You didn’t solve it by watching it a second time, but you did settle into its mysteries.

Later audiences had another advantage. “2001” established the phenomenon of the Kubrick film: much rumored, long delayed, always a little disappointing. Casts and crews were held hostage as they withstood Kubrick’s infinite futzing, and audiences were held in eager suspense by P.R. campaigns that often oversold the films’ commercial appeal. Downstream would be midnight showings, monographs, dorm rooms, and weed, but first there was the letdown. The reason given for the films’ failures suggested the terms of their redemption: Kubrick was incapable of not making Kubrick films.

“2001” established the aesthetic and thematic palette that he used in all his subsequent films. The spaciousness of its too perfectly constructed sets, the subjugation of story and theme to abstract compositional balance, the precision choreography, even—especially—in scenes of violence and chaos, the entire repertoire of colors, angles, fonts, and textures: these were constants in films as wildly different as “ Barry Lyndon ” (1975) and “ The Shining ” (1980), “ Full Metal Jacket ” (1987) and “ Eyes Wide Shut ” (1999). So was the languorous editing of “2001,” which, when paired with abrupt temporal leaps, made eons seem short and moments seem endless, and its brilliant deployment of music to organize, and often ironize, action and character. These elements were present in some form in Kubrick’s earlier films, particularly “Dr. Strangelove,” but it was all perfected in “2001.” Because he occupied genres one at a time, each radically different from the last, you could control for what was consistently Kubrickian about everything he did. The films are designed to advance his distinct filmic vocabulary in new contexts and environments: a shuttered resort hotel, a spacious Manhattan apartment, Vietnam. Inside these disparate but meticulously constructed worlds, Kubrick’s slightly malicious intelligence determined the outcomes of every apparently free choice his protagonists made.

Though Kubrick binged on pulp sci-fi as a child, and later listened to radio broadcasts about the paranormal, “2001” has little in common with the rinky-dink conventions of movie science fiction. Its dazzling showmanship harkened back to older cinematic experiences. Film scholars sometimes discuss the earliest silent films as examples of “the cinema of attraction,” movies meant to showcase the medium itself. These films were, in essence, exhibits: simple scenes from ordinary life—a train arriving, a dog cavorting. Their only import was that they had been captured by a camera that could, magically, record movement in time. This “moving photography” was what prompted Maxim Gorky, who saw the Lumière brothers’ films at a Russian fair in 1896, to bemoan the “kingdom of shadows”—a mass of people, animals, and vehicles—rushing “straight at you,” approaching the edge of the screen, then vanishing “somewhere beyond it.”

“2001” is at its best when it evokes the “somewhere beyond.” For me, the most astounding moment of the film is a coded tribute to filmmaking itself. In “The Dawn of Man,” when a fierce leopard suddenly faces us, its eyes reflect the light from the projection system that Kubrick’s team had invented to create the illusion of a vast primordial desert. Kubrick loved the effect, and left it in. These details linger in the mind partly because they remind us that a brilliant artist, intent on mastering science and conjuring science fiction, nevertheless knew when to leave his poetry alone.

The interpretive communities convened by “2001” may persist in pockets of the culture, but I doubt whether many young people will again contend with its debts to Jung, John Cage, and Joseph Campbell. In the era of the meme, we’re more likely to find the afterlife of “2001” in fragments and glimpses than in theories and explications. The film hangs on as a staple of YouTube video essays and mashups; it remains high on lists of both the greatest films ever made and the most boring. On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from “2001” looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture. The very fact that you can view “2001,” along with almost every film ever shot, on a palm-size device is a future that Kubrick and Clarke may have predicted, but surely wouldn’t have wanted for their own larger-than-life movie. The film abounds in little screens, tablets, and picturephones; in 2011, Samsung fought an injunction from Apple over alleged patent violations by citing the technology in “2001” as a predecessor for its designs. Moon landings and astronaut celebrities now feel like a thing of the past. Space lost out. Those screens were the future. ♦

An earlier version of this story suggested that a single monolith appears at different times in the film.

2001: A Space Odyssey's Most Confusing Moments Explained

Developed as a joint project between director Stanley Kubrick and noted science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, " 2001: A Space Odyssey " has become one of the most discussed and important films in history. A lot of that is down to the fact that the film is so open to interpretation and confusing to viewers, with only a small amount of dialogue to help explain exactly what is happening (via No Film School ). Add in the fact that it deals with concepts like space travel, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and the evolution of man, it is little wonder that it has caused so much confusion over the years.

That isn't all that surprising, given how Kubrick was known for his more cerebral work demands multiple viewings to fully understand. Just look at "The Shining" and its baffling ending as another example of such storytelling. However, that doesn't mean that "2001: A Space Odyssey" is completely opaque and cannot be understood. Film scholars, analysts, and even Kubrick and Clarke themselves have spoken at length about the movie and exactly what it means. Here are some of the most confusing moments from the film and some explanations that shed some much-needed light on them.

What are the Monoliths?

The Monoliths themselves are one of the greatest mysteries in "2001: A Space Odyssey." They drive the action forward upon their discovery and play important roles in pivotal moments of mankind's history. Yet, they don't actually outwardly appear to do anything at all, and "2001" doesn't show how they work or what they are designed for. Instead, they are immovable black slabs — clearly designed rather than naturally occurring due to their straight lines and minimalist design.

Despite the enigmatic nature of the Monoliths, the one thing that is plain to see about them is that they are closely tied to humanity and have some sort of effect on the species (via Shmoop ). Their exact nature and origin are never explicitly stated. Still, it can be inferred that they have been built both to monitor humans and exert some sort of control over humanity's evolutionary course (via Visual Memory ). Each particular Monolith also demonstrates a specific function. For example, the device on the moon is a signal, sending information in the direction of Jupiter. Meanwhile, the larger Monolith encountered at the end of the film is a stargate, transporting Dave across vast distances.

Strangely, the Monoliths also have a kind of religious element. They are treated with what can only be described as reverence by those that find them. They create a sense of awe and wonder in an almost spiritual manner, in large part due to how otherworldly and transcendent they are (via Roger Ebert ).

Who built the Monoliths?

While the Monoliths are no doubt mysterious, they must have been built by someone. They're simply too perfect in shape to be a natural phenomenon, meaning someone — or something — designed them (via Shmoop ). Whoever these beings are, they must be far more advanced and technologically capable than humans. After all, the Monoliths would have been constructed and hidden away millions of years ago while humans were nothing more than primitive beasts. In many ways, such a civilization could be considered almost god-like.

Perhaps this is why Stanley Kubrick was so set against ever showing or describing the aliens responsible for the Monoliths. While the director freely spoke about the fact that these aliens existed within the movie, he did not want to give them a visual identity as this would not be as effective or impressive as allowing the audience to picture them in their own heads.

He explained in an interview with Joseph Gelmis (via Visual Memory ) saying, "From the very outset of work on the film we all discussed means of photographically depicting an extraterrestrial creature in a manner that would be as mind-boggling as the being itself. And it soon became apparent that you cannot imagine the unimaginable." So, he instead decided to use the Monoliths as a representation of the aliens (via Far Out Magazine ).

Author Arthur C. Clarke was more explicit about the alien civilization in later novels. In "3001: The Final Odyssey" he called them the Firstborn — impossibly old beings who have shed their physical bodies and roam space as they search for new life.

What do the Monoliths actually do?

Understanding who built the Monoliths and what they are doesn't fully explain their purpose or workings. The Moon Monolith, for example, sends a signal to the Monolith near Jupiter, but why? To get a full picture of these machines, it is necessary to look back at the very first one in the film.

After a group of ape-like early humans comes across the first Monolith, they begin to develop a deeper intelligence, using tools and weapons to become the superior group and defeat their competitors. In that sense, this Monolith serves as an accelerant, increasing the evolution and advancement of those that find it. It essentially gives humans a push in the right direction to ensure they head along the right evolutionary path (via Film Site ).

The Moon device has a similar purpose, though it's more subtle, pointing humanity to Jupiter so they can continue their journey towards their final form. It also acts as a beacon and test, as it can only be discovered when technology on Earth has advanced sufficiently and tells its creators that humans have reached a point where they can travel in space.

On a deeper level, some interpretations of the film suggest they could also represent our own reliance on technology. The Monoliths, with their rectangular shape and black coloring could be a symbol for screens, according to film analyst Rob Ager .

What's with the ape scene at the beginning of the movie?

The opening moments of "2001: A Space Odyssey" sees a group of ape-like, early homininis, driven away from their land by a rival group. Because they discover a Monolith , they are able to understand that things can be used as tools, learning how bones make useful weapons. This newly enlightened clan then fights off the rival group and kills its leader. The Monolith is key to this scene, as it imparts knowledge to the creatures and helps them come to a new level of intelligence (via Roger Ebert ).

In Stanley Kubrick's 1970 interview with Joseph Gelmis (via Visual Memory ), the director spoke about his desire to not become too literal with his depiction of what the Monoliths are doing in the film. He wanted to give "2001: A Space Odyssey" a more enigmatic nature so it was open to interpretation, so exactly what the Monoliths are doing or how they operate is never made fully clear.

Although Arthur C. Clarke did go into more detail in his novel about what the Monolith was actually doing to the primitive creatures. David K. Johnston explains how in the book the Monolith gives the creatures visions of how to perform certain actions and create specific tools. It effectively acts as a sort of learning device, testing whether these lifeforms have the potential to become sentient and reach an advanced state of intelligence.

Why is the monolith on the moon kept secret?

Almost immediately after the scene where the early humans kill the rival leader, a jump cut thrusts us into the future. Humanity has now reached the stage where it can travel in space and has even established several bases on the Moon. One of these is Clavius Base, an outpost that Dr. Heywood Floyd is visiting when he is questioned by Russian scientists about why the base has shut off all communication. Floyd is coy and doesn't reveal any information that the American team has discovered a second Monolith buried beneath the Moon's surface. A cover story has even been developed to provide a reason to deny access to anyone who is attempting to come to Clavius Base, falsely claiming there is some sort of disease outbreak in the facility.

Some hints about why this secrecy is necessary are given in the mission briefing scene when Dr. Floyd talks about the panic that could be caused by revealing that alien life exists to a population that hasn't been prepared or conditioned. However, there's more at play here as well. "2001: A Space Odyssey" was released at a time when the Cold War was still very much a genuine threat (via BBC ). Kubrick has employed anti-war themes throughout many of his films and this movie was originally going to include a storyline about nuclear satellites that would be destroyed. In this context, the secrecy is likely the government wanting to keep any knowledge or intelligence that can be gained from the Monolith to themselves and out of the hands of potential enemies.

How do the astronauts walk on the ceiling?

David Bowman and Frank Poole are on board the Discovery One on the way to Jupiter, although they are not fully aware of what their true mission is. In one of the most memorable scenes in the entire film, one of the astronauts is shown jogging around the outside of a room, seemingly going upside down without falling. A similar scene from earlier in "2001: A Space Odyssey" shows a woman grabbing food and then walking up the wall until she is on the ceiling.

There are two ways to explain this. The first deals with the in-film universe and the explanation for why such movement is possible. On Discovery One, the astronauts are able to freely move around the spacecraft like that because of artificial gravity (via Wired ). Meanwhile, the Pan-Am air hostess has a special pair of Grip Shoes, which can be seen here in a close-up , that allows her to stick to the wall while walking (via CNET ).

The second answer explains how Stanley Kubrick and the crew were able to realistically depict such an action. Using a technique that had been utilized in an earlier Fred Astaire movie "Royal Wedding," the entire set was rotated, and the camera was fixed in place. This gave the effect of the person moving as the set and camera moved around them. To achieve the effect, Kubrick had a giant Ferris wheel structure developed to house the set (via ASC Magazine ).

Why does HAL decide to kill the astronauts?

As well as being one of the most famous computers in history , HAL 9000 is also the primary antagonist in "2001: A Space Odyssey." An artificial intelligence, he was created to control most of the systems on Discovery One and assist the crew in their missions. He communicates with Dave and Frank, keeps the ship running in a proper manner, and is essential to overall operations.

That all changes, though, when he begins to show signs of malfunction. Dave and Frank, having discussed the issue with mission control on Earth, believe that HAL 9000 is behaving erratically and intend to shut him down to prevent disaster. Despite the precautions they take to avoid the AI from overhearing what they see, it is able to lipread and learn of their plan. HAL 9000's next actions are prompted by two motives. One is that it cannot allow its mission to be halted because it is too important. Secondly, the AI has clearly developed some sort of fear about being disconnected or "killed" due to its sentience. In this interpretation, HAL 9000 acted only in self-defense to prolong its own existence.

Kubrick spoke about this in an interview , saying that such an AI with higher brain functions would "develop an equivalent range of emotional reactions — fear, love, hate, envy, etc. Such a machine could eventually become as incomprehensible as a human being, and could, of course, have a nervous breakdown."

What was HAL's mission?

An important way to help make sense of what happens in "2001: A Space Odyssey" is to read Arthur C. Clarke's novelization. Although it makes some changes to the story, it is a useful guide to some of the more mystifying elements that might confuse viewers. A good example of this is the AI HAL 9000 and its motivations and purpose. Those who have seen the film will know that there was a second hidden mission for the Discovery One, a mission that Dave and Frank were unaware of but that the ship's AI was programmed to complete.

The true purpose of Discovery One is to investigate the radio signal sent from the Monolith discovered on the Moon to Jupiter, with the hope of establishing contact with an alien civilization or discovering more advanced technology (via Brian Eggert ). The novel suggests that this mission and the fact that HAL 9000 was created to be as accurate as possible is what caused it to malfunction and kill the crew.

The AI was trying to solve a paradox created by the fact that it was supposed to be unable to provide false information, in this instance lying to the crew, but was also being forced to hide the true mission from Dave and Frank (via Gizmodo ). The solution that HAL 9000 comes up with in this situation is simply to get rid of the crew so it no longer has to lie.

Would Dave actually survive in space without a helmet?

When HAL 9000 decides he needs to kill the crew to survive, Dave is locked out of the ship when he tries to rescue Frank. Needing to leave the safety of his own pod and enter the vacuum without a helmet to keep him pressurized and supplied with oxygen, he manages to reach the airlock after being exposed for just over 10 seconds . With film audiences conditioned to believe that the slightest exposure to space would lead to explosive decompression, just how accurate is this scene?

It turns out that it certainly would have been possible if events panned out the way they did in the film.  How Stuff Works  indicates that a person wouldn't immediately die and could last up to two or three minutes in total before permanent damage took hold. This is because the various effects take a little while to start, with Film School Rejects noting that the experience wouldn't be pleasant but would likely have worked and given Dave a chance to survive.

What actually happens at the end of the film?

Perhaps the most baffling part of "2001: A Space Odyssey" is the ending , which is impressive considering just how confusing the rest of the film can be. After encountering the Jupiter Monolith, Dave is taken away on a journey that involves striking colors and strange special effects, ending with Dave being transported out of the spaceship and emerging in a decadent room. As he searches his surroundings he encounters several older versions of himself until one of them is an old man in a bed who seemingly dies before being reborn as a fetus.

Each Monolith has led to some sort of advancement in humanity and the Jupiter Monolith is no different in that respect. In Kubrick's own words the device "sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death."

Like in other parts of the film, Kubrick wanted "2001: A Space Odyssey" to be subjective and mysterious . He wanted the audience to have their own interpretations rather than simply be told what is going on. But, as noted above, he was more than happy to lay out the events in a factual manner.

Why is Dave transformed into a star child?

At the conclusion of the ending sequence, Dave is transformed into a fetus that is then sent back to Earth. The meaning behind this and his new purpose is arguably the most confusing element of the entire film. In early drafts, this new entity would have removed the nuclear threat around Earth by destroying the various satellites housing the weapons. But that doesn't happen in the final version of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Instead, he seems to watch over the planet with a thoughtful gaze before the experience ends.

Kubrick himself said that Dave "is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to Earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny." According to Shmoop , the astronaut has his reliance on technology removed as his suit, pod, and even body are taken away from him as he begins his transformation into something new.

Professor David K. Johnson argues that the novel's explanations help to make sense of the film. Dave has been pushed to the next evolutionary stage for mankind, becoming like the aliens that created the Monoliths themselves, a type of energy being free of his physical form. Roger Ebert suggests that this may well be Kubrick's own hope of what humanity might become in the future.  

Screen Rant

10 behind-the-scenes facts about the making of 2001: a space odyssey.

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10 Movies & TV Shows You Didn't Know Glen Powell Was In

How robert de niro's 1993 acclaimed crime movie accurately depicts bar fights explained by former gang member: "brawls do happen", alien: romulus ending's connection to resurrection & prometheus' engineers addressed by director.

Stanley Kubrick 's 2001: A Space Odyssey is unanimously hailed as one of the all-time greatest examples of cinematic science fiction. The film not only earned Kubrick an Academy Award for its groundbreaking Special Effects, but it also directly influenced an entire generation of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, and many more.

RELATED: 10 Great Atmospheric Sci-Fi To Watch If You Liked 2001: A Space Odyssey

Loosely based on Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Sentinel , the sprawling epic follows a crew of U.S. astronauts that, upon discovering an alien relic on the moon, voyage to Jupiter under the command of sentient A.I. HAL 9000. It was one of the arduous productions of all time, and here are 10 behind-the-scenes facts about the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey .

Front/Rear Projection

Due to the lack of advanced CGI in the mid-1960s, Stanley Kubrick relied on age-old optical techniques rather than blue and green screens. While Kubrick had a team of 12 matte-painters working round the clock to achieve the grandiosity of outer space, he also used front and rear projection in a number of scenes.

For the Dawn of Man sequence, Sinar Front Projection was used for the far-off African background landscapes (which are still photos). This allowed Kubrick to fuse foreground action with the pre-recorded background imagery. Conversely, during the pod sequences, Kubrick uses rear projection for the content seen on various monitor screens.

Special Effects

A scant total of 205 special effects shots were used in 2001 , taking 18 months at a cost of roughly $6.5 million to film. By contrast, Star Wars: A New Hope featured 350 special effects shots.

With roughly half of the film's total budget invested in the special effects, Kubrick was meticulous about recreating the cosmos with the utmost authenticity. Furthermore, Kubrick ordered every special effect shot to be printed on the original negative for fear that copies would tarnish the visual quality of the images. For the shots of nebulous star-clusters, Kubrick filmed drops of dye dispersed on a small glass plate.

Zero Gravity

To achieve the appearance of weightless astronauts floating in the spacecraft, the actors were suspended from wires connected to the ceiling of the set. The camera was strategically placed so the actors' bodies would hide the wires.

RELATED: 2001: A Space Odyssey: 10 Pieces Of Sci-Fi Tech From The Movie We Have Today

For the shot of the stewardess snatching the floating pen, Kubrick applied double-sided tape to the pen and attached it to a pane of glass that was suspended before the camera. For the shot of the stewardess walking up the interior of the spaceship and appearing upside down, the camera was mounted to a rotating set. Although she appears upside down, the actress remained at the bottom frame while the set imperceptibly rotates.

Original Hal 9000

The HAL 9000 robot was originally conceived to be called Athena and come equipped with a female voice. When the gender was reversed, actor Nigel Davenport was hired to voice the role, but Kubrick deemed his thick British accent too distracting and relieved him of his duties.

Kubrick hired famed actor Martin Balsam as a result, who recorded lines of dialogue as HAL 9000. Again, Kubrick was dissatisfied with the tone and tenor of Balsam's voice and eventually hired Douglas Rain to voice the role. All of Rain's dialogue was recorded in post-production.

Original Monolith Designs

Originally, the black rectangular monolith was conceived as a large transparent screen on which images could be projected to teach the primates how to use tools and weapons.

When Clarke discarded that idea, Kubrick opted to represent the monolith as a black tetrahedron. However, the structure did not properly reflect light and the idea was scratched. Kubrick then tested an image of the monolith as a large transparent cube, but the lighting on the studio sets continued to reflect light in distracting ways. When a final test involving a Lucite rectangle failed as well, Kubrick settled on the familiar black rectangular slab.

Stargate Sequence

The colorful stargate sequence at the end of the film was conceived and executed by special effects master Douglas Trumbull. Kubrick hired Trumbull after seeing his work on the 1964 documentary To the Moon and Beyond , in which he created and employed a technique called Splitscan Photography.

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The Splitscan technique was used during the stargate sequence to create a hallucinatory experience as Bowman (Keir Dullea) hurls through the Jupiter starfield. The method was achieved by moving the camera at a rapid pace across a series of lighted art exhibits while keeping the shutter open, creating a tracer effect.

Rotating Set

For the scenes taking place on the Discovery centrifuge, a large rotating set was built that allowed the actors to remain in a stationary position while appearing as if moving in a circle.

For the shots of Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) jogging, the actor remained at the bottom of the centrifuge as if it were a giant hamster wheel. As he jogged in place, the set rotated behind him, making it appear as if he's running up and down the inclines of the craft.

A common misconception about the beginning of 2001 is that a famous jump-cut is made from a bone tossed into the air to a spaceship orbiting Earth. However, it is not a spaceship but rather a nuclear satellite, making the connection from the bone as the first murder weapon among primates to the ultimate weapon of future humans.

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Originally, the Star Child seen in the final shot of the movie was supposed to detonate the nuclear satellite and all other devices orbiting Earth. Once Kubrick deemed this ending too similar to his previous film, Dr. Strangelove , the idea was nixed.

Concurrent Novelization

While 2001 was loosely adapted by Clarke's The Sentinel , the famed sci-fi scribe also wrote a novelization of 2001 concurrent with the film production. Kubrick would show daily footage to Clarke, who would go off and write the novel based on the work Kubrick already completed. The two would compare notes and advance the screenplay based on their independent work.

As a result, there are several differences between the film and the novel. Not only is the ending much different in both versions, but the dimensions of the monolith also differ in the film and novelization.

Original Ending

Originally, 2001 was set to end in the same way the novel does. Instead of the Star Child descending on Earth, the finale would have featured Bowman finding the third monolith on the surface of Saturn's moon Japetus.

When Kubrick tested Trumbull's visual representation of Saturn's rings, he was unhappy with the result and decided to change the ending of the film. Kubrick also discarded a voice-over narration that was recorded for the film. Following its New York premiere on April 3rd, 1968, Kubrick also excised 19 minutes of footage for pacing purposes.

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• 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is Still the Most Scientifically Accurate Space Film Ever

Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece is one of the most prescient movies in history.

A year before the Apollo 11 Moon landing in July, 1969, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in theaters. A cult masterpiece of cosmic proportions, 2001 imagined a near-future in which humans went on epic interplanetary journeys assisted by hyper-intelligent machines. It remains one of the wildest and highly-stylized sci-fi films ever made, yet 2001: A Space Odyssey is also one of the most accurate depictions of aeronautical technology to date.

Jonathan McDowell , an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, argues that 2001 is in a league of its own when it comes to accurately depicting space travel.

“I think it's the only science fiction movie to capture the majesty and precision of travel through space,” McDowell tells Inverse .

2001 is two hours and 19 minutes long, with just under 40 minutes of dialogue. The famously pedantic Kubrick left little to chance; and his meticulous focus on technology was no exception – it is vital to the film’s theme. In a 1968 interview with Eric Norden from Playboy, Kubrick explained his intention behind 2001 : “I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content ... in 2001 , the message is the medium.”

“Sending them to the Moon? No problem.”

The experience Kubrick was trying to create was no small feat; he was trying to capture something that is quite difficult to grasp universally … but attempting to put it into words almost detracts from its magnitude, vastness, and complexity. That is sort of Kubrick’s point. And one of the most essential ingredients for creating that experience: technology.

“I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 — but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God,” Kubrick said. “I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God… When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia — less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe — can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken...Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.”

Principal engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab John Brophy saw the film when it came out in 1968. He tells Inverse that it opened his eyes to the possibilities of space travel — and making these dreams come true.

“I thought it was really fantastic. And the cool thing was, it really made it seem like, you know, sending people to Jupiter was realistic,” he says. “Sending them to the Moon? No problem.”

Even the plane-like shuttle that takes people to the Moon is a realization of Kubrick’s vision, Brophy comments: “because the Space Shuttle has wings.” From the moonwalk to the design of Discovery One (the ship that travels from Earth to Jupiter using nuclear propulsion controlled by a murderous AI called HAL 9000), 2001 is one of the most scientifically well-researched films in history — and one of the most prescient.

Working with NASA to Design 2001: A Space Odyssey

A scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey .

In the making of 2001 , Kubrick’s consultants had already been working with NASA, and continued once production began. Frederick Ordway III , a researcher and science communicator, and Harry Lange , a German designer who worked for the military and for NASA were the lead guys responsible for the creativity and accuracy of the technology in the film. They had worked closely with Wernher Von Braun, referred to by some as a “Father of Rocket Science,” in the past.

Von Braun , who emigrated from Germany to the U.S. after World War II, was largely responsible for the creation and development of V-2 ballistic missiles. At NASA, he was a huge advocate for space exploration. His group built the rocket that carried the first American, Alan Shepard, into suborbital flight in 1961 on Mercury-Redstone 3 . He may also have been the partial inspiration for Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Even though Von Braun and Kubrick never worked together directly, Kubrick certainly benefited from existing within Von Braun’s orbit.

In a written retrospective , Ordway describes his first meeting with Kubrick. He and Lange met him through Arthur C. Clarke, who was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City when Ordwell and Lange happened to be visiting the city. He recalls how Clarke talked about Kubrick’s vision: “First of all, [Kubrick] wanted to create the space fiction film, one against which all others would be measured. It would-be a big budget, big screen effort, serious, and scientifically and technically plausible,” Ordway writes. “It would portray man facing the immensity of the universe and consider the possibility that life may exist out among the stars. Lange and I listened attentively.”

The Realism of The Discovery One

The Discovery One was one of the most impressively realistic representations of aeronautical engineering.

Ordway describes six months of pre-production planning and design work that resulted in the evolution of six space vehicles – an Earth-to-orbit shuttle, a space station in orbit around Earth, an Earth-orbit-to lunar surface shuttle, a lunar surface transport bus, the Discovery One, and its associated pod. Ordway and Lange were as meticulous as Kubrick. He described leaning heavily on NASA and private companies for advice and material to support their work on designing and building the technology featured in 2001 .

According to Brophy, the Discovery One is one of the most impressive aspects of 2001 ’s true-to-science representations of aeronautical engineering : “That's a very realistic depiction of what a crewed piloted ship to Jupiter might look like.” He explains that a nuclear ion propulsion spaceship would need to be long like the Discovery One to keep the humans at a safe distance from the radiation generated by the nuclear propulsion system.

He does, however, say something key is missing from the iconic ship.

“Any kind of large spaceship that processes a lot of power would have to get rid of a lot of waste heat. So, there would be fairly large thermal radiators; just surfaces that get hot and then radiate that heat out into space,” explains Brophy. “It turns out that the makers of the movie and Kubrick knew that, but were afraid that if they put these radiators on, they would look like wings, which they would. They didn't like that, so just for aesthetic reasons did not include the radiators.”

In other words, the ship wouldn’t look so cool.

The details were not arbitrary additions. In his retrospective, Ordway recalls, “each of these vehicles was designed with extreme care, for we would later be dealing with full-scale interiors as well as reduced-scale exterior models all of which had to appear absolutely realistic. We insisted on knowing the purpose and functioning of each assembly and component, down to the logical labeling of individual buttons and the presentation on screens of plausible operating, diagnostic and other data.”

A Surprisingly Accurate Depiction of Space

The retrofuturistic vision of space travel was similar to luxury planes.

Brophy, an aeronautical engineer by training, was particularly amused with the Zero Gravity Toilet located on Space Station V based on a concept by von Braun , the midway point between Earth and the Moon. This was extremely true to form, Brophy says. Kubrick has also claimed this was the only intentional joke in the film.

The extreme care to which Ordway refers to real science is appreciated by scientists like Brophy, who not only observe the occasional humor, but how the depictions of human’s aeronautical feats in 2001 are still relatively true to what is and what might be . Brophy confirms that the concept of rotating ships — or compartments of ships — to create artificial gravity makes sense; and Space Station V did a reasonable job of that.

“The rotating space station is awesome. If you wanted to create a gravitational environment and low earth orbit, having a big rotating spaceship, that is exactly the right thing to do,” he says. “And the way the shuttle docked with the space station where it matched the rotation rate, that seems just brilliant. That's exactly what it would look like. And so it was just really very cool once they match the rotation rate. Then from the shuttle, it looks like nobody's rotating, except the stars in the background.”

“If you wanted to create a gravitational environment and low earth orbit, having a big rotating spaceship, that is exactly the right thing to do.”

Of the rotating chamber in the Discovery One, Brophy is a bit more skeptical that the diameter is sufficiently large to actually create a kind of gravitational environment that is more friendly for humans than zero gravity.

“That section is probably too small in diameter to be realistic. If it were that small, and creating what looks like, you know, kind of an Earth gravity, it would have very undesirable gravitational effects, the crew would get disoriented. You really need to make it much bigger in diameter to get it to be realistic,” he explains. But at least, Brophy says, it looked great for the movie.

But one scene that audiences might have had a hard time buying turns out to be more realistic than one might expect: The heart-stopping scene, where Dave must exit his EVA pod without his spacesuit’s helmet through the vacuum of space to enter the ship’s airlock door, is not an entirely fictional imagining.

“You could do that and have a reasonable chance to survive; you know, get the door closed and the volume pressurized quickly enough. In theory you could, but don’t try it at home,” jokes Brophy.

Landing on the Moon

A year before the Apollo 11 mission, Kubrick and co. landed on the Moon.

Given that the movie came out one year before the Apollo 11 mission, Kubrick and his team had relatively little knowledge about what a lunar mission would look like. That didn’t stop them from imagining the experience in a way that was surprisingly true to form.“They did a really good job of landing on the Moon. The lunar landing is terrific because they come down and you can't see the exhaust from the rocket engines, which is what happens, but it blows the dust away on the landing pad. So that's very well done. The underground infrastructure is fantastic. I mean, it must have cost a fortune to really build that on the Moon, but it’s very realistic because it protects you from the radiation environment,” said Brophy.

The walking was less on point. Brophy says, “it looked like they were walking on Earth. And, you know, the Apollo astronauts kind of shuffled along, or even to this kind of bunny hop within to just walk. But, of course, nobody knew that until they got there.”

“It'll all be solar powered. Solar power is like fusion power, except the fusion power is in the sun.”

Ever since Brophy saw the film in 1968, 2001 ’s predictions on how humans would go to the Moon have been relatively fulfilled. But he believes it offers real hope that humans will make it to Jupiter, though perhaps with a different kind of ion propulsion: solar.

“From that standpoint, the movie is fantastic, in that it says this is a real possibility. But, I don't think we'll use nuclear thermal propulsion to get there. I think it'll all be solar powered. Solar power is like fusion power, except the fusion power is in the sun. So you have this enormous fusion reactor, and all you have to do is collect the power that it's sending out to you,” explains Brophy. “Right now there is a solar powered robotic spacecraft in orbit at Jupiter called Juno. It has big solar arrays, and it powers the entire vehicle. You just need to scale that up and you can scale it up by a lot.”

But, Brophy adds, “space is big, and making big things is very doable.”

• Science Fiction

The 2001 Archive

The special effects of 2001: a space odyssey.

By George D. DeMet Originallly published in DFX , July 1999

More than thirty years after its initial release, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey  still inspires those who see it. Like a piece of fine art or a classical symphony, its appeal has only grown over time. A strikingly unique film, it captivated a generation of young people in the late 1960s, who accepted its visual message with religious fervor. Initially rebuffed by leading film critics, 2001  is today considered one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces.

An epic story spanning both time and space, 2001  begins four million years ago, in a prehistoric African savanna, where mankind’s distant ancestors must learn how to use the first tools in order to survive. The film cuts to the technological utopia of the early 21st century, where life in outer space is an everyday reality. The story then takes us to the first manned space mission to Jupiter, which consists of two human astronauts and a super-intelligent computer named HAL. The final segment of the film contains a fantastical 23-minute light show of special effects and a mystifying conclusion designed to make its audience question themselves and the world around them.

Director Stanley Kubrick, who is also known for films such as Dr. Strangelove , A Clockwork Orange , and Barry Lyndon , first approached science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in early 1964 to collaborate on what both hoped would be “the proverbial good science fiction film”. They spent a year working out the story, and Kubrick began pre-production in the mid-1965.

On the recommendation of Clarke, Kubrick hired spacecraft consultants Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, who had assisted some of the major contractors in the aerospace industry and NASA with developing advanced space vehicle concepts, as technical advisors on the film. Ordway was able to convince dozens of aerospace giants such as IBM, Honeywell, Boeing, General Dynamics, Grumman, Bell Telephone, and General Electric that participating in the production of 2001  would generate good publicity for them. Many companies provided copious amounts of documentation and hardware prototypes free of charge in return for “product placements” in the completed film. They believed that the film would serve as a big-screen advertisement for space technology and were more than willing to help out Kubrick’s crew in any way possible. Lange was responsible for designing much of the hardware seen in the film.

Every detail of the production design, down to the most insignificant element, was designed with technological and scientific accuracy in mind. Senior NASA Apollo administrator George Mueller and astronaut Deke Slayton are said to have dubbed 2001 ‘s Borehamwood, England production facilities “NASA East” after seeing all of the hardware and documentation lying around the studio. Even today, most audiences and critics still find 2001 ‘s props and spaceships more convincing than those in many more recent science fiction movies. While earlier science fiction films had aimed for a streamlined “futuristic” look, 2001 ‘s production design was intended to be as technically credible as possible.

Production designer Anthony Masters was responsible for making Harry Lange’s design concepts a reality. More than a hundred modelmakers assisted him and the other members of the art crew in this task. For greater authenticity, production of many of the film’s props, such as spacesuits and instrument panels, was outsourced to various aerospace and engineering companies. Everything had to meet with Kubrick’s approval before it could be used in the film.

Kubrick’s unrelenting perfectionism was evident when it came to designing the mysterious alien monolith, which appears at various points throughout the film. Originally envisioned as a tetrahedron, none of the models were impressive enough. Kubrick then commissioned a British company to manufacture a three-ton block of transparent lucite, which also lacked the necessary visual impact. The black slab finally used was constructed out of wood and sanded with graphite for a completely smooth finish.

It was not unusual for the crew to go to great lengths to create the film’s unique sets. The film’s’ most impressive set is that of the interior of the spaceship Discovery. To compensate for the weightlessness of outer space, the ship’s crew compartment was envisioned as a centrifuge that would simulate gravity through the centripetal force generated by its rotation. A 30-ton rotating “ferris wheel” set was built by Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group, a British aircraft company at a cost of $750,000. The set was 38 feet in diameter and 10 feet wide. It could rotate at a maximum speed of three miles per hour, and was dressed with the necessary chairs, desks, and control panels, all firmly bolted to the inside surface. The actors could stand at the bottom and walk in place, while the set rotated around them. Kubrick used an early video feed to direct the action from a control room, while the camera operator sat in a gimbaled seat.

2001 ‘s special effects team was supervised by Kubrick himself, and included Con Pederson, Wally Veevers, and Douglas Trumbull, who went on to create effects for other science fiction movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind  and Blade Runner . Work on the film’s 200+ effects scenes had begun even while Kubrick and Clarke were working out the script; Kubrick had used a reel of experimental effects shot in an abandoned New York corset factory to help “sell” the film to studio executives. Kubrick’s crew hoped to set a new standard for quality in visual effects. As Kubrick put it, “I felt it was necessary to make this film in such a way that every special effects shot in it would be completely convincing – something that had never before been accomplished in a motion picture.”

2001  was one of the first films to make extensive use of front projection, a technique where photography is projected from the front of the set onto a reflective surface. The prehistoric Africa scenes were actually filmed in the Borehamwood studio, with second unit photography projected onto a screen behind the actors measuring 40 feet by 90 feet to provide the illusion of an outdoor scene. Front projection was also used for some of the film’s outer space effects scenes. The more traditional technique of rear projection was reserved mainly for the many video displays and computer monitors that appeared in the film.

Although most of the visual effects techniques used in 2001  had been used before, there was one sequence that broke new technical and artistic ground. The “Star Gate” seen in the final segment of the film, where a stream of whirling lights colors streamed around amazed theater audiences, was created using a “Slit Scan” machine developed by Douglas Trumbull, which allowed the filming of two seemingly infinite planes of exposure. Additional effects for the sequence were created applying different colored filters to aerial landscape footage and filming interacting chemicals.

Other effects were achieved through a combination of creative camerawork, hard work, and dedication. To make a stray pen “float” in a weightless environment, it was attached to a rotating glass disk. The illusion of astronauts floating in space was created by hanging stunt performers upside down with wires from the ceiling of the studio, often for hours at a time.

The achievements of 2001 ‘s effects, which were all done without the benefits of computer technology, are nothing less than amazing. Kubrick held his crew to the highest standards to insure that the film’s effects were designed to be as realistic-looking as possible. To insure that every element of an effects scene was as sharp and clear as a single-generation image, he ruled out the use of many techniques that would have been much faster and less expensive. $6.5 million of his $10.5 million budget ended up going toward effects alone, and it was nearly two years after the end of principal photography that film was finally finished.

When audiences first saw 2001  in the spring of 1968, many were baffled. The film lacked a traditional plot structure, contained almost no dialogue, and had an ending that many found confusing. Leading film critics, like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, panned the film, arguing that Kubrick had sacrificed plot and meaning for visual effects and technology. Young audiences soon discovered the film, however, and it became a huge commercial success. The glowing reviews of many younger critics prompted many of the film’s detractors to give it a second chance, and some even retracted their earlier reviews. Articles and books were written, all containing different interpretations of just what the film’s message was. Many agreed that with Stanley Kubrick’s suggestion that as a visual masterpiece, 2001  is intensely subjective and cannot be objectively explained, much like one cannot “explain” Beethoven’s Ninth or Leonardo’s La Gioconda. The film inspired many, who have said they became filmmakers, engineers, or scientists as a result of seeing 2001 .

Even today, 2001  continues to be a part of people’s lives. Films and television commercials consciously evoke its imagery, countless fans post their thoughts about it on the Internet, and articles like this one continue to be written about it. It is a testament to the genius and dedication of Kubrick and his crew that the future they so meticulously constructed still looks so convincing.

Greatful appreciation is given to the following sources used in preparation for this article:

Agel, Jerome, ed. The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 . New York: New American Library, 1970.

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

Lightman, Herb. “Filming 2001: A Space Odyssey”. American Cinematographer , vol 49, no 6.

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Fantastic Flight: The Orion III Spaceplane from "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Publicity poster for '2001'.

The Orion III space plane is one of the most iconic vehicles in sci-fi movie epic "2001: A Space Odyssey." In this photo essay, we'll look at the Orion III and its history, including awesome images of an incredibly accurate, fan-made model. HERE: A publicity poster for "2001" shows Orion III launching from Space Station 5 (a scene that does not appear in the film). At its premiere in 1968, the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" presented to the public a vision of future space travel as routine and comfortable as airplane travel of the day. Daily shuttles flew to orbital space stations, and from there, large carriers took passengers up to a base on the moon. The Orion III space plane represented the first leg of these voyages. In the reality of 1968, an Apollo crew had yet to walk on the moon, and the reusable space shuttle was a distant dream.

Concept Sketch of the German Silverbird

Concept sketch of the German Silverbird suborbital bomber from World War II. Austrian-German engineer Eugen Sänger's concept of a plane that could travel around the world was developed for the Nazi war effort. The plane, called "Silverbird," would have been propelled by a rocket sled, taking off from a 2-mile-long (3.2 kilometers) inclined ramp. Silverbird would pass above the United States to drop its bomb, and then skip around the world to a landing site in Japan. Silverbird was never built, but after the war, German rocket scientists captured by the United States and the Soviet Union went on to influence the space programs of those countries.

Orion's Ascent to Orbit

Sketch of Orion's ascent to orbit. The fully reusable Orion III developed for "2001" was meant to be rail-launched from an inclined ramp at the (fictional) Kennedy Space Port in Florida. The space plane would be boosted by the attached Orion I carrier aircraft. Once at altitude, the booster plane would separate and fly back to Kennedy Space Port for a runway landing and preparation for its next launch.

First Glimpse of Orion in '2001'

A frame from the film showing our first glimpse of Orion in "2001." Orion could carry up to 30 passengers, but space agency official Heywood Floyd travels alone on a chartered Pan American flight, due to the urgency of his trip to the moon to view a newly discovered alien artifact that predates mankind. With no computer-generated imagery available in the 1960s, the exterior of Orion seen in the film is always a physical model about 44 inches (111 centimeters) long. The model had no lights or interior. The scene visible in the windows of the passenger cabin was composited in optically. In most of the handful of shots in which Orion appears, the space plane is a still photo rephotographed on an animation stand. Only when the Orion is shown matching its rotation to the space station is the model filmed in motion.

Interior Passenger Cabin of Orion

"2001" still frame showing the interior passenger cabin of Orion. After engine shutdown, Orion is in a weightless condition. To move around, the flight attendant wears Velcro-covered slippers. Pilots and passengers remain strapped into their seats for the 55-minute flight. Orion's destination, Space Station 5, is in low Earth orbit. The space plane cannot travel deeper into space, to, for example, one of the bases on the moon. For that leg of the trip, another spacecraft must be used, the Aries 1B lunar shuttle.

Pilot's View from Orion Spaceship

A frame from the film shows the pilot's view as Orion approaches the 1,000-foot-diameter (305 meters) double wheel of Space Station 5. To dock, Orion's pilots must align the long axis of the space plane with the rotation axis of the space station and spin up Orion to the required rotation rate. The station appears motionless from Orion's cockpit windows. Space Station 5's exterior is a model about 8 feet (2.4 m) across.

Copy of the Orion Miniature

This is a 44-inch-long copy of the Orion miniature used for filming "2001." Steve Dymszo built the replica from a resin kit by Scott Alexander. The master pattern was designed by Adam K. Johnson, author of the book "2001: The Lost Science" (Griffin Media, 2012). Graphics design by Karl Tate. The Orion spacecraft seen in the film was designed by Harry Lange. The length of the "real" Orion space plane is taken to be 175 feet (53 m), so this miniature is around 1:48 scale.

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Orion's Twin Main Rocket Engines

Featured in this view of the Orion replica are the mouths of the twin main rocket engines, powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Secondary and tertiary rocket engine nozzles also point toward the tail of the ship. Just aft of the large "Pan Am" logo is a ring of emergency explosive bolts and retrorocket jets, which would be fired to separate the tail section should something go wrong with the main engines. Rectangular outlets are visible on the top surface of the wings, presumably for atmospheric flight. The raised fins along the rear edge of the wings are "wing fences" that control airflow when Orion travels faster than Mach 1 (the speed of sound).

Orion's Wing Intake Ports

The openings in the front surface of the wings are intakes, presumably for atmospheric flight. At the very front of the wing roots are landing lights, represented in this model by tiny glass beads. The clear canopy covering the lights is actually a part from a P-51 Mustang airplane plastic model kit. The model features a lit interior cockpit with one pilot figure. The flat surface forward of the cockpit is a sliding heat-shield cover that protects the windows — a feature inspired by the XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic nuclear bomber. The oval opening at the very front of Orion's nose houses a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) tracking system used when docking with Space Station 5.

Underside of the Orion Replica

The underside of the Orion replica. At the wing tips are clear parts representing the anti-collision strobe lights. The ridged trapezoid-shaped plate between the wings is a hypersonic airflow correction plate. Forward and rear landing-gear doors are also visible. The underside of Orion features a titanium heat shield for heat dissipation when returning through Earth's atmosphere.

Space Shuttle Concept, 1970

Space shuttle concept, 1970. An Orion-like configuration with a piloted "flyback" booster stage was briefly considered for NASA's space shuttle in the early 1970s. Ultimately, a configuration with an external fuel tank and strap-on solid rocket boosters was chosen instead.

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Karl's association with Space.com goes back to 2000, when he was hired to produce interactive Flash graphics. From 2010 to 2016, Karl worked as an infographics specialist across all editorial properties of Purch (formerly known as TechMediaNetwork).  Before joining Space.com, Karl spent 11 years at the New York headquarters of The Associated Press, creating news graphics for use around the world in newspapers and on the web.  He has a degree in graphic design from Louisiana State University and now works as a freelance graphic designer in New York City.

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Stanley Kubrick's 50 Year Old Sci-Fi Masterpiece Is More Relevant Than Ever

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Innovation for survival and domination, humanity's downfall by way of design, what happens when technology works against us.

Science fiction and social commentary have always walked hand in hand with one another. During the Cold War, the supposed communist threat was depicted in the form of invaders from Mars. Gene Roddenberry used the original Star Trek series to platform topics of prejudice, war, and religion . Looking at 20th-century science fiction from a modern perspective, many topics are still relevant today. This is the case with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . Years before George Lucas would take space opera to new heights with Star Wars , Kubrick took us on a journey that depicted the human race's need for domination through technological innovation.

As the discussion regarding AI and an ever-growing dependency on technology continues, there's a lot in Kubrick's magnum opus that is more relevant than ever. The hubris that has always accompanied advancements in technology is on full display, and Kubrick provides his audience with a thorough examination that's just as relevant now as it was when it was first released over five decades ago.

2001: A Space Odyssey

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Humankind's history is one of adapting to changes necessary for survival. More than just the need to prolong existence, there's also a capacity to dominate. The aspects of domination and survival are integral to the first act of 2001: A Space Odyssey , with the dawn of man. Evolution, which thrives on the theory of survival of the fittest, becomes established with a group of apes developing the use of weapons to hunt for food.

Set to the tune of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," man learns to kill for food and tame his environment. An ape strikes the skull of an animal with a bone. Images of animals succumbing to this new-found knowledge follow, illustrating the capacity to dominate the environment to ensure survival . In a moment of triumph, the bone is thrown into the sky and transitions into a spaceship in the distant future. Kubrick's unique use of images establishes the continuity of the need to survive and dominate as humankind takes to the stars to tame new frontiers.

2001: A Space Odyssey: Does the Sci-Fi Masterpiece Still Hold Up?

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a grand symphony of innovation, challenging conventions and embracing ambiguity, leaving audiences in awe.

The crux of 2001: A Space Odyssey involves a scientific mission to Jupiter. Astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), along with three colleagues who are being held in hibernation, and a computer known as the HAL-9000. While 2001: A Space Odyssey was filmed before the moon landing , Kubrick's vision of future space exploration, aided by the help of co-writer Arthur C. Clarke, isn't too far off from what would develop in the years following the film's release .

Viewing these sequences with the hindsight of a modern perspective, it's shockingly prescient. The mission is largely dependent on the HAL-9000, as an AI overseeing the technical operations of the equipment that will be necessary to complete the mission, and the life support systems of the crew in hibernation. With the HAL-9000 providing oversight and being thought of as another member of the crew, the reliance upon him for success places Dave and Frank at the mercy of technological innovation . Just as he did with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , Kubrick highlights how technology has advanced humanity but will ultimately lead to its undoing .

2001: A Space Odyssey: Revisiting Kubrick's Masterpiece and Explaining the Ending

The significance of 2001 is timeless in every sense of the word, but what makes this Space Odyssey so good, and what's with the ending?

In a world where technology is relied upon daily, error caused by something created by human hands is the ultimate betrayal. There have been a plethora of unique antagonists who strike a chord with the viewing audience. But, the HAL-9000 epitomizes the reliance on innovation and serves as one of the screen's most terrifying creations .

Because of its design, the HAL-9000 cannot be subject to reasoning or bargained with . With the HAL-9000 being so crucial to the success of the Jupiter mission and having eyes and ears everywhere, the computer nearly becomes a transcendent entity, watching over its subjects and eliminating those who pose a potential threat. These acts of self-preservation are cold and calculating and come close to mimicking the human traits that are often associated with sociopathy .

The fact that the technology designed to keep the astronauts alive becomes their biggest threat is even more chilling today than it was in 1968 because it's all the more real. Five decades after its first release in theaters, 2001: A Space Odyssey is more relevant than ever. As humanity progresses with new technological innovations, we must always be aware of the dangers of relying on them too much.

The 10 Most Rewatchable Space Opera Movies, Ranked

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Hollywood has long since been enamored with the possibility of space travel , as many of the earliest science fiction movies about life beyond Earth were developed before the development of NASA and the Apollo 11 program. Science fiction has developed many recurring archetypes about the vastness of the universe, including flying saucer, different alien races, and the possibility of interstellar voyages. Space operas occupy a unique subgenre of science fiction that may try to resemble some aspects of reality, but also includes some elements that are the work of pure fantasy.

Modern sci-fi films continue to push the boundaries of the space opera genre , as many of the popular superhero film franchises from DC and Marvel Studios draw heavily from the classic space epics that were developed in the 1950s as B-movies. Here are the ten most rewatchable space opera movies, ranked.

10 ‘Serenity’ (2005)

Directed by joss whedon.

Serenity served as a beautiful conclusion to the cult science fiction series Firefly , which was sadly canceled by FOX after only airing one season. Although Firefly had a great cast of characters that feasibly could have sustained several years of a great television series, Serenity offered a satisfying conclusion that nonetheless opened up the door for more adventures, should Joss Whedon and his creative collaborations ever choose to develop a follow up project.

Serenity managed to capture the heart, humor, and sociopolitical commentary that had made Firefly so beloved among space opera fans, and the advanced budget didn’t take away from its inherently scrappy quality. Although it was great to see the original cast reprise their roles, Serenity also introduced several new characters to the Firefly universe; Chiwitel Ejiofor in particular stood out as the terrifying new villain known only as “The Operative.”

Serenity (2005)

Rent on Amazon

9 ‘Starship Troopers’ (1997)

Directed by paul verhoeven.

Starship Troopers was a highly risky science project that was simply ahead of its time, as Paul Verhoeven chose to make a film that couldn’t have been more different than the original source material that it was based on. Rather than making a straightforward military action film, Verhoeven crafted a satire of propaganda that intentionally featured shallow characters and fascist ideology.

The brilliance of Starship Troopers stands out even more upon repeated viewings , as it is so brilliantly interlaced with the narrative that some audiences weren’t sure what to make of the film when it was first released. It’s rather chilling to see how easy it can to tie in these dark themes within what would otherwise pass as a standard space opera, but repeated viewings only call further attention to the extraordinary attention-to-detail that Verhoeven crafted with one of the most defining masterpieces of his very impressive career of making confrontational cinema.

Starship Troopers

Humans in a fascist, militaristic future wage war with giant alien bugs.

Watch on Netflix

8 ‘Galaxy Quest’ (1999)

Directed by don zimmerman.

Galaxy Quest is a giant love letter to space opera films and their fans , and includes more than a few niche references that those that are dedicated to the Star Trek franchise may appreciate. Tim Allen was never more charismatic , but the supporting cast includes a wealth of great character actors, including Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Justin Long, Tony Shalhoub, and Sam Rockwell.

Galaxy Quest is worth rewatching because it shows the positive side of fandom , a novelty when so much of modern discourse is dominated by toxicity. Although Galaxy Quest plays most of its most impressive special effects sequences for laughs, it also serves as a legitimately entertaining space epic in its own right; those that may have missed out on the Star Trek references can still enjoy Galaxy Quest as a cheeky look at what it’s like to be given the opportunity to live out the fantasy that has only been hinted at in media.

Galaxy Quest

Watch on Paramount Plus

7 ‘The Fifth Element’ (1997)

Directed by luc besson.

The Fifth Element is one of the most imaginative space operas of all-time , as Luc Besson is simply a visual stylistic like no other. Although the similarities to the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky and his work on The Incal have been the subject of controversy, The Fifth Element is so visually inventive that it's hard to look at it as anything other than a complete success.

The Fifth Element asks a lot of its viewers to buy into the heavy amount of world-building , but it also presents charismatic characters that warrant serious emotional investment. Bruce Willis plays the perfectly snarky anti-hero that this type of bizarre space opera asks for in order to be self-aware about its inherent ridiculousness, and Gary Oldman gives a hilariously over-the-top performance that is so delightfully evil that he steals almost every scene that he is involved with.

The Fifth Element

Watch on AMC+

6 ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956)

Directed by fred m. wilcox.

Forbidden Planet is a foundational work in the science fiction genre that arguably laid the groundwork for many of the other space operas that were developed in the subsequent decades. Although it has become easy to dismiss it as a silly B-movie that featured cheesy special effects, Forbidden Planet actually deals with some more pressing issues, as it drew inspiration from the classic William Shakespeare play The Tempest.

Forbidden Planet was also notable in its creation of the character Robby the Robot , who became one of the first sentient android characters in science fiction that was given a real character arc. It’s even more impressive to rewatch Forbidden Planet considering it was released a full decade before the Moon landing. The stunning artwork and set decoration in Forbidden Planet still looks good today, as no amount of computer-generated imagery is more impressive than this level of handcrafted work.

Forbidden Planet

Watch on Tubi

5 ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ (2014)

Directed by james gunn.

Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t just one of the best installments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe , but arguably the film that proved that the superhero genre had a future beyond simple origin stories. James Gunn ’s labor of love may have been based on a rather niche comic book run, but the characters of Peter Quill ( Chris Pratt ), Gamora ( Zoe Saldana ), Groot ( Vin Diesel ), Rocket Racoon ( Bradley Cooper ), Drax ( Dave Bautista ), and Nebula ( Karen Gillan ) became as beloved as any of the more established heroes in The Avengers .

Guardians of the Galaxy explored the vastness of space travel , yet also paid tribute to the classics that inspired it with a terrific soundtrack of great needle drops. Although a majority of the MCU sequels have offered diminishing returns, Gunn was able to wrap up a compelling trilogy that stood on its own as a great narrative, regardless of what was happening in the rest of the related films.

Guardians of the Galaxy

A group of intergalactic criminals must pull together to stop a fanatical warrior with plans to purge the universe.

Watch on Disney+

4 ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ (1982)

Directed by nicholas meyer.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the greatest Star Trek film ever made because it told an emotional, human story about saying goodbye to old friends. Viewers that had enjoyed the original series in the 1960s had grown to love seeing Captain James T. Kirk ( William Shatner ) and Commander Spock ( Leonard Nimoy ) go on adventures together, so seeing them face off with an old enemy on what could be their last mission was incredibly impactful.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan brilliantly explores space combat in a way that feels similar to classic Cold War submarine thrillers. While Nimoy did eventually reprise his role when he directed the subsequent film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , his emotional farewell to Kirk is still one of the most moving moments in the history of the space opera genre.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

3 ‘dune: part two’ (2024), directed by denis villenueve.

Dune: Part Two is an ambitious foray into the darker aspects of Frank Herbert’s source material that examined the inherent issues with heralding a young leader as a messianic figure. Although the first Dune film that Denis Villenueve delved deep into the generational feud between House Harkonnen and House Atreides that kickstarted a galactic war, Dune: Part Two showed how Paul ( Timothee Chalamet ) began to “break bad” in his attempt to take down the Emperor ( Christopher Walken ) for killing his father, Duke Leto ( Oscar Isaac ). Despite a few major deviations from the source material,

Dune: Part Two is an amazing adaptation of a classic novel that was often deemed to be “unadaptable.” There is a significant amount of anticipation for what Villeneuve will do next with Dune: Messiah , as Dune: Part Two is an achievement that will be very difficult to surpass.

Dune: Part Two

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Paul Atreides unites with Chani and the Fremen while seeking revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family.

Watch on Max

2 ‘Star Wars: Episode V- The Empire Strikes Back’ (1980)

Directed by irvin kershner.

Star Wars: Episode V- The Empire Strikes Back is the darkest and most complex of the original Star Wars films , as it took the franchise to daring new heights by exploring the characters in greater detail. This was the film that showed the brutality of the dark side through Darth Vader’s ( David Prowse ) obsession with finding Luke Skywalker ( Mark Hamill ), but also amounted for some hope through the introduction of the wise JEdi Master Yoda ( Frank Oz ).

Between the exhilarating opening battle on Hoth, the lifting of the X-Wing fighter on Dagobah, the thrilling asteroid chase, and the climactic lightsaber duel on Bespin, Star Wars: Episode V- The Empire Strikes Back contains some of the most memorable moments in the Star Wars saga. It remains the best example of how a sequel can be more thought-provoking, daring, and introspective than its predecessor.

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

After the Rebels are overpowered by the Empire, Luke Skywalker begins his Jedi training with Yoda, while his friends are pursued across the galaxy by Darth Vader and bounty hunter Boba Fett.

1 ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

Directed by stanley kubrick.

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the greatest films ever made , and a testament to what an extraordinary artist Stanley Kubrick was. It’s difficult to overstate how groundbreaking the visuals actually were, as a year before the Apollo 11 landing Kubrick was able to show how gravity and technology worked in outer space.

2001: A Space Odyssey asks existential questions about the origins of mankind, the limits of technology, and the search for a creator that have become heavily influential on all films moving forward, and not just those in the science fiction genre. Although it's a film that has been referenced and ripped off countless times in the multiple decades since its initial release, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen like Kubrick intended is something that every cinephile needs to do at some point in their lifetime.

2001: A Space Odyssey

After uncovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, a spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to find its origins: a spacecraft manned by two men and the supercomputer HAL 9000.

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