2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
For other uses, see 2001: A Space Odyssey (disambiguation).
2001: A Space Odyssey is an influential
1968 science fiction film directed by
Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay, written by Kubrick and
Arthur C. Clarke, deals with themes of
human evolution and
technology,
artificial intelligence, and
extra-terrestrial life. The film is notable for its scientific realism, its pioneering use of
special effects, and its reliance upon ambiguous yet provocative imagery and sound in place of traditional techniques of narrative cinema. The film has received a wide spectrum of positive and negative reviews upon release, although it is widely recognized today among
critics as one of history's
greatest films. It remains, however, one of the most controversial films among casual viewers. It won the
Academy Award for
visual effects (
Stanley Kubrick) and the
Kansas City Film Critics Circle awards for Best Director and Best Film of 1968 .
Filming of
2001 began on
December 29,
1965 at
Shepperton Studios in
Shepperton, England. The studio was chosen because of its size; it was large enough for the 60 by 120 by 60 foot pit built as the set for the Tycho crater excavation scene, the first to be shot.
[Gedult, Carolyn. The Production: A Calendar. Reproduced in: Castle, Alison (Editor). The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Taschen, 2005. ISBN 3822822841]From
1966 filming took place at
MGM-British Studios in
Borehamwood, England. It was here that a "command post" was established to facilitate the filming of special effects scenes, described as a "huge throbbing nerve center... with much the same frenetic atmosphere as a Cape Kennedy blockhouse during the final stages of Countdown."
[Lightman, Herb A. Filming 2001: A Space Odyssey. American Cinematographer, June 1968. Excerpted in: Castle, Alison (Editor). The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Taschen, 2005. ISBN 3822822841]The film was shot in
Super Panavision 70 with a 65mm film negative format, and the release prints were made using the
Technicolor dye transfer process.Kubrick began editing the film in March of 1968 and made his final 19-minute cut just days prior to the public premiere on
April 6. By this time the film had run $4.5 million over its initial $6 million budget and was 16 months late of its scheduled release.
This film was the first major use of retro-reflective
matting, used in the African scenes where the proto-humanoids discover the use of tools as weapons. Static transparency images of landscapes, taken in Africa, were projected through a partially silvered mirror, placed diagonally in front of the camera. The projected image illuminates both the costumed characters and a retro-reflective glass bead background screen. The projected image is not visible on the characters as its intensity is well below other illumination. It is, however, reflected selectively back to the film camera by the background screen, passing through the partially silvered mirror, along with the view of the characters, and is seen as a background in the complete scene. This technique produced much more realistic images than other methods available at the time but is now supplanted by more flexible computer processed blue or green-screen methods.
Kubrick filmed a number of scenes which did not make the first cut. These include a schoolroom scene at the Clavius moon base in which Kubrick's own daughter appeared in the cast, and the purchase of a bush baby in a futuristic department store for Heywood Floyd's little girl who appeared in the video phone scene. Additional footage includes some redundant spacewalk material and a scene where Bowman retrieves a spare antenna part from a hexagonal corridor. MGM made a publicity still from this which was used as a lobby card. But most notable was an opening scene where scientists are shown discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It has been rumoured that Arthur C. Clarke himself portrayed one of the scientists.
[Agel, Jerome. The Making of Kubrick's 2001. The Agel Publishing Company, 1970. (out of print)] A notorious perfectionist, Kubrick's final cut of the film was made after the April 1968 premiere, when he removed 10 minutes of footage.
[The Lost Worlds of 2001] |
Tribal "man-apes" approach a mysterious, black monolith |
2001 opens with
György Ligeti's Overture from
Atmosphères, unaccompanied by any on-screen image (in a
theater presentation the curtains would remain drawn for this duration). The following introductory sequence depicts a perfectly aligned
Sun rising behind the
Earth and
Moon accompanied by the first movement of
Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra. The remainder of the film can be divided into three chapters, each of which are preceded by on-screen title cards.
The first chapter of
2001 entitled "The Dawn of Man" begins in the late
Pliocene epoch and contains no dialogue. It shows a tribe of prehistoric "man-apes" in their attempts at survival: avoiding a predatory
leopard and capturing a
waterhole from another tribe. A mysterious, black, rectangular
monolith appears near their habitation, and is nervously approached and touched by members of the tribe.
Following this encounter, a lone man-ape is shown scavenging through a pile of bones. The man-ape picks up a bone and plays with it, becoming increasingly aggressive until striking the surrounding bones with destructive force. The man-apes are next shown eating meatâ€"presumably that of a freshly killed
tapir, many of which are depicted throughout the chapter. With their newfound weapon, this tribe of man-apes now recapture the waterhole, beating to death another man-ape in the process.
In the famous
match cut that follows, a victorious man-ape throws his bone weapon into the air and the film jumps forward to the modern era, the image of the bone matched to that of a man-made
satellite.
The remainder of the first chapter takes place in what was the near-future, presumably around the year
2001, as suggested by the film's title. It first depicts a transport shuttle docking with an Earth-orbital
space station, several shots of the interior of which show it carries only one passenger:
Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (
William Sylvester), a scientist bound for the Moon. Floyd arrives at the station, as a monotone stewardess announces the first spoken lines of the film: "Here you are, sir. Main Level, please." Floyd meets Mr. Miller of Station Security, and the two walk through the sterile station to a restaurant, but Floyd stops to make a
videophone call as Miller goes on ahead.
In the first narrative
exposition, Floyd meets a group of Russian scientists including an "old friend" Elena and sits down for a brief chat. After Floyd reveals that he is going to the Moon base Clavius, Dr. Andrei Smyslov (
Leonard Rossiter) inquires as to why nobody had been able to establish contact there, and Elena mentions that the base recently denied emergency landing to one of their shuttles. Floyd expresses a blank surprise, but when Smyslov brings up a rumor that an
epidemic has broken out at the base, Floyd firmly refuses to comment on the situation.
The next scene depicts a lunar landing craft Aries heading towards the Moon base Clavius. It lands and is lowered on an elevated platform into the base. In a meeting room here, Floyd lectures to a small room of scientists and/or officials on the importance of hiding the true reason for Clavius' suspicious activities: that they have discovered a monolith buried on the Moon. The scene cuts to a transport shuttle on the Moon, where Floyd and two other scientists debate the nature of the monolith, and assert that it had been "deliberately buried." The shuttle lands at the dig site, and the scientists warily approach the monolith. They gather around it for a group photo, but an earsplitting, continuous high-pitched tone emanates suddenly from the monolith.
Before any explanation is offered for the monolith's tone, the film jumps forward once again to its second chapter entitled "Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later." The story here takes place on the spaceship
Discovery One that has been sent on a mission to the planet
Jupiter. Accompanying the pilots,
astronauts Dave Bowman (
Keir Dullea) and
Frank Poole (
Gary Lockwood), are three scientists in
cryogenic hibernation and the
HAL 9000 (
Douglas Rain) on-board supercomputer. Various scenes are shown depicting life on-board the ship:
exercising,
eating, watching
television,
sleeping,
sunbathing, playing
chess, and
drawing. During a conversation with Bowman, HAL reveals an anxiety about the mission and immediately reports a fault in a component of the ship's Earth communications system. Bowman exits the Discovery in an
EVA pod to retrieve and repair the part, but upon manual examination no fault can be found. HAL suggests restoring the part and waiting for it to fail to determine the problem. Bowman and Poole retreat to an EVA pod to attempt to have private conversation about the consequences of HAL's potential error in judgement: disconnection. Unbeknownst to them, HAL is reading their lips. An
intermission follows.
Poole now exits the Discovery in an EVA pod to restore the part while Bowman watches from inside the ship. As Poole exits the EVA pod to restore the part, HAL uses the empty pod to murder Poole, who is next shown floating lifelessly into space. Bowman exits the ship in another EVA pod to rescue him (forgetting to bring his space helmet). While Bowman is outside, HAL murders the three hibernating scientists by disabling their life support systems.
Bowman manages to retrieve Poole's body and upon returning commands HAL to "open the pod bay doors." HAL refuses and reveals that he knows of Bowman's plan to disconnect him as discussed with Poole in the EVA pod earlier. He also informs Bowman that without his helmet it would be fatal to enter the emergency air lock. He decides to do it anyway, and by using the EVA pod's ejection system propels himself into the airlock, seals the chamber, and fills it with oxygen.
Bowman next enters HAL's 'brain room' with the intention to disable him. With HAL pleading for him to stop, Bowman proceeds to dismantle and disconnect him. Gradually HAL reverts back to his earliest programming, loses his memory, and sings the song
Daisy Bell as he slowly deteriorates. HAL's shut-down appears to trigger a pre-recorded video briefing recorded on Earth by Heywood Floyd, explaining to the crew (although Bowman is now the only survivor) the true nature of the mission, which is to investigate the signal sent from the monolith on the Moon.
|
The "Star Child" looking at the Earth. |
The third chapter, entitled "Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite" begins with a view of a third monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and of the Discovery One entering the Jupiter system. As the planets and monolith appear to align, Bowman again exits the Discovery One in an EVA pod, and flies towards the phenomenon.
Bowman, in the EVA pod, now appears to travel across vast distances of space and time through a tunnel of colorful light and sound, in what is often labeled the "Star Gate sequence." He arrives alone in a
Louis XVI style hotel room. He is depicted through various phases of aging, until finally shown lying on what appears to be his death-bed, at the foot of which appears a fourth and final monolith. Bowman slowly reaches out to it and is seemingly transformed into a giant
fetus-like being surrounded by a ball of light, commonly referred to as the "Star Child", looking across to Earthâ€"the film's final scene.
The US
premiere was on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in
Washington, DC. The original release was in a
70mm projection format with a six-track stereo magnetic soundtrack. The projection aspect ratio was 2.21:1. The film was also released in the
35mm anamorphic format for general release beginning in the fall of 1968; these prints were available with either 4-track magnetic stereo or optical monaural soundtracks.
The original 70mm release was billed as a
Cinerama production in theaters (such as the
Indian Hills Theater in
Omaha, Nebraska) which were equipped with special projection optics and a deeply curved screen. In non-Cinerama theaters the release was simply identified as a "70mm" production.
In 1980, it became the second movie to be released on VHS by
MGM/CBS Home Video.
It has been released on
Region 1 DVD three times, once by
MGM Home Entertainment in 1998 and twice by
Warner Home Video in 1999 and 2001. The MGM release featured a booklet, the film, theatrical trailer and an interview with Arthur C. Clarke. The soundtrack was remastered in 5.1 surround sound as well. The 1999 release from Warner omitted the booklet and featured a re-release trailer. The 2001 release featured the re-release trailer and the film presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.20:1 and digitally re-mastered from the original 70* mm print, the audio was remixed in 5.1 surround sound. The interview and booklet were omitted from this release as well.
It has also been transmitted in an HDTV format on the
HDnet movie network. No high definition video disc releases have yet been announced, however.
Upon release,
2001 received mostly positive reviews, and quickly gained a cult following (its psychedelic visual imagery was quickly embraced by the
counterculture).
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars in his original review, believing the film "succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale"
[Roger Ebert, Reviews: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. Retrieved from http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19680412/REVIEWS/804120301/1023]Yet the movie also had its detractors. Critic
Pauline Kael said it was "a monumentally unimaginative movie"
[rogerebert.com, Critical Debates: 2001: A Space Odyssey, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19680101/CRITICALDEBATE/40305008],and
Stanley Kauffmann of
The New Republic called it "a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull."
[Stanley Kauffmann, "Lost in the Stars", The New Republic. Retrieved from http://www.krusch.com/kubrick/Q16.html]2001 earned one
Academy Award for
Best Visual Effects and was nominated for
Best Art Direction,
Best Director (Kubrick), and
Original Screenplay (Kubrick, Clarke).
2001 is consistently on the
Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was number 22 on
AFI's
100 Years... 100 Movies, number 40 on its
100 Years, 100 Thrills, included on its
100 Years, 100 Quotes ("Open the pod bay doors, HAL."), is the only science fiction film to make the
Sight and Sound poll for ten best movies, is the
Online Film Critics Society top science fiction film
[http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com/pages/pr/top100scifi], and been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry.
Academy Awards
Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards
* Best Director 1968 --
Stanley Kubrick* Best Film of 1968
|
Keir Dullea as David Bowman. |
The story of
2001 is based in part on various short stories by co-screenwriter
Arthur C. Clarke, most directly "
The Sentinel" (1951), and indirectly Clarke's running themes of humanity's "ascendance" best summed up in
Childhood's End (1953). Kubrick collaborated with Clarke in writing the screenplay, and
Clarke's novel was released shortly after the release of the film.
In early conversations, Kubrick and Clarke jokingly called their project
How the Solar System Was Won, an allusion to the epic 1962
Cinerama film
How the West Was Won, which presents a generation-spanning historical epic told in distinct episodes. Like
How the West Was Won,
2001 is divided into distinct episodes.
As Clarke wrote in 1972: "Quite early in the game I went around saying, not very loudly, '
MGM doesn't know this yet, but they're paying for the first $10,000,000 religious movie.'"
[ Arthur C. Clarke: Meanings: The Myth of 2001, excerpted from "Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations", ©1972 Harper and Row)]For an elaboration of the Clarke/Kubrick collaborative work on the book and film, see
The Lost Worlds of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, Signet., 1972.
|
The "Star Gate" sequence. |
Since its premiere,
2001: A Space Odyssey has been analyzed and interpreted by multitudes of people ranging from professional movie critics to amateur writers and science fiction fans.
Film criticism has existed since the earliest days of the motion picture, but
2001 holds a place unique in film history due to its openness to interpretation by audiences.
Kubrick encouraged people to explore their own interpretations of the film, and refused to offer an explanation of "what really happened" in the movie, preferring instead to let audiences embrace their own ideas and theories. In a 1968 interview with
Playboy magazine, Kubrick stated:
|
Spaceship USSC Discovery XD-1 launching an EVA pod. Note the deliberately non-aerodynamic design of both craft. |
In general,
2001 is highly realistic: it is one of the few
science-fiction films to accurately portray space (an approximate
vacuum) as having no sound and to have spacecraft producing no sound while traveling through space. The film is also notable for its accurate portrayal of
weightlessness on board the
Discovery. Tracking shots inside the rotating "wheel" which provides
artificial gravity is contrasted in the film with the weightlessness outside the wheel during the repair and the HAL disconnection scenes. The scenes in the pod bay where the astronauts are walking may be explained by a '
velcro'-like coating of the floor, which explains the slow pace of the walk.
Much was made by MGM of this aspect of the film in its promotion, claiming in a 1968 publicity brochure that "Everything in
2001: A Space Odyssey can happen within the next three decades, and... most of the picture will happen by the beginning of the next millennium."
[MGM Studios. Facts for Editorial Reference, 1968. Reproduced in: Castle, Alison (Editor). The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Taschen, 2005. ISBN 3822822841] In addition the film does have a number of minor failures of scientific accuracy, such as:
* The height of lunar mountains was overestimated, as the film was made before the lunar expeditions of the
Apollo program, and because meteoric erosion was underestimated.
* The gravity in Clavius base appears to be that of Earth's rather than lunar gravity.
* The dust blown up by the exhaust of the lunar shuttle is seen to billow up from the landing pad, rather than radiate out in straight lines, as would happen in the near-vacuum of the lunar surface.
* The Earth is shown in varying phases during the landing maneuvers of the
Aries 1B moon ship (an error of
continuity as well as science).
* In the sequence in which David Bowman blows the hatch on his space pod to make an unprotected entry to Discovery's airlock, there is a shot with Dave rebounding in the airlock chamber, while his space pod is still sitting just outside the airlock door. Since the pod is not fixed to
Discovery, the blowing of the pod's hatch should have caused the pod to move away on the thrust of its escaping atmosphere—though rather slowly, given a rough estimation of the mass and speed of ejected air (and Bowman) in relation to the mass of the pod. This being said, it is not impossible that the ejection procedure involves automatic compensation by the thrusters of the pod, as in
stationkeeping.
* There is a somewhat famous, though small, technical error when Heywood Floyd is flying to the moon. Supposedly in a weightless state, he sips through a straw, and when he lets go of it, the fluid slides back into the container.
|
The Centrifuge in Discovery One â€" seen here, astronaut Frank Poole is jogging around its circumference like a hamster in a cage. |
* Though the crew quarters in the spaceship
Discovery are arranged in a rotating wheel to simulate gravity, which is often overlooked in science fiction, the wheel's small radius would require a fairly rapid
RPM (five to ten RPM depending on the actual radius) to produce earth-like gravity. It is suggested that the human body becomes dizzy, nauseated and disoriented when exposed to high
Coriolis forces, and few if any humans could become accustomed to high levels of rotation. In addition, the amount of gravity exerted on the human body would vary between the feet, waist and head. A better design to reduce the gradient of centripetal force would have been to rotate the entire ship, and have the crew section and the drive section swinging from the central AE-35/Antenna structure tethered by strong cables. However, this is assuming the crew quarters rotate to simulate Earth gravity. Were the purpose to simulate, say, lunar gravity, the section could rotate much more slowly.
* In one scene, a flight attendant grabs the pen of a sleeping Heywood Floyd as it floats in zero gravity inside a spaceship cabin. The pen is rotating, but it is not rotating about its own center of mass; instead, it is rotating about a center that is significantly external to the pen. This happens because, in reality, the pen was mounted on a large, transparent, rotating disk from which the actress playing the flight attendant plucked it, and it was not mounted at the center of the disk. In an actual zero-gravity environment, some force would have to be acting upon the pen in order to compel it to rotate around anything other than its own center of mass.
* Also, earlier in the same scene, as the flight attendant is walking back to Heywood Floyd, the camera shows a close-up shot of her feet/shoes which are labeled "Grip Shoes", suggesting that they are the only things keeping her planted to the floor. However when she is transferring her weight to her right foot, the tip of her left foot bends back, indicating that it is bearing weight.
The film made a number of predictions of the future. Some were accurate, while some were not.
Accurate predictions include:
|
One of the more accurate predictions made in the film: small, portable, flat-screen televisions. |
*
Ubiquitous computers.
*Flat-screen computer monitors (these were simulated by
rear projection in the film).
*Small, portable, flat-screen televisions.
*In-flight television screens with a
wide aspect.
*
Glass cockpits in spacecraft.
*The proliferation of TV stations (the
BBC's channels numbering at least 12).
*Telephone numbers with more digits than in the 1960s.
*The survival of corporations like
IBM,
Aeroflot, and
Hilton Hotels to the year 2001.
*The ability of a computer to beat an average human player easily at a game of chess.
*The use of
credit cards with data stripes, for use as with ATMs. (The card Heywood Floyd inserts into the telephone is an
American Express card; a close-up photo of the prop reveals that it contained a
barcode rather than a
magnetic strip, but the principle is the same.)
*
Biometric identification. The film shows voice print identification on arrival at the space station.
*The basic design of the 213 ft
Orion III Pan Am Orbital
Clipper can be seen in the form of the smaller Orbital Sciences
X-34, which is being prepared as a plane-launched test orbiter.
* High levels of co-operation and friendliness between astronaut teams from both the USA and Eastern Europe.
|
The Aries 1B Transfer Vehicle landing. This vision of an underground moonbase, is among the film's inaccurate predictions. |
Some of the film's predictions of the future turned out to be inaccurate:
* Space travel is incorrectly portrayed as being commonplace by 2000. In the film,
** colonies (at least 2) have been established on the moon,
** manned missions to Jupiter are feasible,
** hotels in orbit, part of a revolving 2000ft Space Station,
** commercial space flight is routine,
** and technology is available to place humans in "
suspended animation".
*HAL's speech, understanding and self-determining abilities exceed the actual year 2001 state of the art by orders of magnitude.
*The survival of
Pan American Airlines and the
Bell System to the year 2000.
* The survival of the
Soviet Union to the year 2000; a
hammer and sickle is incorporated into the
Aeroflot logo on a flight bag visible during the "Russian conversation" scene on the space station (However, Aeroflot airlines still uses the hammer and sickle in their logo for brand recognition purposes).
Music
Music plays a crucial part in
2001, and not only because of the relatively sparse dialogue. From very early on in production, Kubrick decided that he wanted the film to be a primarily non-verbal experience, one that did not rely on the traditional techniques of
narrative cinema, and in which music would play a vital role in evoking particular moods. In this respect,
2001 harks back to the central power that music had in the era of
silent film.
The film is remarkable for its innovative use of
classical music taken from existing commercial records. Major feature films were (and still are) typically accompanied by elaborate
film scores and/or songs written especially for them by professional composers. But although Kubrick started out by commissioning an original orchestral score, he later abandoned this, opting instead for pre-recorded tracks sourced from existing recordings, becoming one of the first major movie directors to do so, and beginning a trend that has now become commonplace.
In an interview with
Michel Ciment, Kubrick explained:
}}
|
Space Station 5 - Many of the film's space scenes were given a new sense of depth and intrigue, due to the use of a classical score for the film's soundtrack. |
2001 uses works by several classical composers. It features music by
Aram Khachaturian (from the
Gayaneh ballet suite) and famously used
Johann Strauss II's best known waltz, "An der Schönen Blauen Donau" (in English,
On The Beautiful Blue Danube), during the space-station rendezvous and lunar landing sequences.
2001 is especially remembered for its use of the opening from
Richard Strauss's
Also sprach Zarathustra (or "Thus Spake Zarathustra" in English), which has become inextricably associated with the film and its imagery and themes. The film's soundtrack also did much to introduce the modern classical composer
György Ligeti to a wider public, using extracts from his
Requiem,
Atmospheres,
Lux Aeterna and (in an altered form)
Aventures (though without his permission).
}}
In the early stages of production, Kubrick had actually commissioned a
score for 2001 from noted
Hollywood composer
Alex North, who had written the stirring score for
Spartacus and also worked on
Dr. Strangelove. But on
2001 Kubrick did much of the filming and editing, using as his guides the classical recordings which eventually became the music track. In March of 1966 MGM became concerned about
2001's progress and Kubrick put together a show reel of footage to the ad hoc soundtrack of classical recordings. The studio bosses were delighted with the results and Kubrick decided to use these "guide pieces" as the final musical soundtrack, and he abandoned North's score. Unfortunately Kubrick failed to inform North that his music had not been used, and to his great dismay, North did not discover this until he saw the movie at the première. North's soundtrack has since been recorded commercially and was released shortly before his death. Similarly, Ligeti was unaware that his music was in the film until alerted by friends. He was at first unhappy about some of the music used, and threatened legal action over Kubrick's use of an electronically "treated" recording of
Aventures in the "interstellar hotel" scene near the end of the film.
HAL's haunting version of the popular song "Daisy Daisy" (
Daisy Bell) was inspired by a computer synthesized arrangement by
Max Mathews, which
Arthur C. Clarke had heard in 1962 at the
Bell Laboratories Murray Hill facility when he was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce. At that time, a remarkable
speech synthesis demonstration was being performed by physicist
John Larry Kelly, Jr who created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an
IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer
vocoder recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with Max Mathews providing the musical accompaniment. Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed that he later told Kubrick to use it in the film.
[Bell Labs: Where "HAL" First Spoke (Bell Labs Speech Synthesis web site)]Dialogue
Alongside its use of music, the dialogue in
2001 is another notable feature, although the relative lack of dialogue and conventional narrative cues have baffled many viewers. One of the film's most striking features is that there is no dialogue whatsoever for the first twenty minutes or the entire last segment (23 minutes) of the film—the entire narrative of these sections is carried by images, actions, sound effects, and two title cards.
Only when the film moves into the postulated "future" of 2000 and 2001 do we encounter characters who speak. By the time shooting began, Kubrick had deliberately jettisoned much of the intended dialogue and narration, and what remains is notable for its apparently banal nature—an announcement about the lost cashmere sweater, the awkwardly polite chit-chat between Floyd and the Russian scientists, or his comments about the sandwiches en route to the monolith site.
The exchanges between Poole and Bowman on board the
Discovery are similarly flat and unemotional, and generally lack any major narrative content. Kubrick clearly intended that the subtext of these exchanges—what is not said, that is—should be the real, meaningful content. At one point during the film, HAL lip-reads a conversation between Poole and Bowman (they have secured themselves in one of the ship's pods for this conversation, wishing HAL not to hear them, his apparent failure being the object of their discussion). This further indicates the centrality of silence and 'subtextual speaking' to the film.
Narrative through ambient sound
Kubrick's unique treatment of narrative in
2001 is perhaps best exemplified by the scene in which the HAL-9000 computer murders the three hibernating astronauts while Bowman is outside the ship trying to rescue Poole. The inhuman nature of the murders is conveyed with chilling simplicity, in a scene that contains only three elements.
|
Other than the alarm sounds and the constant background hiss of the ship's environmental system, the entire scene is enacted with no dialogue, no music, and no physical movement of any kind. |
When HAL disconnects the life support systems, we see a flashing warning sign, "COMPUTER MALFUNCTION", shown full-screen and accompanied only by the sound of a shrill alarm beep; this is intercut with static shots of the hibernating astronauts, encased in their
sarcophagus-like pods, and close-up full-screen shots of the life-signs monitor of each astronaut. As the astronauts begin to die, the warning changes to "LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL" and we see the vital signs on the monitors beginning to level out. Finally, when the three sleeping astronauts are dead, there is only silence and the ominously banal flashing sign, "LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED".
"The film combines eerie contemporary music with classical waltzes and ballet suites, grunts and snarls with pneumatic hisses and synthesized beeps. One character has a rough, throaty voice but a computer talks with a soft, mellifluous tone (the classic characterization of a smooth-talking villain). Space is accurately depicted as a truly silent vacuum, but Technological Man fills this world with the sound of circulating air systems, humming computers and hissing doors. 2001 is alive with sound, and most of it is environmental. That is, most of it is ambient.
"The legacy of 2001's
Ambient music sound design is clear in later films such as
George Lucas's
THX 1138,
Carroll Ballard's
Never Cry Wolf,
David Lynch's
Eraserhead,
Francis Ford Coppola's
Rumble Fish and
Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner. Filmmakers became far more conscious of the revolutionary possibilities that effective sound editing offered. Noise, quiet, eclectic effects, all contribute to a scene's power, but treating a film as an extended sonic performance, as well as visual, expanded the art." -- D.B. Spalding [
1]
Due to its cultural significance,
2001: A Space Odyssey has been heavily referenced and spoofed in various forms of popular media.
Kubrick did not envisage or plan on a
sequel to
2001. Kubrick was afraid of the later exploitation and recycling of his material in other productions (as was done with the props from MGM's
Forbidden Planet), so, to the dismay of MGM Studios, he ordered all prints of unused scenes, sets, props, and production blueprints destroyed — and thus lost forever.
[Starshipmodeler.com][Piers Bizony, "2001: Filming the Future"] However, Clarke eventually created three sequels, one of which was adapted for the screen in the 1980s.
Clarke went on to write three sequel novels. The first was subsequently adapted into a film, but there has been no serious discussion of filmmakers adapting the other two for the screen.
2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
2061: Odyssey Three (1987)
3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
A sequel film, entitled
2010: The Year We Make Contact, was based on Clarke's 1982 novel
2010: Odyssey Two and was released in 1984. Kubrick was not involved in the production of this film, which was directed by
Peter Hyams in a straightforward style, without Kubrick's mysticism. Clarke saw it as a fitting adaptation of his novel.
[STARLOG magazine]Beginning in 1976,
Marvel Comics published both a
Jack Kirby-written and drawn
adaptation of the film, and a Kirby-created 10-issue monthly series "expanding" on the ideas of the film and novel.
# Arthur C. Clarke
The Lost Worlds of 2001# Daniel Richter (Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke).
Moonwatcher's Memoir: A Diary of 2001: A Space Odyssey # Jerome Agel.
The Making of Kubrick's 2001. The Agel Publishing Company, 1970. (out of print)# Michel Chion.
Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. BFI Pub, 2001.# Piers Bizony.
2001 Filming the Future# Robert Kolker.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey -- New Essays # Stephanie Schwam (Editor), Jay Cocks (Introduction).
The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey # Wheat Leonard F.
Kubrick's "2001"# Castle, Alison (Editor).
The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Taschen, 2005. ISBN 3822822841
*
List of 2001: A Space Odyssey trivia*
Space colonization in popular culture*
Colonization of the Moon*
Space exploration*
Poole - HAL 9000, an examination of the human vs. computer chess game seen in the film
*
2001: A Space Odyssey Internet Resource Archive*
The 2001: A Space Odyssey Collectibles Exhibit*
Original 1965 screenplay for 2001*
Original cinema program for 2001*
The Kubrick Site including many works on
2001
