Quality is timeless.
Released on April 3, 1968, cinema's most ageless landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey has celebrated its 50th anniversary, influencing everything that followed it.
Here are over 100 films, shows, books, songs, and comics across five decades that received its signal.
Here's to the next 50 years...
Chapter Shortcut links:
1 • 2001: A Cinematic Revolution
Influence:
2 • 1960s
3 • 1970s
4 • 1980s
5 • 1990s
6 • 2000s
7 • 2010s
8 • 2020s
• MUSIC PLAYER:
songs inspired by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY,
from 1968 to today.
2 0 0 1 :
A
S P A C E
O D Y S S E Y
quite like this before.”
• “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways,
who was driven far journeys..."
-“The Odyssey”, by Homer
The way to appreciate how everything changed is knowing what it was like before.
• Middlebrow:
In the 1960s, movies were still considered lowbrow and fleeting, unlike the higher arts like painting, opera, and novels. A middle-aged middle class audience with High School educations watched movies once. In the wake of Beatlemania, the first inkling of a burgeoning Youth Market was only beginning to crystalize in Madison Avenue's flowcharts.
• Dying:
Movies were released by regions gradually instead of everywhere at once, depending on good press or word-of-mouth to build up success. Television's popularity was killing films the whole decade, as Hollywood desperately rolled out glossy big-budget musicals that were failing. Instead, parents watched TV, teens went to parties, and students went to rallies.
• Generation Gap:
Most films reaffirmed the conventions and attitudes of the past, with any representation of young people consigned to beach comedies and exploitation cheapies. Art houses rose up around campuses, where the largest generation of all time attended college in record numbers and imbibed avant-garde foreign films.
• “It is unfortunate for us, that, of some of the greatest men, we know least, and talk most."
-“The Odyssey”, by Homer
• Critics:
Many established movie critics were local print stars grounded in either literature or academia or ego, with a make-or-break streak. An emerging vanguard of younger film critics had a sense of it as an art form made by auteurs, such as Hitchcock, Kurasawa, Godard, and Fellini.
• SciFi Pulp:
Most people knew Science Fiction from the escapist space opera adventures prominent in 1940s pulp magazines or comic books. Some were gradually aware of the literate, mature short stories of 1950s writers like Asimov, Bradbury, Bester, and Clarke, which were making inroads to upscale magazines. No one was aware yet of the emerging heretics of the late-'60s New Wave of Science Fiction, like Ellison, Dick, and Le Guin.
• Quality Science Fiction:
Science Fiction films and TV shows were camp knockoffs of the pulps with Bug Eyed Monsters, bikini models, and wire models. The amount of smart SF '50s films with high production values could literally be counted on one hand: THE THING From Another World, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, FORBIDDEN PLANET, THIS ISLAND EARTH, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Few folks in the mainstream '60s had heard of challenging new films like LA JETEE, ALPHAVILLE, or FAHRENHEIT 451.
That was the past. It was time for a new dawn.
what the damned thing is?”
The way to appreciate how everything hinged is knowing how the change was first percieved.
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke decided it was time to evolve. So they made a challenging speculative fiction art film about the progress of humanity for creative thinkers.
It threw away the past and hurtled for the future at the speed of nosebleed.
Upon its release, 2001: A Space Odyssey was reviled and hailed. Hated by people who didn't get it and loved by those who did.
At first, few knew how to appreciate it:
• Egobrats:
New York City critics were often status stars who used scorn to claw their power. They were particularly venomous against the film. Many were clearly threatened by a subjective story they couldn't suss, or irritated they didn't get a DR. STRANGELOVE retread, or were just straight-up genre bigots. Renata Adler's review for The New York Times is toxic, spewing a torrent of classist 'anti-nerd' cliches that becomes painfully embarrassing in its bitter cluelessness. Even the better thinkers like Sarris, Crist, and Kael didn't get it. Their own flaws were in their way.
• "The artist is the only true sage. He comes to us with open mind and with open hands. When his work confronts others he is not up for trial, it is the spectator, if anyone, who is putting himself on record."
-Man Ray
• Next:
The old guard of the 19th Century Salon continuously rejected all of the upcoming Impressionist painters, unaware that their limited outlook was now archaic. Likewise, conventional movie critics held on to an antiquated view of social mores, subject matter, film form, and audience intelligence that wasn't prepared for the radical changes coming to cinema from 1968 through the mid-'70s. 2001 was unrecognized yet as one of the first salvos of the New Hollywood to come.
• "Kubrick dared to reimagine space and time.”
-Darren Aronofsky
• Iconoclast = destroyer of images:
Many general critics and viewers had no awareness of film movements like the French New Wave or Italian art films. They were used to objective Hollywood stories told in a clear manner, reaffirming current doctrine or standardized history. A mirror of mundanity. A technically advanced film like 2001 with narrative leaps, distant performances, minimal dialogue, obtuse mysteries, jarring imagery, and an orgasmic epilogue simply blew their volt. Amazingly, a general attitude prevailed that, if it wasn't seen clearly immedietly, it wasn't worth considering. So they dismissed what they failed to see.
• “Stanley’s design in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ influenced everybody. I’ve never shaken it off."
-Ridley Scott
• Mr. Jones:
Thus one of the greatest films ever made, almost inarguably the most important since CITIZEN KANE, went unrecognized. The 1968 Best Picture award went to THE LION IN WINTER, an historical drama with Broadway pedigree. Which says everything. 2001 only received an Oscar for Special Visual Effects (to Stanley Kubrick, because the Academy didn't know who Pederson and Trumbull were.) Which says everything, still to this day. Something was happening here and they didn't know what it was. Similarly, The Beatles are universally known as the greatest band of all time, yet they never won a Grammy during their tenure. The fact that The Beatles and 2001 weren't recognized for their true worth at the time shows how truly backwards the arbiters were.
But the future was already here.
• “I see it every week.”
-John Lennon
Zefferelli, Fellini, Polanski, Saul Bass, and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov sent congratulatory letters of praise to Kubrick.
The film was supposed to go away because of the NY reviews, which it eventually did in that city after 6 months. But it played for over 18 months in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The Variety magazine auditors astutely noted the film's continued financial success signaled a new social shift from the affluent elders to the counterculture college crowd, who kept it in theatres with repeat viewings. The previous model of the older sedate seeing flicks once had just lost grip. Now, college students conversant with independent and international films debated movies as an art statement, like paintings or music. See feel think.
• “The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art.”
-Stanley Kubrick, Playboy (1968)
Music is understood on a deeper, more complex level because it is felt, bypassing the limits of logic or language. Kubrick had deliberately flattened or stripped out dialogue, to force the viewer into a visceral experience felt instinctively through the visuals, an immersive event like a symphony or a concept album. To see was to concieve. It was like a tune that you couldn't shake, a tune that shook you.
Like life, insight only came from repeated experience. To re-see was to comprehend. John Gelmis of Newsday couldn't break free of the film's spell, writing about it three times, where he pinioned from hating it to liking it to extolling it as the year's masterpiece. Taking it further, both The Christian Science Monitor review (by John Allen) and The Harvard Crimson's lengthy essay (written by Tim Hunter w/ Stephen Kaplan and Peter Jaszi) nailed it, with thorough analysis that was profoundly insightful and accurate about the film's craft and meaning. Much like the Scientific Method: think, try, think more, try again...
The tide was turning, away from urban critics, the Academy, and the middlebrow, away from the fading space camp of BARBARELLA, and in favor of film students, experimentalists, and the conceptual, and toward resonant message allegories like PLANET OF THE APES. From objective to subjective, from obstructionists to the abstract, from dream factories to auteurs.
> The Guardian:
2001: the best sci-fi and fantasy film of all time
2001 forced astute viewers to go deeper and to explore.
• “I was disturbed by its ambiguity when I first saw the film. But I think it will turn out to be the CITIZEN KANE of our era.”
-star Kier Dullea
Madison Avenue lives by the creed of the 3-Second Read: if a passing driver can't read a billboard in three seconds, it's a failure. Simple is best. But this basic practicality becomes insidious, when all shows and news narratives are dumbed down, made 'simple for simpletons'.
The counterculture rejected this. Filmore concert posters were deliberately complex and arresting to force a person to stare at it for a while, to enjoy its intricacies and secrets, to appreciate its sophistication, to divine their own meaning. Saying hippies loved 2001 because they saw it as an acid trip is simple-minded. In reality, the new youth pursued any journey that challenged the mind and led to spiritual revelation. The metaphysical evolution experienced in 2001 was analogous to their new social philosophy, their attempt at a new way of feeling, seeing, and becoming.
• "We are stardust/ We are golden/
We are billion year old carbon/
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
-Joni Mitchell
To the primal. To the progressive. To posterity.
Ape, human, angel.
• “The only way to define the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
The trick to appreciating 2001 is to know what it brought.
• Millennium:
If 1967 had been a rising tide of hopes>, 1968 was a crux point of conflict worldwide>. Wars for profit, mass protest, Government crackdowns, starvation and poverty, hero assassinations, and -looming like the Reaper quietly in the back- the Cold War. Kubrick and Clarke posited the Millennium as turning point with their bold film, a crux point to focus all our energies on progress for everyone. More so than any other source, their film can be credited with the public idea for the following three decades that the Millennium was the hinge of hope. With the present tense, they tried to make the future perfect.
• “Kubrick was saying, ‘I want you to see something. I’m going to take you through something you never thought you’d experience.'”
-Martin Scorsese
• Outlooks:
2001 put an end to provincial attitudes, replacing the local with awareness of time's arc and the infinite. It championed science over superstition. While skirting aroound US-Soviet relations, it was stealthily anti-nuclear weapons, converting atomic power to boosters for spaceships. It warned that our tools could be our salvation or extinction, depending on how we used them.
• “This was a film that was imprinted on the conscious of everyone who saw it and forced them to talk about it and, more importantly, to think about it.”
-William Friedkin
• Realism:
2001 killed the pulps, lifting Science Fiction in the public imagination to a forum for high art. The creators' years of research set a standard for space film realism followed ever since, from APOLLO 13 to 'Star Trek: Enterprise', from THE MARTIAN to 'The First'. A public used to Mission Control coverage for a decade were startled to recognize in the film the extension of their own new reality. 2001 was the hinge to the actual 1969 moon landing. And the moon landing revalidated the film, like the other shoe dropping in public comprehension. Now that interstellar travel was real, 2001 superceded film to become prophecy and fruition and truth. Arthur C. Clarke was as much a visionary as he was the go-to science communicator on any news program.
• "It was the first time people really took science fiction seriously."
—George Lucas
• Aesthetic:
2001 brought a shocking sense of modernity to the screen. It was an art film that moved the masses, full of clean design and Mod futurism. It was hard contrast and bold color, supple plastic and cool metal, perfect central symmetry and radial geometry, abrasively loud and lovely and deadpan and silent, glass visors splayed with impressionistic reflections, rectangles and circles and grids, and lenses that looked back at you. It played to the senses, to the nerves, to the psyche. It was brutal and cold, empty and spiritual.
• "Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
That call me on and on across the universe."
-"Across The Universe" (1969), The Beatles
• Art Film:
2001 was the mainstream turning point that turned movies into film, flicks into personal statements, theatres into exhibitions, and ideas into the possible. It replaced escapist cartoon musicals with widescreen vistas with depth. (The Director Of Photography was Geoffrey Unsworth.) Along with Spaghetti Westerns and film festivals, it brought the underground into the mainstream. It transferred underground techniques into common use: nonlinearity, ambivalence, graphic composition, disorientation, montage, dissonance, synchronicity, the schizoid, the unconcious. It was the first epic thinking movie for the first college generation.
• "It took it to the level of world class, important, profound, philosophical, artistic filmmaking."
-James Cameron
• Next Wave:
2001 was The Experience, a rite of passage for the new pilgrim. Just as it redefined realism, it redefined surrealism. For all the talk of it as excessive, it actually stripped everything down to the essence: the primal, the clean, the professional, the designed, the heirarchal, the silent. The Monolith achieves its potency by being a perfect rectangular slab unnatural to the rounded, messy universe. The film is a running companion with the conceptual pieces of John Cage, the entrancing binary flux of serial music, the hallucinatory introspection of the New Wave Of Science Fiction. It is the shifts of time and destiny of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Its subversion of dialogue narratives in favor of experiencial distance predicts Pynchon's anti-narrative in Gravity's Rainbow, freeflowing cascades of detail surrounding transitory actors. It's "Sgt. Pepper", "Bitches Brew", "Trout Mask Replica", and "Dark Side Of The Moon".
• "It's a radical piece of work."
-Christopher Nolan
• Starchild:
2001 is the shock of the knew. It invented the modern SFX industry: the techniques, the magazines, the effects houses, the schools. It inspired and unleashed the most innovative creatives ever known. It inspired the tech that changed society and how we connect and create together. It is the parent than no child should take for granted.
“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not Westerns and Detective stories."
-Arthur C. Clarke
• New Dawn:
The late-'60s was a cultural renaissance in politics, creativity, spirituality, and technology, a social Big Bang which we are still expanding from with deep exploration. The college students became the new college professors, the new critics, authors, and auteurs, the new audience, journalists, and archivists, embracing any evolution that involved the introspective, the inclusive, and the revolutionary. They surpassed the parochial with a fluid inquiry into the infinite.
Quality is undeniable, and since the 1970s, 2001: A Space Odyssey has become universally considered one of the greatest films of all time, a cultural watershed and regenerative catalyst, and the standard for high art in cinema.
A Tech Aftermath
showing smart car
2) Flatscreen
3) Video call
4) Tablets
• "Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic -hardware and technology- to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
2001 didn't just advance film and culture, it advanced our everyday reality.
In attempting to guess the future, it inspired the future. Arthur C. Clarke had already invented the concept of the satellite in 1945>, which is why you have television, the internet, satellite radio, GPS, Google Earth, and a cellphone. With the film, Kubrick and Clarke worked exhaustively with astronomers, aerospace engineers, military experts, moon cartographers, observatories, university scientists, Bell Labs, IBM, NASA, JPL, GE, computer researchers, aviators, mathematicians, geologists, medical colleges, weather bureaus, and even the Soviet Embassy/London for three years to accurately design the possible future of 1999 and 2001.
Seeing is becoming. Their projected appearance onscreen led to the Smart Car, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station. After the various devices appeared onscreen, inventors and designers made these possibilities come to pass, bringing us the personal computer, the tablet, the flatscreen, touchpads, internet newsreaders, seatback video, video phonecalls, and Siri and Alexa at our command.
(Similarly, 'Star Trek' has also inspired many of the devices we take for granted now.)
> Wired;
"The Amazingly Accurate Futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey"
> Infrics:
How 2001: A Space Odyssey got the future right
• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
Con Pederson and Douglas Trumbull.
You could always spot the lazy reviewer of the film because they used the offhand pejorative "trickery" for special effects. Newsflash: an entire film is a special effect. Films evoke a reality that doesn't exist, built from component illusions, but no one has such a disparaging attitude for storyboarders, scriptwriters, makeup artists, set designers, costume designers, lighting crews, dubbing engineers, or editors, all artisans in mutual service to evoke a fictional reality. Why treat the matte painter and the model maker like a forger? No one hangs a magician for fraud, they applaud.
All hail Pederson and Trumbull. Maybe more than any notable pioneer before them, their advances invented for 2001 brought modernity, respect, and possibility to the special effects industry, establishing it as an art form, a career, and a vital contributor.
They achieved their miracles using juxtaposed transparencies mounted on animation stands, blue-screen matting, rotating sets, model landscapes in forced perspective, large-scale ship models, long exposures, slit-scan projections, solarized photos, and sculptures. They invented the first computer motion control that led to STAR WARS, and also showcased the first computer animation.
For its entire history, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has only given 'genre films' an Oscar for technical effects. This is a backhand way of dismissing them as not being as valid for main awards as conventional 'real films'. They seem to have forgotten the wider meanings of honoring films involving art or science. Speculative films are real films, and this dinosaur attitude of denial needs to go. Evolve, or go extinct. The rest of the world has already embraced the future for the last half-century.
All hail the dreamers.
> How STAR WARS Is Changing Everything!
Let there be light...
◉ Pre-Flight: Before 2 0 0 1
Before tracing the branches, it's important to divine the roots. A succession of sources helped chart the journey for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
COSMIC VOYAGE;
DESTINATION MOON;
FANTASIA;
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
▭ OUR HEAVENLY BODIES /Wunder der Schöpfung (Germany, 1925)
An educational Silent film, with many intertitles explaining astronomy, visualized by very sophisticated models of planets, moons, and the sun.
▭ COSMIC VOYAGE /Kosmicheskiy Reys (Russia, 1936)
A science fiction film, channeling Verne and Méliès, about a fictional Russian moon landing. Of particular note are the surreal montages (a la Eisenstein) and the anti-gravity scene of the astronaut walking around the circular cabin.
▭ FANTASIA (1940)
Disney's fine art film, interpreting classical music with animation, including scoring Stravinsky's "The Rite Of Spring" into epic vistas depicting the evolution of early life on Earth from the sea to the land. (The final step to humans was overruled from pressure by creationists.)
▭ DESTINATION MOON (1950)
While its rival ROCKETSHIP X-M was a space adventure, this prescient film produced by George Pal was instead a straight-forward and practical procedural predicting the logistics of actual space travel.
▭ Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)
Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" (1950) is the seed that would later grow into 2001. But this full-length novel also contains the DNA, with a scopic story about First Contact and the ultimate future evolution of the human race.
▭ LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)
Freddie Young's revolutionary cinematography turned the desert landscapes into the prime character, creating an emotional experience as visceral as the storytelling was purely visual. Peter O'Toole's Lawrence becomes an alienated pilgrim within an alien diorama beyond his scale. [The combination of Dave Bowman and Lawrence will create 'David' in PROMETHEUS (2012).]
'The Time Tunnel' (1967);
'Star Trek' (1966-'69);
2001 Spacesuits
DESTINATION MOON (1950) was the first attempt by Hollywood to do a serious science fiction movie, a lavishly budgeted film shot in Technicolor, generally informed by scientist consultants. Among the many standards it set going forward was the color-coding of spacesuits in primary colors to distinguish the actors in space scenes. This concept, and the actual costumes, were endlessly recycled in the following decades.>
From films to TV shows, the primary colors clarified characters, jobs, and rank. (This has become the throughline in uniform design across every iteration of 'Star Trek'.) Along with silver (in the Moon sequence) and orange, the primary colors are used in the reserve spacesuits on the Discovery in 2001.
▭ IKARIE XB-1 (Czech, 1963)
Based on a Stanislaw Lem short story, this visionary film is the direct stylistic hinge toward 2001.
The movie could have been a crowd-friendly space travel romp in the tradition of George Pal. Instead, Jindřich Polák directed a boldly innovative art film (while navigating Soviet censorship) which stays true to its sober and philosophical source, creating a dynamically graphic and eerily somber dream that feels like Bergman wrote it and looks like Nykvist lensed it.
It is often rumored that Kubrick screened the obscure gem when researching his own upcoming approach to science fiction cinema. Besides many visual touchpoints (center ratio hallways, video-calls, the computer's wall-eye), what proved most influential is the film's tone: adult and pensive, eerie and clinical, slowly unhinged, ultimately reaching a startling crescendo. Viewers may sense echoes beyond 2001 to other progeny like SOLARIS, ALIEN, EVENT HORIZON, and SUNSHINE.
(The film was once released in the USA in a mangled and dubbed cut as 'VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE'. Avoid this version, and watch the digitally restored original released in 2016.)
The clearest screen harbingers to 2001 came just before it.
FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), the most expensive SciFi film made to that point, augers some of the aspects of what is to follow: a sober Mission Control tone, dynamic compositions, widescreen color, sophisticated special effects, and surreal vistas.
The story of a miniturized sub traveling through a human patient's body (notably from the director of Disney's version of 20,0000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954)) also charts out the thematically parallel journies in later films like STAR TREK: The Motion Picture (1979) and THE BLACK HOLE (1979), as well as spectacular shrinking movies from INNERSPACE (1987) to ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: Quantumania (2023).
Robert Altman's Hollywood debut COUNTDOWN (1967) pairs James Caan and Robert Duvall (ahead of THE GODFATHER) as competing astronauts before a fraught moon launch. The stark drama gains its impressive authenticity by filming at NASA itself, and its realistic take on the tensions of the Cold War space race forecasts those in Clarke's sequel novel, "2010: Odyssey Two" (1982).
█ 1 9 6 0 s █
the moonlanding,
July 20, 1969.
Let there be more light...
• “2001 became almost a dividing line between the way movies were and the way they would be.”
-Sydney Pollack
As 2001 became assimilated into mass consciousness, references to it seeded everywhere for decades.>>>
The next 50 years saw innumerable films, shows, books, songs, and comics branch out from it. The following list is not every Space film made since, but instead the specific creative works galvanized by the structure, craft, symbols, themes, or vision of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Just as the film traced the arc of evolution, note how these works began to interlace as exponential catalysts for each other across time. All is cyclical.
◉ 1 9 6 8
▭ 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Arthur C. Clarke
For those who didn't understand the film, the book was a godsend. Kubrick's subjective experience was complemented here by Clarke's objective approach, crafting a science procedural in sober, literal terms. Whether critics and fans admitted it or not, his lucid explanation of the symbolic ending acted as a cheat sheet for sounding clever in the heated debates.
Written concurrently with a film script that kept changing, the novel also has subtle differences from the finished film.
▭ “Space Odyssey” (1968), The Byrds
In anticipation of the film, guitarist Roger McGuinn co-wrote a song based on Clarke's short story, "The Sentinel" (1950), which had initially inspired the movie.
▭ Playboy interview: Stanley Kubrick (Sept ’68)
• “I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life.”
-Stanley Kubrick
The magazine had interviewed many thinkers from varied disciplines, but Kubrick's academic precision and conceptual acumen was on an entirely rarified level.
His fluency with cutting-edge scientific projections essentially charted out the cosmology of the next fifty years of speculative films: sealife, such as dolphins, as an example of possible extraterrestial life (Star Trek IV); Project Blue Book and J. Allen Hynek (Close Encounters of the Third Kind); exceeding the limits of the speed of light (hyperspeed in Star Wars); cryrogenics (Earth II; Andromeda); cloned organs (clones and stem cell research); eliminating old age (Prometheus); computer-interfaced dreams (cyberpunk and The Matrix); and the singularity (Colossus, etc.).
While NYC critics barked like local turf dogs, Kubrick was dreaming wide like an astrophysicist.
1975 Marvel mag,
cover by Neal Adams;
Kirby's "The Eternals".
▭ Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1968), by Erich Von Däniken
In a time when religions, anthropology, and technology were being vigorously reassessed, Von Daniken's book channeled the zeitgeist by popularizing the concept of Ancient Astronauts.
Between the tension of "God is dead" and astronauts now piloting our future, the tome upended perception by positing that they had always been One: that ancient civilizations and religions had actually been guided by extraterrestrial intervention.
Coupled with the release of 2001, the concept took fire in the public imagination. A theatrical documentary (1970) was an international hit and spun-off the "In Search Of" TV series (1977-'82), narrated by Leonard Nimoy. It similarly rewrote the DNA of SF history with examples like Parliament's SF-Funk concept albums of ancient Afronauts (including Starchild), Jack Kirby's comic "The Eternals" (1976), the backdrop of 'Battlestar Galactica' (1978), the mythos of 'The X-Files' (1993), STARGATE (1994), INDIANA JONES And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008), and the backstory of PROMETHEUS (2012).>
◉ 1 9 6 9
• (close-up zoom on bottom)
▭ MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)
One of 2001's first presences in film was literal.
John Schlesinger's adaptation of MIDNIGHT COWBOY began its New York City location shooting in May, 1968, the month after 2001's theatrical release. A billboard for the film, featuring the art of Robert McCall, is clearly seen on the building above the theater playing it in an establishing shot.
Ironically, the billboard is partially obscured by another for its rival, the conventional historical THE LION IN WINTER, which would essentially shut 2001 out of the 1969 Oscars nominations. This deliberate shut-out shorthands a consistent pattern of the industry, critics, and pundits favoring conventional (often Eurocentric) films which reaffirm historial norms over the disruptive innovation of speculative fiction works, a willful blindspot that continues to the present.
▭ Fellini's SATYRICON (1969)
One of the first major films imprinted by the influence of 2001.
Federico Fellini had gradually explored the subjective with the idle daydreams of 8 1/2 (1963) and the idyllic fantasy of JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965). But this film, made while 2001 toured theaters, was a quantum leap in stylistic audacity. Instead of the historic panoplies of Lean, this symbolist allegory strongly echoes Kubrick: an epic fable with widescreen vistas, stark graphics, brutalist architecture, monolithic stones and structures, subjective mystery, lysergic estrangement, and alien terreign.
In turn, its brutal design, askew tone, and colossal scope would influence future movies, such as Lynch's DUNE (1984), Villeneuve's ARRIVAL (2016), and Zhao's ETERNALS (2021).
▭ “Space Oddity” (1969), David Bowie
Stepping out into the heavens may be the ultimate existential crisis.
Bowie debuted as the alien outsider with this elegaic ode to the Lonely Astronaut, opening the pod bay doors for scores more songs by the likes of Black Sabbath, Nilsson, The B-52's, Pixies, Radiohead, and Beach House, all of which you can hear here.
█ 2 0 0 1: A Music Playlist █
- songs inspired by, 1968-Today
by Tym Stevens
This music player contains songs inspired by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, all in chronological order from 1968 to today.
Some thematics:
• If a song is a sundial, a symphony is a clocktower; the intricate melding of all innovations into one ultimate harmonious totality.
In the vast leap from the dawn of humanity to the Space Age, Kubrick stealthily used Classical pieces as signifiers of our progressive sophistication in the period between. The pounding tympani of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" declares the end of the beginning and the beginning of new ends. The Strauss waltz "The Blue Danube" used during spacedock sums how the dance moves between partners was magnified by the concerted partnership of the world moving toward the future.
Contrarily, he evokes ancient intelligence far beyond our structures of understanding using Ligeti's unnerving "Atmospheres", a textural timber vibration radiant with dissonant glossolalia; like the film, its primal and profound meaning is felt through the senses viscerally instead of preconceptually.
• A more traditional score by Alex North went unused, and was interpreted for records years later.
• David Bowie's "Space Oddity" was clearly inspired by Dave Bowman's journey, but also reconsider concurrent songs like The Beatles' "Across The Universe", Tim Buckley's "Starsailor", and Black Sabbath's "Supernaut".
• The epic scope, varied chapters, and intense apex of 2001 infused or paralleled work by late-'60s and early-'70s Space Rock and Prog Rock acts like Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Yes, UFO, and Van Der Graaf Generator.>
• "Zarathustra" became the intro music for Elvis tours, and also took on new life within the dance music community (see 1977 below).
• The influence on electronic musics and dance culture eventually morphed into continued manifestations of the film through New Wave, Industrial, Rave, and Electro acts across the decades, from Skinny Puppy and The Shamen to Enigma and Daft Punk.
• Electro musicians now make entire concept albums based on the film, such as As Lonely As Dave Bowman and Jim Hart.
█ 1 9 7 0 s █
◉ 1 9 7 0
▭ The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (1970), edited by Jerome Agel
One of the many failures of rote critical dismissal of the film was its total blindspot about the audience to come.
'Behind The Scenes' books didn't exist until 1968, when The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield debuted. Following after the show's second season, the lengthy paperback spanned the gestation process, the writing and production struggles, executive apoplexy, design and budget challenges, and sociopolitical merit of the ambitious and innovative SF series. It was hailed as the definitive resource book for how to write for quality television. Most importantly, it was written by a young outsider who had the pulse of all the other creative outsiders in the counterculture era looking for a catalyst spark for their potential.
It went through a million copies sold and three printings in its first year alone. 'Star Trek' fans then changed fandom and culture: their protests pressured NBC into renewing a third season; fans became pros who wrote new original books; they designed the blueprints for all the unseen ships and wrote exhaustive histories of the show's timeline; with their networking, their mass momentum created the first huge SF conventions where they invented cosplay; their numbers greenlit first the animated return of 'Star Trek', and then the cinematic return, and then all the new shows. In short, the cliched geeks that the classist Adler had spit on so vehemently were actually the creative community of the future, the guiding pop cultural and scientific force for the next 50 years. The starchildren rewrote reality, better. From the New Hollywood to the Internet, from Comic-Con to Apple, from Pixar to Tesla.
Taking that book's cue, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 was compiled by Jerome Agel, who had co-written The Medium Is the Massage with Marshall McLuhan. In like form, he examined all angles of the film in a way that quietly mocked and superceded critics, creating a concrete reaffirmation for the mass public of the film's landmark worth that left all of the hostile critics' brief columns and local reputations in the past. The prescient examination of how the special effects were done harbingered future magazines like Starlog, Cinefantastique, and Cinefex, which would school the youth who would convert "trickery" into an art form and careers and production studios. These two books established all 'Making Of' tie-in books that followed.
The dismissers just couldn't concieve that the great unwashed would be their smarter replacements.
▭ 'UFO' (1970-’73)
Following their success with puppet animation shows like 'Thunderbirds', Gerry and Sylvia Anderson made a bold leap attempting advanced SciFi for a mature audience. Clearly encouraged by 'Star Trek' and 2001, the adventure series retained a pensive edge that was more character-based than most, which baffled syndicators who couldn't fathom yet to market a SciFi show to adults.
Essentially a spy show with an alien invaders theme, the true star of the show was the moon base and its space fleet run by purple-haired, silver metallic Mod queens. When the show hit production and syndication difficulties, the Andersons refocused on this strength to envision a new show based on the moon... 'Space: 1999'.
▭ COLOSSUS: The Forbin Project (1970)
In 1970, the Tofflers' Futureshock was a bestseller, warning that fast-paced tech development would outpace our ability to comprehend such rapid change emotionally or ethically, hence the term 'information overload'.>
IBM computers helped guide us to the moon, but their introduction into corporations and workplaces created more mass anxiety. The immediate fear concerned layoffs, but the ultimate fear was the Singularity... when sentient artificial intelligence might surpass -and then perhaps eliminate- the human race.
HAL 9000, like the tool/weapon bone, embodied the tension between our aspiration to lift ourselves higher and our flaws pulling us under instead. This Singularity anxiety was the principle story of COLOSSUS, and continued to interlace SF ever since in films like WESTWORLD (1973), ALIEN (1979), SATURN 3 (1980), WAR GAMES (1983), THE TERMINATOR (1984), THE MATRIX (1999), and EX MACHINA (2017). Its variant is the Surveillance State, in which the omnipotent camera lens enforces tyranny on all, such as “V For Vendetta”, EAGLE EYE (2008), 'Person Of Interest' (2011-'16), and CAPTAIN AMERICA: Winter Soldier (2014).
▭ EL TOPO (1970)
If COLOSSUS had branched from 2001 literally, EL TOPO was among the first to do so abstractly.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's symbolist epic takes its general form from the Leone Spaghetti Westerns, but its hallucinatory shamanism and subjective opacity were clearly emboldened by Kubrick. In its tryst of the desert and dementia, it foretells Moebius. Shunned by theatres, the art film was distributed with the support of Lennon and Harrison, and its innovative strategy of Midnight Movie showings made it one of the first 'cult hits' supported by a hip underground following.
▭ Ringworld, by Larry Niven (1970)
Niven won all the major awards and his reputation with this book.
Ringworld is essentially Clarke amplified, bringing us into the evolving mystery of exploring an impossibly advanced technopolis left by a previous higher intelligence.
It must have had some impact on Clarke, who followed with the like-minded Rendezvous With Rama (1973).
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▭ “Who’s Next” (1971) cover, The Who
The acclaimed concept album "Tommy" put the onus on the band for another masterpiece. Pete Townshend imagined a complex opus called "Lifehouse" in which a universal chord could unite everyone into a state of shared transcendence, but all his attempts to literally accomplish this in reality led to an emotional breakdown. The band stripped everything back down to the best basic songs and this classic album resulted.
They very much admired 2001, and the cover photo's literal piss-take on the monolithic slab seems to be irreverently putting grandiosity behind them with the punning title, but the failed dream has haunted Townshend ever since.>
"Obscured By Clouds" (1972);
"Pulse" (live, 1995).
▭ “Echoes” (1971), Pink Floyd
Famously called “The First Band On The Moon”, Pink Floyd mutated their Psychedelia into Space Rock with long, exploratory mood pieces with sinuous grooves, dynamic sections, and avant noize.
The eternal debate is whether the 23-minute “Echoes” was directly inspired by the 2001 finale sequence of the same length, or if by synchronicity it just fits perfectly anyway.>
Just absorb the trip.
▭ THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971)
Michael Crichton first broke through with his bestselling novel.
Like 2001, the key to its success was the matter-of-fact realism, a gripping plague thriller framed within faux government documents. The film version took its tone and design sense from Kubrick, and inspired all of the contagion narratives afterward, like King's The Stand, 12 MONKEYS (1995), Vaughn and Guerra's "Y: The Last Man" comic, and the 'Fortitude' series.
▭ THX-1138 (1971)
George Lucas' debut.
The counterculture came into power through the New Hollywood films> and the literary New Wave of Science Fiction>, both of which challenged narrative conventions, social mores, and subject matter, embracing the nonlinear, the hallucinogenic, the harsh, the candid, and the ambiguous. In short, the forms graduated liberal arts college and grew up.
SF films were hindered by their expense and marginality. THX-1138 is one of the first speculative fiction films, along with Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (also 1971), in the cinematic revolution. Its clinical precision, chilly mood, and spartan design proceed from Kubrick, which put audiences off. But this sheaths the lead's sublimated spiritual crisis, best symbolized by the transformation of HAL 9000 into an automated confession booth that ignores as it interrogates.
Futurism's chilliness gave it cutting-edge cool to some while polarizing others. Lucas would swap cold for warmth with the successful AMERICAN GRAFFITI and STAR WARS. In retrospect, THX-1138 is a bold formal experiment that augered the later acclaimed films of Cronenberg, Jones, Garland, Villeneuve, and Cosmatos. Also notice how much of this Kubrickian formalism survives throughout the 'Star Wars: Andor' TV series (2022).
▭ ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971)
Science Fiction films gained mainstream credibility in 1968 with the double-punch of 2001 and PLANET OF THE APES.
Actual simians had been passengers in early jet and space flight tests.> Pierre Bouelle's 1963 novel "La Planète Des Singes", about astronauts finding an advanced world of simians, had two twist endings. Rod Serling wrote a better version of one of them for the film adaptation, the shockingly iconic climax. The other was loosely retooled for this third film, with advanced apes arriving in 1971 from space.
The pattern of Ape-Futurism begins. It will recur across time in works like Kirby's "Eternals" comic (1976), "Heavy Metal" magazine (1977), the reimagined PLANET OF THE APES (2001), SPACE CHIMPS (2008), the 'Captain Simian And the Space Monkeys' cartoon (1996), and the comic "Primordial" (2021).
2) New Gods (1971).
▭ Comics
Marvel Comics gained a lot of its '60s college cred by being considered a radical Pop Art form, as Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko distorted all envelopes with photo collages, widescreen page spreads, cubist tech, and evolved entities.
For DC Comics, Jack Kirby then rejuvenated and unleashed himself with the family of “New Gods” titles (1971), inspired by the youth movement and their genre innovations. The man who'd brought spiritual cosmicness to comics with Thor and the Silver Surfer now went next level with science dieties and demons on a cosmogonic tableaux that fried eyes and fired minds.
2) “Warlock” (b/w line art, 1975).
Back at Marvel, his heir Jim Starlin alchemized this further with his storied work on “Captain Marvel” (1973) and “Warlock” (1975), in which interstellar stones latticed attainment to godhood. They are now the entire conceptual foundation that enabled Marvel Films' first decade of success: e.g., Thanos and the stones of power.
All of this is the subliminal thread that connects 2001 to AVENGERS: Infinity War (2018).
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▭ SOLARIS (1972)
The U.S. government tapped Frank Capra to select their entry for the 1968 Moscow Film Festival, and he submitted 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Naturally contrarian, the U.S.S.R. responded with their counter 2001. Based on Stanislaw Lem's 1961 book, director Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS is the yang to its yin. Admiring Kubrick's form, the film obverts his content: scientific faith is rebuffed by existential ennui, sleek futurism by garage ruin, transcendence by irresolute surrender. Clarke felt that ancient wisdom could advance us, while Lem countered that the abstract is beyond understanding, whether in the heart or the heavens.
SOLARIS was a bracing shock, a different slant of the subjective. And its 'used universe' aesthetic directly inspired the artists of Metal Hurlant, and all the film directors that followed in their stead.
▭ SILENT RUNNING (1972)
Con Pederson and Douglas Trumbull, the Special Photographic Effects Supervisors for 2001, pioneered modern SFX from scratch inch by inch and lamented at the time, “If only we’d had a few more years…”
Trumbull duly became a director himself, specifically to advance what they had dreamed of. His feature film debut SILENT RUNNING hinges all to come. The service drones predicate the droids of STAR WARS, the space station's greenhouse domes were recycled from 'Battlestar Galactica' to 'Nightflyers', the blue-screen overlays are more ambitious, the ship sets are more expansive, the ecological warning boldly forward.
He also kept The Trip. Kubrick's Odyssean quest culminated in ecstatic divination, and from then on SF films kept both the tech journey and the spectacular head trip. Here it's the full-throttle careen through Saturn's rings.
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▭ FANTASTIC PLANET (1973)
By now, because of 2001's impact, stylish aesthetics and subjective allegories have become the expectation.
Rene Laloux won the Grand Prix prize at Cannes for this Bosch-ian animated parable of anti-slavery revolts in another realm of being. Its surreal art and unsettling tone baffled audiences and enthralled fans. It became a Midnight Movie perinneal, and expanded its underground appeal through viewings on the TV cult anthology 'Night Flight' in the '80s. Its soundtrack, midway between Pink Floyd and Isaac Hayes, won over cratediggers and DJs worldwide.>
▭ THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)
Alejandro Jodorowsky, bankrolled by The Beatles, returns with his magnum opus. (It almost starred Harrison, who declined over the nudity.)
The lysergic fever dream, like Townshend, intended to achieve mutual exploregasm in its cast and audience. Tough goal but a worthy journey: The Trip is the film itself, with its spectacular visuals and askew visions. Deeply overlooked and underrated.
The documentary "Jodorowsky's DUNE" (2013) details his madly ambitious but doomed attempt to subsequently adapt Herbert's novel, and how the potpourri of creators involved then led to STAR WARS, ALIEN, and BLADE RUNNER.
Woody Allen's SF spoof uses Douglas Rain himself (HAL 9000) as the computer's voice.
2) FUTUREWORLD (1976);
3) 'Westworld' (S02, 2018).
▭ WESTWORLD (1973)
Singularity.
Michael Crichton used his bestselling clout to write and direct this original film, inspired by the automatons of Disney World, in which an android theme park revolts. Yul Brenner resurrects his MAGNIFICENT SEVEN gunslinger as an eerie roboid shell inhabited by a vengeful HAL. The FUTUREWORLD sequel was made without Crichton, who later retooled the basic concept with dinosaurs as "Jurassic Park".
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy upgraded it as an HBO series, acclaimed for its nonlinear story, philosophical angst, arresting cinematography, and corrosive satire. While seemingly separate from the films, the series does quiet nods to them, including the distinctly '70s Futurism design of The Forge in Season 2.
▭ THE EXORCIST (1973)
“You’re going to die up there,” Regan says to the astronaut at the party.
William Peter Blatty's matter-of-fact book about demonic possession, contemplative and meticulous, achieves its literacy through a careful balance of mysticism and science, built around a moving character drama. Director William Friedkin commutes this purely with sharp perfection.
Kubrick valued silence as much as symphonies in 2001, reducing at one point to just the harrowing sound of breathing in the vaccum of space 500,000 miles from home. Friedkin tossed away a traditional horror score in favor of serial electronics, and for moments of abrupt silence, used actual leader tape on the soundtrack to achieve a hissless deadness. His jarring visual intensity and sonic innovation owe more to Kubrick than to Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY, and like that inspiration, raised genre fare to high art.
The only demonic possession film that matters, and one of the finest films of the decade.
(Also watch:
MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS [Poland, 1961].
▭ Skylab (1973-’74)
After a run of Soviet Salyut space stations, which had varied degrees of setbacks, the American Skylab began its run. The Space Race symbolically ended in 1975 with the joint Apollo/Soyuz link-up, which eventually led to the ongoing International Space station (2000).
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▭ DARK STAR (1974)
John Carpenter expanded his student film into a cult hit that fizzled theatres but ignited his career.
“The Spaced Out Odyssey”, co-written with Dan O'Bannon, is essentially a stoner comedy gloss on 2001 with some DR. STRANGELOVE on the tail. It proved to be one of the seeds for ALIEN, along with Jodorowsky's ill-fated DUNE.
▭ PHASE IV (1974)
Saul Bass invented much of modernity, with his sleek corporate makeovers, artful film credits, and minimal poster graphics.
Impressed by 2001, Bass stepped behind the camera to direct an unlikely subject -the accelerated evolution of ants- with his characteristic visual pinache. It failed at the box office, but time bore it out. The intensely surreal ending montage was cut, but carefully restored in 2012, though not added into any video version available yet. (Here is a shakey cam' of it.)
The finale of Paul's signature solo album, "Band On The Run", crescendoes at the end with the chords of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” blasting in the horn fanfare, tympani drums, and final triumph chord.
"Lone Sloane" by Druillet.
▭ Metal Hurlant magazine (1974)
Moebius and Philippe Druillet upended Sci-Fi, comics, and films forever.
In their adult Fantasy comics magazine, they combined the hatching and dementia of Zap Comix, the galactic blowouts of Kirby, the eye of Leone and Jodorowsky, the dis-ease of Tarkovsky, the freeform of Burroughs, the perfect excess of Hendrix, the clean-line of Hergé, the New Wave SF mythmaking of Moorcock and Zelazny, and the format of Warren Magazines.
Their alternative adult magazine inspired the creators who led the '80s Comics Renaissance, made possible by indie comics publishers and direct sales comic shops. It was repackaged as "Heavy Metal" in the USA, and inspired imitators from "Epic Illustrated" to "1994".
Their 'used universe' sensibility would also now permeate all of the film work of Lucas, Scott, Hyams, Cameron, and Besson.>
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▭ 'Space: 1999' (1975-’77)
The exact synthesis of 'Star Trek' and 2001.
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's vaulting follow-up to 'UFO' went for glory, blending the two dominant forces of modern SciFi into an impossibly expensive series that took 18 months to film its first season.
The resulting combo is wildly uneven. The attempt to blend proactive 'Trek' space opera with the dispassionate ethereality of 2001 roils hot/cold throughout. And yet the hybrid child has a mesmerizing effect all its own: Moonbase Alpha is a bracing blend of cool plastic modularity, impossible physics, ambitious sets, disco mysticism, Prog score, icy horror, innovative design, clinical crew, advanced effects, notable guest stars (Cushing and Lee), all adding up to an ineffable oddness that's as frustrating as it is entrancing. (The theme song also begins with a grand "Zarathustra" flair.)
It proved to be a gateway. Its design approach and tone directly inspired the attempted 'Star Trek II' series, which instead turned into STAR TREK: The Motion Picture (1979). Its direct-to-syndication model paved the way for 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' a dozen years later. And SFX leader Brian Johnson went on to helm the effects for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980).
Kubrick's previous film had a subtitle, like a novel: DR. STRANGELOVE, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). His next film also used a colon, like an academic thesis or a science paper: 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The pattern continued in the offspring: 'Space: 1999', SUPERMAN: The Movie, STAR TREK: The Motion Picture, 'Cosmos: A Personal Voyage'.
▭ ROLLERBALL (1975)
How does a future sports film relate here?
Corporate control. The space future depicted in 2001 depended on corporate cooperation, and logo branding is everywhere. By the time of ROLLERBALL, with exposés of corp' malfeasance an everyday headline, the growing fear of a corporate state seizing control of government was made palpable in this film.
(see also: the 2016 'election'.)
HAL was the casualty of a logic conundrum, a corporate misstep that made him a serious liability. In the aftermath of Watergate, this shorthand seed germinated into the weed of counterproductive corporate interference that twines through the SF that follows, such as DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), the ALIEN films (1979), BLADE RUNNER (1982), BRAZIL (1985), THE RUNNING MAN (1987), ROBOCOP (1987), GATTACA (1997), and ELYSIUM (2013); and the corporate dystopia seen in the “Lazarus” comic series (2014), and shows like 'Mr. Robot', 'Incorporated', 'Westworld', and 'Severance'.
Corps should be pronounced corpse.
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The cast of 'Star Trek'
and the real Enterprise.
▭ The space shuttle, Enterprise
2001 shows us a space plane that carries the scientist to the giant space station. The next year, the US Congress greenlit production of a real space shuttle, a reuseable ferry system for space installations.
The first shuttle was named Enterprise, from public insistence, and the cast of 'Star Trek' reunited to attend its christening. Like Bowman's ship in the film, the third flying model was named Discovery. (see also: the 'Star Trek: Discovery' series) And shuttles such as Endeavor docked with the International Space Station in the '90s, just as the film predicted.
Nichelle Nichols went on to recruit for NASA, bringing in many astronauts who would fly on subsequent shuttles.
Marvel Treasury Special (1976);
2) Machine Man (1978);
3) Devil Dinosaur (1978).
▭ Jack Kirby
The House Of Ideas was blueprinted with the copious visions of Jack Kirby.
When he returned to Marvel Comics in 1976, he went full-scale with a large 10" x 14" tabloid-sized adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a symbolic landmark by a landmark. There were no such things as VHS home videos yet, so Kirby had to work from the script, publicity photos, and memory.
Kirby then became the first to make a sequel to 2001. His uniquely freeform approach tumbled unexpectedly into a monthly run of his own original extension, "2001: A Space Odyssey" #1-10 (1976-’77). MGM Studios was startled by this unexpected sequel and ended the licensing. But Kirby, an idea machine, spun off his original concepts from it into the new separate books "Machine Man" #1-9 (1978) and "Devil Dinosaur" #1-9 (1978).
But the core influence of 2001 and von Däniken reached total fruition in his series "The Eternals" (#1-19, 1976), where celestial beings had genetically engineered humanity since the dawn of time for some grand future purpose. It rewrote Marvel's entire chronology/cosmology, and was extended, debated, and reimagined by comic scribes for decades, from Roy Thomas' THOR (1979) to Alex Ross' EARTH X (1998) to a cinematic maxi-series sequel by bestselling author Neil Gaiman (2006).
The sum of all this inspiration became the feature film ETERNALS (2021).
inner sleeve photo
▭ “Presence” (1976), Led Zeppelin
The Obelisk.
The design team Hipgnosis created many of the most iconic Rock album covers of the decade for artists like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Here, the various mundane photos in the packaging are made unsettling with the presence of a half-twisted black monolith. Like Kubrick's film, the hard and indefinable geometry goes at odds with the natural world, signaling mystery and portent.
▭ THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)
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The cover art by Moebius is a shorthand homage to 2001, combining our simian origins from 'The Dawn of Man' sequence with the modern Flight Age. (Or perhaps to Bouelle's novel, "La Planète Des Singes" (1963) and ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971).)
▭ STAR WARS (1977)
• "A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away..."
The ultimate Ancient Astronauts.
George Lucas picks up the guantlet of Kubrick, and changes cinema on every level.
THESIS
Like the child of a parent, it's remarkable how alike 2001 and STAR WARS are.
It's a bone's throw from Moonwatcher to Chewbacca (both designed by Stuart Freeborn). The arid plains from the Dawn Of Man have become Tatooine, an ultimate desert that also encompasses Herbert's metaphysical Dune and the vistas of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (starring Alec Guinness) and the gunfights of John Ford.
The stately white spaceships shot in forced perspective. The plastic modularity of the Blockade Runner's corridors. The modular padding lacing the Millennium Falcon's interior.
The Empire's architectural aesthetic is HAL's mainframe in black and white, illumed by the same capsule-shaped light slits. The octagonal halls of Discovery have become the hexagonal corridors of the Death Star detention. Rectanglular console ports, lit button banks, wall lenses.
The Trip has become the kaleidoscope of hyperspace and then later the downforce drag blurring through the Death Star trench. The same wireframe displays pivot the pathways on the computer screens.
ANTITHESIS
Like the child of a parent, it's necessary that they have their distinctions.
A child will find its own way, willfully, noisily, with a lot of pile-ups and laughter. The deadness of space before is now full of a musique concrete of cacophy. The only space suit is Vader's armor. Everything in this galaxy is fast, loose, wreckless, ecstatic.
Both are the past and the future. But 2001 is human history becoming human destiny, while STAR WARS is all of movie history reinventing itself at once.
If 2001 is a ballet, STAR WARS is a hoedown. Classical strings has become Korngold anthems. Dialogue has gone from mission briefs to Altman on speed.
If 2001 is Henry Jones, STAR WARS is Indiana Jones. Where Kubrick and Clarke are academic, Lucas is all undergrad mischief. Roll over, Ligeti, and dig the Benny Goodman-esque ragtime of the Cantina band.
Both offer an alternate take on spiritual connection. Clarke the agnostic posited science as a universal divination that supercedes religion, while Lucas suffused his universe with a macrocosmic Buddhism that superceded dogma.
2001 is Science/Fiction, where STAR WARS is hybridic Space Fantasy, fusing Brackett and Tolkien.
SYNTHESIS
Like family, it's all interconnected.
STAR WARS was a synthesis of everything before it that changed everything after it, a mix of fun and refreshed ideas that made it the biggest movie of all time, for all the right reasons.
> How STAR WARS Is Changing Everything!
(At this point, 'Star Trek', 2001, and STAR WARS are now the Holy Trifecta of screen Science Fiction.)
'Space: 1999' (1975); STAR WARS (1977);
NASA Flightsuit; THE MARTIAN (2015);
'Doctor Who' (2022)
▭ Orange Is The New Future
The orange spacesuit of Dave Bowman in 2001 was so iconic that it became visual shorthand in the decades that followed for space exploration, futurism, and cosmic transition.
2001 meets THE EXORCIST.
A helper computer gone horribly awry, voiced in dulcet HAL tones by Robert Vaughn.
2) Deodato, Donna Summer, Sarah Brightman.
▭ SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
“Also Sprach Zarathustra” resounded far beyond theatre speakers for a decade, from the anthemic intro to Elvis Presley's tours, to the dynamic string crescendos in discotheques.
• Soul acts incorporated it into their set lists, like The Jules Blattner Group's “2001: A Soul Odyssey” (1969), The Cecil Holmes Soulful Sounds' “2001” (1973), and The Fatback Band's phat “Funkbackin’” (1973).
• While Dance Music was actually a diverse scene throughout NYC the entire decade>, Disco exploded into mass consciousness with the film SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). Tony danced at the Odyssey disco, the most advanced nightclub around with (taking its cue from The Trip) computer-controlled laserlights and a grid floor lit from below.
• Starting with Deodato's hit cover of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (1972), Disco songs often used that forceful string build. It swayed with Salsa in Tito Puente's “Tito’s Odyssey [La Odisea De Tito]” (1974) and Alice Street Gang's “Also Sprach Zarathustra/ Bahia” (1976). It throbbed with robotic synth in Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's intro to “I Feel Love” (1977). As a SciFi signifier in the wake of STAR WARS, it awakened the force in Sarah Brightman And Hot Gossip's “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” (1978), Galactic Force Band's “Theme From 2001” (1978), and Discotheque's “Intro Disco” (1979).
> Link back to MUSIC PLAYER
▭ CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
• "Watch The Skies."
Another starchild carries the torch.
Steven Spielberg's follow-up to the phenomenal JAWS (1975) startled everyone, a mysterious nightmare and luminous idyll. It must have impressed Kubrick, who later tapped Spielberg to develop and finish his project A.I., which Steven did in (wait for it)... 2001.
✔ The visitations of the past. The summoning. The olympian journey to connect to the beyond. The monolithic Devil's Tower. The Trip in the finale of sound and light.
Kubrick had spoken of J. Allen Hynek, who left the Air Force's Project Blue Book with the public declaration that UFOs could be real. Hynek served as a consultant on CE3K and has a cameo in the finale. The Project has had a lasting impact on TV culture: Jack Webb's typically stoneheaded debunking of it all with the brief series 'Project: UFO' (1978); Major Briggs on 'Twin Peaks' (1990); Mulder and Scully on 'The X-Files' (1993); 'Roswell' (1999); and 'Project Blue Book' (2019).
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▭ CAPRICORN ONE (1978)
Kubrick's evocation of the moon was so convincing that some didn't believe the real thing the next year. A crazed rumor went around that he faked the moon landing for NASA in a movie studio, which still circulates in flat-earther circles.>
In the era of the post-Watergate conspiracy thriller, Peter Hyams directed this riff on the rumor where a faked mission to Mars goes all wrong. Hyams later went on to direct 2010: ODYSSEY TWO (1984).
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▭ STALKER (1979)
A misleading name for an enigmatic film.
Andrei Tarkovsky (SOLARIS) returns with a stripped-down tour around the peripheries of the unknown. Three travellers attempt to navigate The Zone, to find the mystery at its heart.
▭ MOONRAKER (1979)
Ken Adam's set designs for James Bond's odyssey into space are an homage to 2001.
▭ "The Micronauts" #11 (Nov 1979)
2001 had set an expectation now in SciFi sagas for the Trancendent Epiphany, the spirit awoken by higher forces.
The STAR WARS of the page was actually "The Micronauts". Writer Bill Mantlo and artist Michael Golden, the first to adapt the Takara/Mego toys in original adventures for Marvel Comics, did the only run that matters. Their space opera with rich story and stunning art zeniths with a shocking transition involving the mysterious Enigma Force.
In the mid-'70s, Mantlo had written separately of a cosmic journier called Wayfinder. (Along his path he met Rocket Raccoon, a character now made world-famous in the GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY films.) He connected it to this series, as Wayfinder became the ancient astronaut who had founded the world of Commander Rann, the 'Space Glider', who in turn became an ancient astronaut through a millennial journey. All is cyclical.
'Battlestar Galactica' was television's attempt at STAR WARS, even to copping SFX head John Dykstra. It also swiped the conceit of ancient astronauts by implying that the ragtag fleet would be the original colonizers of Earth.
In this episode, the space opera took an abruptly spectral turn as the crew encountered a heavenly crystal ship of advanced beings who seem to be guiding their destiny.
(The episode title is a pun on the thriller film, EXPERIMENT IN TERROR [1962].)
▭ STAR TREK: The Motion Picture (1979)
STAR TREK: The Motion Picture can only be understood in the context of 2001 and 'Space: 1999'.
Gene Roddenberry's space adventure TV series 'Star Trek' (1966-'69) had always had a philosophical intelligence. But in the wake of Kubrick and Clarke's cinematic achievement, SciFi films now were under enormous pressure to make the Great Statement throughout the 1970s. Then 'Space: 1999' (1975) set a new standard for what could be done on television. A new 'Star Trek II' series was developed to build on this, but the godlike success of STAR WARS drove the studio heads to froth for a money-making film instead.
Gene and director Robert Wise (THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL) then streamlined 'Star Trek' into a 2001 odyssey, with the design sense of 'Space: 1999'.
Thus, the fetishistic waltz of the drydock sequence. The muted costumes, the plastic modularity of the interiors, the octagonal corridors. The professional tightness in the performances. Spock's inner revelations and personal evolution.
The Trip is done first in the odd wormhole sequence near Saturn, and then in the extended odyssey through V’Ger. And the cryptic mystery revealed at its heart.
[The ending was essentially heisted in every way by FANTASTIC FOUR (2015).]
The effects were so ambitious that it took both Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra to accomplish them.
Ambition got in the way of authenticity. But in retrospect, who wouldn't appreciate a Kubrick-ian take on 'Star Trek'? Truthfully, STAR TREK: TMP is actually a deeply underrated head picture, but it took STAR TREK II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) for them to regain their true soul.
▭ THE BLACK HOLE (1979)
Disney responds to STAR WARS by remaking 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea with a surrealistic 2001 apex.
When you cross the other side, will that necessarily be good?
▭ ALIEN (1979)
• "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream."
2001 by way of Lovecraft's At The Mountain Of Madness.
ALIEN is in every way a stylistic inversion of that film, like a hybrid of Kubrick's technical precision and Tarkovsky's visual murk. Fluorescent becomes chiaroscuro, professionalism becomes sloth, corporate interest becomes a disease, and the alien other just keeps becoming.
✔ Cryosleep. Ancient astronaut. Ash, Mother. The Trip is the explosion with its mirrored tides.
2001 is now morphing through mutations into new expressions and possibilities, new antithesis and then synthesis. The subliminal horror that underlined its middle act now seizes a new focus in this counterpoint film. ALIEN also brought inclusion, as it finally dawned on filmakers to include women and other complexions in space crews. Counting Moebius as a designer, ALIEN amplified the "Metal Hurlant" 'used universe' aesthetic in SF films, with blue-collar slogs arguing amid degraded machinery. The anti-corporate distrust becomes defacto in SF films from now on, particularly in the '80s with the real-life Yuppie coup. And then there's the demon, without and within.
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▭ COSMOS: A Personal Voyage (1980)
Arthur C. Clarke was the go-to science communicator for television, but was gradually eclipsed by Carl Sagan. This maxi-series covering the micro- and macrocosmic was the most-watched PBS show ever for the entire decade following.
▭ 'Odyssey' magazine
When the French adult Fantasy magazine "Metal Hurlant" was repackaged in the USA as "Heavy Metal", it jumpstarted everyone.
Particularly Stan Lee, who hyped Marvel’s upcoming answer mag, "Odyssey", for months in his comics column. To his grinning chagrin, the name was already taken, and they finally launched in 1980 as "Epic Illustrated" instead. This later led to their adult line of creator-owned series, Epic Comics.
▭ ALTERED STATES (1980)
Now that it's been internalized into culture, aspects of 2001 now abstract quietly into other stories.
Enfante terrible Ken Russell (TOMMY) teamed with Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (NETWORK) for this surreal interior odyssey. They fell out and Paddy threw a pseudonym on, but this is still one of the most startling and cerebral films of the decade.
Taking a cue from an actual '60s scientist who had used sensory deprivation tanks and controlled drugs to tap into human consciousness>, the film covers the span from the primal to the present, struggling between transcendence and devolution. The Trip is the finale.
Because of this film, the TV series 'Fringe' (2008) poached the tank concept and co-star Blair Brown, and deprivation tanks also figure prominently in the '80s-set TV show, 'Stranger Things' (2016).
A core power of the film 2001 is its sense of mystery, with humans being at a loss to comprehend a higher power.
Simak's book, expanded from his short story ('Analog', Oct 1979), explores this gulf of understanding, as giant black monoliths appear all over Earth.
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2) Adaptation by Steranko.
▭ OUTLAND (1981)
Like Tarkovsky remaking HIGH NOON in space.
Director Peter Hyams absorbs the aesthetic of ALIEN in this taut and deeply underprized character thriller starring Sean Connery, a Marshal navigating the treacheries of a mining colony on Jupiter's moon.
Jim Steranko did an astounding experimental comics adaptation for "Heavy Metal" in stylized double-page spreads.
▭ QUEST FOR FIRE (1981)
The Dawn Of Man.
Or the dawn of Rae Dawn Chong, who steals the film. Jean-Jacques Annaud's promethean take on the struggle for progress.
Frederick Ordway, a science consultant working on 2001, was adamant with the director that the "The Dawn Of Man" act should have grindingly literal narration of every element, like a documentary. Kubrick's instinct instead was to strip it down to the actions and let viewers work instinct out for themselves. Whereas some critics at the time agreed with Ordway's recommendation, it was a different story a dozen years later when QUEST FOR FIRE was widely hailed as a truly international movie for its lack of dialogue and dependence on audience intuition.
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▭ 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), by Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke does the impossible twofold: writes a sequel, and makes it matter.
The Space Race had always been wrought with Cold War tensions. At a time when Reagan's sabre-rattling with Russia was endangering the planet, Clarke crafted a heist thriller that brings American and Russian astronauts together working in space even as their leaders inch to the brink of apocalypse.
Kubrick's 1968 film was subjective, Clarke's 1968 book was objective. Artist, scientist. For all those who couldn't fathom the film, Clarke's very literal telling put them straight, to a fault. This said, the sequel balances both approaches very well, with a nuanced character adventure folding into a truly momentous and epic ending.
▭ TRON (1982)
2001 featured some of the first examples of computer animation, seen as wireframe grids and geometries on guidance computer screens.
By 1982, during the meteoric mania for video games, Disney pushed the boundaries with this film incorporating blue-screened actors in computer-created environments, particularly amid grid-framed planes. The entire video game world is The Trip.
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▭ BRAINSTORM (1983)
Douglas Trumbull does a parallel to ALTERED STATES, finding transcendence from within in the interface between human and computer. It foreshadowed William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), and the concept of cyberspace and virtual reality. The Trip is the finale.
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▭ 2010: ODYSSEY TWO (1984)
• "The Year We Make Contact."
Peter Hyams does a good job and gets no love for it.
They first gave Kubrick flack for not being as objective as Clarke's book. After the art film then earned years of cred, they gave Hyams flack for not doing the sequel in Kubrick's subjective style. This misses the point: Hyams is doing Clarke.
2010: ODYSSEY TWO, like the two books, is best appreciated as an objective supplement to the original film. Taken on that merit, it is a taut thriller that actually improves on the novel in terms of political edge, character interplay, and spooky reverence.
Apple, orange. Eat, enjoy.
David Lynch had done a Dadaist student film (ERASERHEAD) and a moody Victorian drama (THE ELEPHANT MAN), but note how much he comes into personal focus here adapting Frank Herbert's book using Kubrick's eye and pace as his guide: giant sets, radical design, center symmetry, tense juxtaposition, weird visions, textural sound, and performances as unhinged as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
He found the big-budget grind experience to be anathema, but look how much of the lessons learned here rubbed off into his true personal debut, BLUE VELVET (1986).
This stoner cult hit set in ruined Punk L.A. ends in a surprising manner. Note how the finale song, "Reel Ten" by The Plugz, morphs during the end sequence from Spaghetti Western strains into the final tympani chords of “Also Sprach Zarathustra”.
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▭ Contact (1985), by Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan writes a fiction book about the longing to connect with alien life.
Sagan worked for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and curated the Golden Records for the Voyager probes launched in 1977.
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2) "Miracleman".
▭ "Watchmen", by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986)
Note the chrysalis and evolution of Dr. Manhattan.
▭ "Miracleman" by Alan Moore and John Totleben (1988)
Note the similar expansion of baby Winter.
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▭ 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), by Arthur C. Clarke
The third trip is less successful, with much of what gave 2001 its tranformative power now strangely and willfully sublimated in service to what feels like a superannuated sidestory.
The politics are rather dubious, but the homage to The Beatles is sublime.
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"The Incal" (1988);
"The Goddess" (1990)
▭ Moebius ’80s
Moebius (Jean Giraud) reinvented himself in the '80s.
He stripped his art down from ultra-detail and hyper-hatching to a clean-line essence with simple gradient color. Likewise practicing a New Age-style mental and physical purification process, he began tackling epic and utopian fables which soared up into empyrean pinnacles.
With Jodorowsky, he crafted the long serial, "The Incal".
The Satellite Of Love spaceship, named after a Lou Reed song, is shaped like a bone.
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▭ THE ABYSS (1989)
After James Cameron's huge succes with the sequel ALIENS (1986), everyone thought this film would be ALIENS underwater. But instead he made a wonderful parallel to CE3K.
▭ "Ghost In The Shell" (1989)
Masamune Shirow's manga is generally an erratic pinball of steroid violence, xenophobia, and gynoid fantasies. But it really finds itself in its latter end, with the story of the Major and her encounter with the possibility of cyber-transcendence.
Mamoru Oshii's anime film adaptation (1995) was a sharper, much improved condensation of this.
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▭ "Starstruck" (1990), by Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta
"Starstruck", the acclaimed feminist adult SF series by Lee and Kaluta, began with Epic Comics in 1984, and continued with Dark Horse publishing in this year. In a crucial segment, crazy pilot Brucilla The Muscle accidently glides into a portal to the multiverse. The Trip.
> The Big Bang of STARSTRUCK
▭ 'Twin Peaks' (1990)
David Lynch and Mark Frost's visionary serial advanced all TV series that followed.
Kubrick compositions. The threshold to Other. The maddeningly subjective second season finale is, point blank, the 2001 of television.
> TWIN PEAKS: Its Influence on 25 Years of Film, TV, and Music!, with 5 Music Players
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▭ 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' (1993-’99)
'Star Trek' wasn't done with 2001 yet.
Following the sleek, comfortable revival series 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' (1987-'94), producers Berman and Piller boldly took chances with an edgy, cosmopolitain serial set in a space station beside a stable space warp.
The Trip is the wormhole portal. The summoned is "the Emissary", Captain Benjamin Sisko, caught in the crux between alien prophecy, time distortion, and destiny.
▭ “Monolith Part One” (1993), by Young American Primitive
• "Something wonderful."
Electronic Music was originally made by 1950s University professors with access to expensive oscillator equipment. In the '70s, portable synthesizers brought experimentalism to Rock, Jazz, and Funk. By the '80s, synths dominated many forms of music, replacing strings and inventing new textures and genres.
The 1990s found a new psychedelia in various forms of Electronica. In new interations of Woodstock, boho youth laced with hallucinogens held communal Rave concerts in deserts, forest fields, and warehouses, swaying to electronic trance music looking for shamanistic deliverance in the tones. Primal, tech, transcendence.
The Trip was the music, again.
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2) "War Without End: Part 2" (1996)
▭ Babylon 5 (1994)
Thematically similar to 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine', this five season TV epic centered on an intergalactic space station.
Although the blue spacesuit was never worn by the astronauts in 2001, that lost opportunity was slyly rectified by this series. Appropriately, in the pivotal bookend episodes "Babylon 5 Squared" (S01/E20, 1994) and "War Without End: Part 2" (S03/E17, 1996), a key character wears the blue suit while tring to correct a time imbalance that profoundly effects the future.
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▭ 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), by Arthur C. Clarke
An unexpected return, all around.
Like the third book, a sublimation of 2001's strengths hampers its potency.
▭ EVENT HORIZON (1997)
2001 meets HELLRAISER.
When you cross the other side, will that necessarily be good?
[see also: Boyle’s SUNSHINE (2007)]
▭ CONTACT (1997)
Spielberg protégé Robert Zemeckis does a sterling adaptation of Carl Sagan's book, driven by a riveting Jody Foster.
The Trip is the trip.
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▭ PI (1998)
Darren Aronofsky's pensive debut, made in black-and-white for cheap with a wealth of smart ideas.
The interface between math and the divine.
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▭ EARTH X (1999)
During his sequel run of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1976) comics, Jack Kirby created new concepts that he spun out into his "Machine Man" series.
In the future-parable EARTH X maxi-series, concieved by illustrator Alex Ross and written by Jim Krueger, the Machine Man (who is evolving beyond his programming) travels to Earth from the Moon through a monolithic portal.
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▭ MISSION TO MARS (2000)
Brian De Palma, usually a medium for Hitchcock, channels Kubrick into a space-zombie film.
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▭ MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001)
Satoshi Kon's anime encapsulates Japan's history viewed through cinema, from the '30s to a 1968 space film. The Trip is the ending.
✔ Crosstemporal. Lifespan. Moon, frame, next.
▭ PLANET OF THE APES (2001)
Don't-call-it-a-remake, dept.: Pierre Bouelle's 1963 book "La Planète Des Singes" was loosely interpreted one way as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), and then loosely re-interpreted another way as PLANET OF THE APES (2001). Both are effective in themselves when considered in this bigger context.
In Bouelle's book, the astronauts arive on a strange world and their monkey companion runs off into the wild. This film version by Tim Burton explores the ramifications of that lost loose end in an underrated Ape-Futurism brainbender on an epic scale.
▭ A.I. (2001)
Stanley Kubrick labored for decades trying to adapt Brian Aldiss' short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". After tries with multiple scripts, he intrusted the project to Steven Spielberg. Sadly, Kubrick passed away in 1999, not living to see the advent of the actual year 2001. Spielberg finished the film as an homage to the master.
✔ Three acts. Spans of time. Artificial Intelligence. David. Chrysalis.
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2) EMPIRE corridor;
3) PHANTOM Pod;
4) SITH asteroid base.
▭ STAR WARS: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)
STAR WARS wasn't done with 2001 yet.
• The white waiting room and interior design of Bespin in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980).
• The EVA Pod from Discovery is glimpsed in the Tatooine scrap pile behind Qui-Gon Jinn in THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999).
• The Jedi library in ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002) is an amplification of HAL 9000's mainframe design.
• The asteroid base Polis Massa in REVENGE OF THE SITH (2005) is based on Clavius Base.
• The Trip is Rey's visions in THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015), THE LAST JEDI (2017), and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019).
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▭ THE FOUNTAIN (2006)
Darren Aronofsky.
✔ Three acts across time. The Source. Ultimate renewal.
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▭ “POD” (2007), by As Lonely As Dave Bowman
Electronic music continued to honor and sample both 2001 and 2010, from artists like Michael Norman, BLT, Hexagram, Aerial, Fidgital, Yvi Slan, and HOLY.
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▭ WALL-E (2008)
✔ Auto, the computer.
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▭ MOON (2009)
Kubrick spent $10 Million making 2001, an exorbinant amount for a major studio at the time, and the SFX supes had to invent all the modern effects methods from scratch.
Duncan Jones spent $5 Million on his indie film, a modest amount now, and he eschewed expensive CG effects to return to the felt realism of practical sets and models.
Jones hearkens the renaissance around the corner. The 1970s was young adults expanding Kubrick's vision in their work. The 2010s is when their children, who grew up on these films, begin to reembrace that style in their mature works.
✔ Octagonal corridors. Solicitous computer. The moon. Self-discovery.
▭ 'Virtuality' (2009)
Ronald D. Moore's impressive TV pilot wasn't picked up for a series, a loss in every way.
Catch up on what everyone missed.
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▭ TRON: Legacy (2010)
✔ The white room.
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▭ 'THE STORY OF FILM: An Odyssey' (2011)
Film critic Mark Cousins, in his book and 15-part documentary series, offers a revisionist assessment of the history of world cinema, upending conventions and contextualizing inclusiveness. From the title itself to the series graphic using the still frame of HAL's lens, he confirms 2001 as the hallmark of film as an art form.
Required viewing.
▭ Peter Kogler (2011)
Kogler’s art installations transform gallery spaces with sculptural forms and 3D-imprinted walls. From November 2011 through January 2012, his installation at Galerie Johann Widauer, Innsbruck, evoked the visual power of 2001 with its black monolithic columns, modular wall forms, and mind-bending graphics.
▭ Voice Assistants (2011)
-HAL 9000
Since the ship's computer on 'Star Trek' (1966) and HAL 9000 in 2001 (1968), the tech dream has been to create a voice-activated AI responsive to human needs.
In 2011, Apple debuted a vocal assistant named Siri in its range of iPhones and smart devices, a software application able to understand voice commands to perform digital tasks. Amazon followed with an in-home device called Alexa in 2014. Quickly, they became ubiquitous globally, rounded devices with pleasant voices waiting to serve.
Consumers rested assured that a listening computer could be trusted without any fear of compromising errors or a maliscious or manipulative sub-agenda. After all, we lived in a future world where nothing could go wrong. go wrong. go wrong. By decade's end, whistleblowers and journalists had uncovered examples of state surveillance, privacy invasion, data mining, and irrational glitches.>>>
There was some cheeky self-awareness about all this. When owners asked Alexa to "Open the pod bay doors, HAL", she would respond, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. I'm not HAL and we're not in space.">
[Also watch:
KIMI (2022)]
▭ THE TREE OF LIFE (2011)
Another abstraction of 2001. Terrence Malick's contemplative memory poem deals with Nature vs. Nurture, aggression versus forgiveness, selfish versus selfless. It does so in three entwined acts, past present beyond. A beautiful film meant to be felt and mulled.
▭ BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2011)
Panos Cosmatos' debut perfectly captures the clinical futurism aesthetic of ‘70s art films and '80s tech thrillers, to a fault.
✔ Plastic futurism, remote performances, balanced symmetry, glacial mystery.
The moon landing as horror film.
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▭ PROMETHEUS (2012)
Ridley Scott returns to make a prequel to his ALIEN (1979).
ALIEN had the general structural DNA of 2001. But in PROMETHEUS, with a massive budget and high public expectations, Scott really went for it: he revived all of the grandiose ideas they'd streamlined out of the original's script, and framed his epic within the grandeur of 2001.
✔ The early Dawn. Primordial landscapes. Monolithic ships. Ancient astronaut. Greek myth. Wide scale. Symmetry framing. Cryosleep. David. Excavation. Stone giant. Aging. Cyclical. Hybrid. Evolution.
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▭ THE EUROPA REPORT (2013)
“All these worlds are yours -except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.”
-"2010: Odyssey Two", by Arthur C. Clarke
Ever since a cryptic pronouncement in Clarke's sequel, SF has done quiet homage to this with stories of attempted colonization of Jupiter's moon going askew.
Examples include:
• This film's entire premise is an implied expansion off of 2010: Odyssey Two.
• Written works include Europa Strike (2000) by Ian Douglas, the short story Riding the White Bull (2004) by Caitlín R. Kiernan, the comic "Ocean" (2004) written by Warren Ellis, The Quiet War (2008) by Paul J. McAuley, Beneath (2010) by Jeremy Robinson, the comic Les Fantômes de Neptune (2015) by Valp, and the Frozen Sky books by Jeff Carlson.
• In the PROMETHEUS (2012) backstory timeline, Weyland discovered a rudimentary life form on Europa, a precept which forbade his industry from terraforming it.
• An attempt at Europa colonization in the TV series 'Nightflyers' (2018) didn't go as planned.
▭ GRAVITY (2013)
Alfonso Cuarón makes a landmark in cinema history.
Specific films were each quantuum leaps in film craft and experience, pushing the entire medium farther: first 2001 (SFX), and then STAR WARS (advanced SFX and sound), and then JURASSIC PARK (CG), and then AVATAR (3D CG). A combination of 2001's veiled allegory amid NASA realism coupled with STAR WARS' rollercoaster intensity, GRAVITY is the next hyperjump in film.
Set entirely around astronauts and vehicles in Earth orbit, it's 'you-are-there' perfection is as unprecedented as it is breathtaking: weightless ballet, complex and continuous sequences, POV freefall, photorealistic crispness. Seen in 3D iMax, it's as close to experiencing outer space as most of us will ever get.
It was a mistake at the time to say 2001 was simplistic because it lacked dialogue, since the rich visuals were intentionally communicating a deeper experience than words. Likewise, GRAVITY seems deceptively simple, with its quietly spiritual parable of rebirth and evolution conveyed through odyssean struggles in lush sequences and coded images.
One giant leap.
▭ OBLIVION (2013)
Joseph Kosinski's undervalued adventure deserves better due.
✔ A spacecraft called The Odyssey, stasis chambers, monolithic computers, and alien intervention.
Can an AI interface save you from loneliness? But what does the AI think or feel?
✔ Computer assistant, alienation, trust issues, evolution.
▭ UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)
One-person-crew Shane Carruth followed his twisty time-travel debut PRIMER (2004) with this heady art film, a Roeg-esque skulltrip demanding every second of attention.
✔ Hallucinatory, subjective, three stages in a life cycle. A Trip.
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▭ 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey' (2014)
Carl Sagan’s heir, Neil deGrasse Tyson, does a sequel PBS maxi-series to wide acclaim. And he does his mentor one better in making the title's homage that much more explicit.
To the back of beyond and back.
> Art Of The Title
▭ LUCY (2014)
On the surface, this seems like a turbo-charged gloss on LA FEMME NIKITA (or a dress rehearsal for BLACK WIDOW). Slyly, it's a feminist rewrite of the anthropological themes of 2001.
The revelation sequence is The Trip.
(Like the book "2061: Odyssey Three", this film has a connection to The Beatles' song, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds".)>
▭ INTERSTELLAR (2014)
Christopher Nolan’s humanist reposte to 2001.
Nolan grew up on the film, and this rumination reconsiders its tenets from new angles.
✔ Time. Centrifuge. Event horizon. TARS. The Trip. Time.
> Observation Deck:
"The Monoliths Have Faces: Interstellar Answers 2001: A Space Odyssey"
▭ SPACE STATION ’76 (2014)
A clearly affectionate spoof/homage of 'Space: 1999'.
When an IBM computer is brought into the 1969 ad agency workspace, the employee anxiety and 2001 allusions go ape.
> SLATE overview
▭ 'Extant' series (2014-’15)
Astronaut Halle Berry encounters impossible visions and immaculate conception in the heavens.
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▭ THE MARTIAN (2015)
Ridley Scott interprets Andy Weir's bestselling book.
✔ Centrifuge vessal. NASA realism. Survival.
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▭ ARRIVAL (2016)
Denis Villeneuve's slow vibration builds to a profound peak.
✔ Impossible megaliths, first contact, communication beyond language.
▭ DOCTOR STRANGE (2016)
Steve Ditko, a strict Randian teetotaler, virtually invented psychedelic realities for comic books with his artwork on the original 1960s supernatural superhero. But could the lysergic mindwarp of interdimensional travel translated to the screen here have even happened without 2001?
All this and Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive", too.
▭ “It’s Full Of Stars” album (2016), by Jim Hart
Electronic concept albums based on 2001 and 2010 continued by artists like As Lonely As Dave Bowman, Jim Hart, Distant Earth, and Moonwatcher.
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▭ 'Runaways' (S01; 2017)
✔ The white regeneration bedroom.
▭ 'Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.' (2013-2020)
✔ The alien stone portals, cheekily called Monoliths; and the mind room, a white room with a grid floor lit from below.>
The short-lived Marvel show, based on the late-'60s Lee and Kirby characters, involved alien-enhanced superbeings on the moon, traveling far distances quickly through stone portals.
▭ 'Legion' (2017-2019)
Noah Hawley's brashly high-art series based on Marvel Comics' mercurial psionic.
✔ 1968-’73 mod futurism, Floyd-ian soundtrack, Kubrick symmetry, journey to a higher self.
> "Legion: How Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ Influenced Its Audacious Design"
▭ 'Twin Peaks' (2017)
David Lynch and Mark Frost return with the most fiercely iconoclastic show ever made.
If the brainburn of the original 1991 series finale had been "the 2001 of televison", it proved only to be a warm-up for the shockingly audacious Episode 8 of the new maxi-series.
A black-and-white travelogue unraveling stages of time, transformation, Penderecki chorales, symbolist rooms, and rebirth.
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▭ ANNIHILATION (2018)
Like STALKER rewritten by James Tiptree, Jr.
The story structure of Tarkovsky's film with the scrutiny of Kubrick's careful eye. Along the way, spectres of other films on this list are evoked.
▭ FIRST MAN (2018)
The unknown struggles of The First Man On The Moon.
Neil Armstrong was a distant and perfunctory man, hiding a secret anguish. Much as 2001 contrasted the frosty astronauts with rushes of extreme intensity, this bio film offsets the detached family man and aloof pilot against the jackhammer adrenaline convulsions of his flights to bracing effect.
Arthur C. Clarke has a cameo in TV coverage of the Moonflight.
[Also watch:
HIDDEN FIGURES (2017)]
2) MRS. MAISEL
▭ 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel': "Someday..." (S02/E08, 2018)
In 1959, Midge finds her scientist father searching through his grandkids' records. “Our Bell Labs speech synthesis team is going to be the first in the world to teach a computer to sing," he says. "I need to find precisely the right song; it has to have a simple melody with a maximum one-octave range, and ideally very few diphthongs in the lyrics.”
In real life, in 1961, Bell Labs demonstrated speech synthesis by having their computer sing "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built For Two)". Arthur C. Clarke had attended a demo, and canonized this by having HAL 9000 sing the song in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• "I'm half-crazy,
All for the love of you."
▭ 'Nightflyers' (2018)
Like 2001 rewritten by Stephen King.
George R.R. Martin's 1980 novella was expanded into a brief series, featuring familiar hallmarks like a centrifugal spacelab, curved corridors, greenhouse domes (SILENT RUNNING), capsule-slit lighting, psychopathic circuitry, Europa colonists, and dream visions from a higher intelligence.
When you cross the other side, will that necessarily be good?
▭ Interior design by Peter Kogler (2018)
Austrian artist Peter Kogler disrupts ordinary spaces by imprinting computer-designed Op Art and patterns on every surface. He shares a visual vocabulary with Kubrick for using Space Age modular forms, monolithic sculptures, and hallucinatory distortions.
▭ The Making of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey', by Piers Bizony (2015)
▭ Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, by Michael Benson (2018)
There are a handful of fine books detailing the making of the film since Jerome Agel's landmark The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (1970). Here are the best of the best.
Bizony's book, published by the art house Taschen, is 562 pages of astounding photos and fold-outs covering every aspect of production. Benson's book, published on the literal 50th Anniversary date, is an exhaustively researched 512-page breakdown of the three years to make the film, speaking to everyone involved.
▭ 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY iMax release (2018)
The truly great films can only be seen on a giant cinema screen: CITIZEN KANE, THE THIRD MAN, VERTIGO, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, THE GODFATHER I and II, THE EXORCIST, STAR WARS, APOCALYPSE NOW, BLADE RUNNER. They are larger than you and need to be experienced that way, need to be felt and revered and feared. They're too important, too spectacular, too sacred to be reduced. Like Everest, you come to them in respect.
In 2018, Christopher Nolan supervised the rerelease of the 70mm print of 2001 to iMax theatres for the 50th Anniversary. The Experience is the learning: now the new students, the curious, and the late could catch up to the eternal, properly.
Quality is timeless.
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▭ 'Star Trek: Discovery' (S02/E14, 2019)
✔ DISCOVERY, suit, event horizon, beyond.
Boldly go.
▭ 'The Handmaid's Tale' (S03/E09, 2019)
Author Margaret Atwood's feminist allegory about dystopic fascism was adapted into an acclaimed TV series.
The episode 'Heroic', set in a clinical hospital room, is clearly Kubrickian (the white room and mortality): central framing, white interiors, peripheral tech, chess piece staging, detached introspection, and (The Trip) hallucination.
▭ AD ASTRA (2019)
Like INTERSTELLAR, a humanist riposte; it uses the story structures of 2001 and 2010 to reinterpret Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness" and Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW.
✔ Clarke's Space Elevator*, Signal, Tycho Base, Neptune, inner Trip.
*(from "The Fountains Of Paradise" and "3001")
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▭ 'BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns And Moonage Daydreams' (2020)
Writer/artist Michael Allred (Red Rocket 7) adapted David Bowie's life into a graphic novel, which homages 2001 in the genesis of the song "Space Oddity".
▭ Actual Monoliths (2020)
At the end of 2020, a metallic column was discovered in the Utah desert.
Over 200 similar art installations, immediately identified in public consciousness with 2001 and termed Monoliths, appeared all around the world.
> List of works similar to the 2020 Utah monolith
> Monolith Tracker
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A 6-issue mini-series comic by writer Jeff Lemire and artist Andrea Sorrentino, a cross between themes from 2001 and 2010, and Grant Morrison's series "We3" (2005).
✔ Apes, first contact, rectangular portals, space, time, distance, transformation.
▭ 'Loki' (S01/E04, 2021)
The TV supplement to the THOR and AVENGERS films had its space god protagonists traveling across time and space through rectangular portals of light.
▭ ETERNALS (2021)
The feature film adaptation of Jack Kirby's visionary comics by director Chloé Zhao (NOMADLAND) kept all of the Kubrick visuals and von Däniken themes.
✔ Early tribes, visitation, monolithic spaceship (with brutalist SATRYRICON interiors), alien astronauts, genetic advancement, and celestial engineers. Zhao tranformed the Kubrick vistas and glacial tone with intimate, naturalistic, and soaring compositions more akin to Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (2011).
The Trip is the dreamy communications with the Celestial.
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▭ APOLLO 10 1/2: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD (2022)
Title: Subtitle.
In Richard Linklater's animated memoir of growing up during the Space Race, the young boy goes to the movie theater to see 2001: A Space Odyssey (on a double bill with PLANET OF THE APES). Later, he watches Arthur C. Clarke on TV talking to CBS News about the July 20, 1969 Moon Landing, who can't help making a winking reference to 2001.
▭ 'Paper Girls' (S01/E06, 2022)
K.J., a 12-year-old girl, has a startling revelation that changes her personal evolution and future. This is expressed metaphorically when she goes to a Kubrick film retrospective and sees 2001: A Space Odyssey on the cinema screen.
The original comics series (2015-'19), by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, is a science fiction epic centered around four young girls which includes broad touchpoints with 2001, such as the early evolution of hominids, portals spanning time and space, and higher luminaries.
▭ EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)
The film has a sequence which spoofs the 'Dawn Of Man' chapter of 2001, showing an alternate outcome for the future development of humans.
The comedy/drama/mindwarp also has a core theme of cosmic awareness and advanced self-actualization, as Michelle Yeoh connects with all of her selves in the multiverse. Her visions are The Trip.
Kubrick and Clarke were notably visionary in their conception of the future, but it was too male and pale. Coming out during the rise of the Counterculture and the Civil Rights movement, this blindspot for inclusion demanded course-correction from the works it has inspired. Screen ancestors made progressive strides positioning women at the fore, such as in ALIEN, THE ABYSS, "Ghost In The Shell", CONTACT, GRAVITY, PROMETHEUS, LUCY, ARRIVAL, 'Star Trek: Discovery', ANNIHILATION, the STAR WARS sequel trilogy, ETERNALS, and EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE. Every one, anywhere.
▭ 'Star Wars: Andor' (S01/E03, 2022)
'The Dawn Of Man' meets the 'Jupiter Mission' in the image above.
STAR WARS quietly winks at 2001 again with this juxtaposition: a primal dweller with his stick tool/weapon, wary of the advanced technology beyond this octagonal corridor.
The contemplative and sophisticated TV series specifically recreates the 'used universe' aesthetic of "Metal Hurlant", and the clinical remove and moody cinematography of THX-1138, SOLARIS, ALIEN, and OUTLAND.
▭ GLASS ONION: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
The detective, played by Daniel Craig, is shown around the rich man's retreat (which spoofs a Bond villain's elaborate headquarters). Looking into the infinity prism he exclaims “Oh my god, it’s full of stars!", before quickly mumbling, "2010, the year we make contact,” as the blank host fails to respond.
Dave Bowman doesn't actually say this phrase in the 2001 film, but does in the Clarke novel. It was reiterated in his "2010: Oyssey Two" book (1982), and became a cultural catchphrase after Kier Dullea's memorable performance of it in the film 2010: OYSSEY TWO (1984).
▭ SIGHT AND SOUND Directors Poll (2022)
Every ten years since 1952, the esteemed Sight And Sound -a film magazine published by the British Film Institute- has polled filmmakers to vote for the greatest films of all time.
In 2012, the Directors Poll chose 2001 as #2. In 2022, they chose it as #1.
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▭ Star Trek: Picard (S03/E09, 2023)
Douglas Trumbull pioneered modern Special Effects with his work on 2001. With John Dykstra (STAR WARS), he co-created the SFX for STAR TREK: The Motion Picture (1979). This episode names a Starfleet starship after him.
▭ Silo (S01/E05, 2023)
Based on Hugh Howey’s dystopian book series, the TV show named a henchman ‘Douglas Trumbull’ (shown on left, speaking with series star Common).
▭ Star Wars: Ahsoka (S01/E05 and S01/E06, 2023)
The monolith from 2001 multiplies into megalith Stonehenge arenas, from primeval to streamlined, as cosmic nexus points for druids of the dark side.
▭ Mrs. Davis (TV Maxi-Series, 2023)
An absurdist adventure limited series co-created by writer Damon Lindelof (PROMETHEA), with the penultimate seventh episode titled "The Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey". All meaning is open to interpretation.
▭ BARBIE (2023)
The 'Dawn Of Man' opening chapter of 2001 set the cinema standard for depicting the early evolution of humanity. Its unforgettable refrain has been quoted from QUEST FOR FIRE to EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, interpolated abstractly from ALTERED STATES to LUCY.
The opening sequence of Greta Gerwig's feminist allegory and smash hit comedy BARBIE pranks Kubrick by showing young girls liberated from normative mommy dollys in favor of variable action figures.
▭ ’New Yorker’ (Oct. 30, 2023)
Mark Ulriksen’s cover cartoon for the Halloween issue, “Spooky Spiral”, eschews the white suit and round helmut of traditional Apollo astronauts with its distinctive orange suit and squared helmut.
• “…and once the spirit has left the white bones,
all the rest of the body is made subject to the fire's strong fury,
but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.”
-“The Odyssey”, by Homer
█ “My God…
it’s full of stars.” █
© Tym Stevens
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