Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all manner of terms since it came out more than half a century ago. An early advertising campaign, tapping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, called it “the ultimate trip”; in the equivalently trendy parlance of the twenty-twenties, one could say that it “goes hard,” in that it takes no few bold, even unprecedented aesthetic and dramatic turns. The new video essay from Just One More Thing even describes 2001 as “the hardest film Kubrick ever made” — which, given Kubrick’s uncompromising ambitions as a filmmaker, is certainly saying something.
In one of the many interview clips that constitute the video’s 23 minutes, Steven Spielberg recalls his conversations with Kubrick in the last years of the master’s life. “I want to make a movie that changes the form,” Kubrick would often say to Spielberg. Arguably, he’d already done so with 2001, which continues to launch its first-time viewers into an experience unlike any they’ve had with a movie before. Unlike the more substance-inclined members of his generation, Spielberg went into the theater “clean as a whistle,” but “came out of there altered” nevertheless. It didn’t require drugs to appreciate after all; “that film was the drug.”
This isn’t to say that 2001 is purely or even primarily an abstract work of cinema. In collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put a great deal of technical thought into the film’s vision of the future, with its well-appointed space stations, its artificially intelligent computers, its video calls, and its tablet-like mobile devices. Working in the years before the moon landing, says Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films author Paul Duncan, they “had to completely visualize, and make real, things that had never occurred.” Such was the realism of their speculative work (up to and including imagining how Earth would look from space) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the real Apollo 11 astronauts could describe their experience simply: “It was like 2001.”
Conceived in the heat of the Space Race, the film envisions a great deal that didn’t come to pass by the eponymous year — and indeed, has yet to materialize still today. “We haven’t quite gotten to artificial intelligence as portrayed,” says star Keir Dullea in a 50th-anniversary interview. “Almost, but not quite.” Still, even since then, the technology has come far enough along that few of us can ponder the current state of AI without sooner or later hearing the ominously polite voice of HAL somewhere in the back of our minds. The saga of astronauts currently stranded on the International Space Station does contrast harshly with 2001’s visions of stable and well-functioning life in outer space — but as a story, it might well have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.
Related content:
1966 Film Explores the Making of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)
How Stanley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Seven-Part Video Essay
Discover the Life & Work of Stanley Kubrick in a Sweeping Three-Hour Video Essay
How Stanley Kubrick Became Stanley Kubrick: A Short Documentary Narrated by the Filmmaker
Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
