2001: A Space Odyssey Movie

A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick's landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. Based on Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel, Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay is structured in four movements. At the "Dawn of Man," a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of Strauss's 1896 Also sprach Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development. U.S. scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon's surface: a black monolith. As the sun's rays strike the stone, however, it emits a piercing, deafening sound that fills the investigators' headphones and stops them in their path.

Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) head toward Jupiter on the spaceship , their only company three hibernating astronauts and the vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship. When the all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the astronauts to cover his error, forcing Bowman to defend himself the only way he can. Free of HAL, and finally informed of the voyage's purpose by a recording from Floyd, Bowman journeys to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," through the psychedelic slit-scan star-gate to an 18th century room, and the completion of the monolith's evolutionary mission.

With assistance from special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull, Kubrick spent over two years meticulously creating the most "realistic" depictions of outer space ever seen, greatly advancing cinematic technology for a story expressing grave doubts about technology itself. Despite some initial critical reservations that it was too long and too dull, 2001 became one of the most popular films of 1968, underlining the generation gap between young moviegoers who wanted to see something new and challenging and oldsters who "didn't get it." Provocatively billed as "the ultimate trip," 2001 quickly caught on with a counterculture youth audience open to a contemplative (i.e. chemically enhanced) viewing experience of a film suggesting that the way to enlightenment was to free one's mind of the U.S. military-industrial-technological complex.

Stanley Kubrick rewrote the book on what a mainstream, major-studio motion picture could look, sound, and feel like with this groundbreaking work. At a time when science fiction onscreen meant bug-eyed monsters menacing scantily clad women, 2001: A Space Odyssey was a visually dazzling and intellectually challenging experience. Kubrick abandoned narrative convention to tell four tangentially related stories about man's destiny, reflected in the conquest of space. Kubrick also insisted that a story set in outer space should like it was taking place in outer space, and his special effects team (headed by Douglas Trumbull) created some of the most stunning visual effects to appear onscreen before or since. Unlike the effects-laden films that followed in the wake of Star Wars, the imagery in 2001 doesn't slow the story but helps move it along, and it creates a genuine sense of wonder about the beautiful, dangerous vastness of space. Kubrick's embrace of avant-garde music and abstract visual textures brought experimental art to an audience that had no exposure to the works of such '60s avant-garde filmmakers as Stan Brakhage or Jordan Belson, and the film's resulting "trippy" atmosphere greatly increased its popularity (and revenue) as a late '60s drug movie. Still as richly thought-provoking as ever, 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a watershed work in '60s cinema and lives up to its billing as "the ultimate trip."