2001: A SPACE ODDITY
As Kubrick’s epic returns 50 years after its launch, our film critic hails a stellar — but weird — masterpiece
One of Christopher nolan’s earliest memories of going to the cinema is being taken by his father to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 47-year- old director of Dunkirk and Interstellar admits being hugely inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 1968 movie, and next month at the Cannes Film Festival he can acknowledge the debt in public.
The film is being reissued in its original 70mm format, so modern cinemagoers can experience exactly what held audiences spellbound 50 years ago this summer. nolan, who has worked closely on the project with a team from Warner Brothers, will introduce the premiere in Cannes, after which the film will be shown in selected British cinemas.
nolan isn’t the only one who has fallen under the film’s spell. Four years ago, 150 leading authors, film-makers and scientists were invited to rank their ten favourite sciencefiction films. Alien finished third and Blade Runner second, but comfortably at the top of the pile was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which h uses pioneering special effects to show the e evolution of humankind over three e million years, from grunting apes s to space travellers discovering g extra-terrestrial life.
Its status as the greatest of all l sci-fi films is endorsed by many of f Kubrick’s fellow directors. George Lucas regards it as a work of f genius, ‘far superior’ to his own 1977 picture Star Wars. Steven Spielberg considers it one of cinema’s towering masterpieces.
James Cameron, the director of Titanic, saw it when he was 15 and says it made him want to make films. But Woody Allen couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and at the Los Angeles premiere Rock Hudson (as well as 240 others) stalked out, thundering: ‘Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?’
Soon, we will all get a chance to make up our own minds about ut Kubrick’s film, which was inspired by British writer Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story The Sentinel and released the year before Man first walked on the Moon.
Since then, 2001 has become revered for its powerful classical soundtrack, its extraordinary images of space and much besides. The screenplay was eerily prescient in its vision of a computer-dependent society — long before mobile phones, its characters used what we now know as Skype.
Love it or loathe it, 2001 is a landmark film. So here are 15 more things you need to know ...
1 ITS title was decided on because in 1968 the year 2001 sounded so thrillingly futuristic — and also because Kubrick loved Homer’s masterwork, The Odyssey.
2 THe film runs for two hours, 22 minutes, but there is less than 40 minutes of dialogue and almost half an hour passes before there are any words at all.
3 THe use of classical music, including Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube, to express the poetic grace of space flight has influenced film-makers ever since.
4 HISTORIAn Arthur Schlesinger Jr described the film as ‘morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long’. But neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, loved it.
5 KuBRICK tried to take out an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London to protect himself against losses in case extra-terrestrial intelligence was discovered before the film’s release. Lloyd’s refused. 6THe
great baddie of 2001 is a computer on board the spaceship Discovery One, which tries to kill the crew. Its name, HAL, is thought to have been a cheeky reference to IBM, since each letter comes one before in the alphabet, but Kubrick always denied this. 7ACCORDInG
to some of the conspiracy theorists who believe footage of the 1969 Apollo Moon landing was faked, unused scenes from 2001 were used by nasa to add authenticity to the gigantic ‘hoax’. 8A-
LeveL physics teachers still show DvDs of 2001 to their pupils, citing it as one of the very few sci-fi films to get the physics of space travel absolutely right. 9THAT
accuracy reflects Kubrick’s perfectionism. He talked to people from leading aeronautical companies, government agencies and numerous industries, asking them all how things might work in the year 2001. 10THe
picture cost $4.5 million more than its initial $6 million budget, and was completed almost two years behind schedule. 11KuBRICK
had a hand in almost every aspect of the production, even choosing the fabrics for his actors’ costumes. 12THe
modernist Djinn chair became so popular after Kubrick used it in the film’s orbital hotel, Space Station v, that it is known as the ‘2001 chair’. They now fetch more than £500 apiece. 13KuBRICK,
a new Yorker, made the film almost entirely in england. He was such an Anglophile that in the film the news from earth beamed to the Jupiter-bound spaceship was relayed by BBC newsreader Kenneth Kendall. 14IT
WOn only one Oscar, for Best effects/Special visual effects. Kubrick was nominated as Best Director but didn’t attend the awards ceremony because he was terrified of flying. 15THe
film’s sense of mysticism appealed hugely to the Summer of Love generation, and apparently the smell of marijuana permeated many cinemas. At one, a young man ran down the aisle and dived through the screen, bellowing: ‘I see God!’ n