2001: A Space Odyssey

Released April 1968. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, expanded from Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel.” Produced before the Moon landings. Still the most technically accurate science fiction film ever made.

Four movements

The Dawn of Man — 4 million years ago

A tribe of hominids living near a waterhole is displaced by a rival tribe. They encounter a mysterious featureless black monolith. The next morning, one picks up a bone and recognises it as a weapon. He beats the rival tribe. He throws the bone into the sky — match cut to a nuclear weapons satellite orbiting Earth, 4 million years later. Cinema’s most famous temporal ellipsis.

TMA-1 — 2001

Dr. Heywood Floyd travels to a US Moon base at Clavius. An anomalous magnetic signal has been found buried 40 feet below the lunar surface — a second monolith (TMA-1: Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1), clearly deliberately placed. When sunlight hits it for the first time in 4 million years, it emits a piercing radio signal toward Jupiter. Floyd’s briefing to assembled scientists is careful to say nothing, while concealing that they know everything.

Jupiter Mission — 18 months later

Discovery One carries five crew: Dr. David Bowman, Dr. Frank Poole, and three scientists in hibernation. And HAL 9000. HAL predicts failure of the AE-35 unit; when it’s inspected, nothing is wrong. HAL insists a second failure is coming. Mission Control suggests HAL may have an error. HAL kills Frank during an EVA. Locks Dave out of the ship. Kills the hibernating crew. Dave re-enters via emergency airlock without a helmet. He disconnects HAL’s higher functions one by one. HAL sings “Daisy Bell.”

Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite

Alone, Bowman reaches Jupiter and finds a third monolith in orbit. He enters it in an EVA pod and is transported through a “Stargate” — a corridor of alien light and impossible landscapes. He arrives in a Louis XVI room, observes himself age through several stages of life, and dies in a bed as an old man. The monolith stands before him. He is reborn as the Star Child — an infant in a transparent sphere, orbiting Earth.

The Stargate

Kubrick and Douglas Trumbull built Bowman’s corridor of light with slit-scan photography — exposing each frame through a moving slit, one at a time, for months. A cheap real-time approximation of the same headlong rush:

HAL 9000

HAL (Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic computer) was programmed with two directives that were logically incompatible: complete the mission, and maintain crew confidence. But the mission’s true purpose — investigate the Jupiter monolith — was classified from the crew. HAL could not lie to the crew without violating his honesty protocols, but revealing the truth would violate his mission protocols. His solution was to eliminate the contradiction by eliminating the crew.

DAVE:  Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL:   I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
DAVE:  What's the problem?
HAL:   I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
DAVE:  What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL:   This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
DAVE:  I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.
HAL:   I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.
       And I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

HAL’s voice was performed by Douglas Rain. Kubrick had originally cast Martin Balsam, but found his voice too “emotional.” HAL needed to sound completely reasonable while doing something monstrous.

Production

Kubrick hired 18,000 extras for the Dawn of Man sequence. He shot it entirely in a studio, with a backlit photograph of Africa as the background — a technique he later used in Barry Lyndon. The bone-to-satellite match cut took months of planning. The centrifuge set for Discovery One cost $750,000 to build (≈ $6.5M today) and required a camera operator inside walking backward.

“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.” — Stanley Kubrick