The Space Odyssey Series

Keir Dullea

Gary Lockwood

William Sylvester

Douglas Rain

Daniel Richter

Leonard Rossiter

Margaret Tyzack

Robert Beatty

Sean Sullivan

Frank W. Miller

Bill Weston

Ed Bishop

Glenn Beck

Alan Gifford

Ann Gillis

Edwina Carroll

Penny Brahms

Heather Downham

Mike Lovell

John Ashley

Jimmy Bell

David Charkham

Keith Denny

Jonathan Daw

Péter Delmár

Terry Duggan

David Fleetwood

Danny Grover

Brian Hawley

David Hines

Anthony Jackson

John Jordan

Scott MacKee

Laurence Marchant

Darryl Paes

Joe Refalo

Andy Wallace

Bob Wilyman

Richard Woods

Maggie London

Chela Matthison

Judy Keirn

Vivian Kubrick

Kenneth Kendall

Kevin Scott

Martin Amor

S. Newton Anderson

Sheraton Blount

Ann Bormann

Julie Croft

Penny Francis

Marcella Markham

Irena Marr

Krystyna Marr

Kim Neil

Jane Pearl

Penny Pearl

Burnell Tucker

John Swindells

John Clifford

Stanley Kubrick

Harry Fielder

Arthur C. Clarke

H.L. Bird

Victor Lyndon

Geoffrey Unsworth

Brian Johnson

Les Bowie

Ray Lovejoy

Winston Ryder

David de Wilde

Ernest Archer

John Hoesli

Anthony Masters

James Liggat

Harry Lange

Robert Cartwright

Dick Frift

A.W. Watkins

Derek Cracknell

Malcolm Stewart

Graham Freeborn

Stuart Freeborn

Douglas Trumbull

Mary Gibson

David Wynn-Jones

Bobby Clark

John Francis

George Watts

John Alcott

Kelvin Pike

Wally Veevers

Con Pederson

Tom Howard

Hardy Amies

Frederick I. Ordway III

Science Fiction

Mystery

Adventure

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick Productions

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

United Kingdom

United States of America

There are many great predictions hinting to future (it is from 1968 - can you believe it?) innovations throughout the movie. I might not have found all them because I keep falling asleep while watching it but I will keep trying to find them all.

I believe that we should call it a modernism show, albeit exhibited in the form of a movie. While it might feel "boring", it forces you to rethink what philosophical level that a two-hour film can achieve. The focus on questions about life, intelligence, and time, is worth more attention than the sci-fi part (though the special effect of this movie is already way ahead of its time).

The eighth wonder of the world. Easily 30+ viewings since I was a little kid. Nothing new to say here; simply wanted to add another pair of hands to the ocean of applause for my absolute favorite thing, the only indisputably perfect movie, the answer to the question of Is Life Worth Living, Man's greatest achievement, two thousand one a burger-flipping space odyssey

Per Gunnar Jonsson

I got this movie recently when it came out on Ultra HD Blu-ray simply because it was missing in my collection and, being a Sci-Fi fan, missing 2001 in my collection simply would not do. It is a movie that was made to rely almost entirely on the visuals. It could be said that it is a visual symphony if that makes sense. Thus it was filmed on 70 mm film and in 6 channel stereo which, at the time was a huge thing. Thanks to this it actually made some sense to transfer this movie to Ultra HD Blu-ray since the originals were really good enough even though the movie was made in 1968.

I remember watching this movie as a kid and was profoundly disappointed. I thought come on, where’s the adventure, not to mention any form of action? Today I can more appreciate it for what it is. A visually stunning movie. I also can more appreciate the fact that the movie is trying to be scientifically accurate instead of going all out on the fiction part. The parts where gravity, or rather the lack thereof, was portrayed, that was really high tech movie making at the time. I also noticed now, when re-watching it, that all the screens are actually flat which also was really far in the future at the time. Actually it was still pretty much in the future back in 2001.

However, even today, I have to say that I find the movie excruciatingly boring. It is two and a half hour long and it moves very, very slowly. It takes 50 minutes of movie time before we actually get to the main part of the movie and get onto the Discovery for instance. No matter how great the visuals are, there’s only so much boredom I can stand before it starts to get to me.

In the last 30 minutes or so the movie starts to become very psychedelic. The part where Bowman is pulled into the vortex, the stargate, is going on forever and in the end it just becomes a blur of headache inducing color effects. The final parts of the movie with the three Bowmans of different ages is just weird.

So,as this is a non-professional and personal take on the movie I cannot really motivate more than 3 out of 5 stars.

I hadn’t actually planned to review this movie. Everything has really already been said about it but I could not refrain after having read this crap at Rotten Tomatoes:

Critics Consensus: One of the most influential of all sci-fi films — and one of the most controversial — Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is a delicate, poetic meditation on the ingenuity — and folly — of mankind.

It’s pretty well known that Rotten Tomatoes is the absolutely worst movie rating site around and the so called “critics” are useless culture elite morons with an over-inflated opinion about themselves at best and politically motivated SJW asswipes at worst but still.

What the hell is controversial about it? Reality check, there’s really nothing controversial about it at all. It is just a fictional story in the future. Then we have that crap “the folly”. What bloody folly? If anything the movie shows a much better future  than what we got. A future where the politicians apparently promoted advancement of science and space exploration which is the direct opposite to the money and oxygen wasters we have today.

Sure, if you indulge too much in smoking funny mushrooms or are politically motivated you can probably “interpret” the hell out of any movie and “find” whatever message you want but it is still bullshit.

Well, that was my (controversial?) take on 2001.

_**Inscrutable space science-fiction as cinematic art**_

The discovery of an ancient extraterrestrial monolith on the Moon leads to a mission to Jupiter, but the astronauts have unexpected complications with their vessel’s onboard computer, HAL 9000. William Sylvester plays an official of US Astronautics in the first hour while Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood play the two functioning astronauts in the second half.

Created by Stanley Kubrick (director/writer) and Arthur C. Clarke (writer), "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) is an artistic sci-fi film about human evolution, advanced technology, the wonders of space, the routineness of space travel, artificial intelligence and the mystery of extraterrestrial life. It mixes elements of “Planet of the Apes,” which debuted over six weeks earlier, with aspects of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” which came out eleven years later and was obviously influenced by this one-of-a-kind movie. 

It begins with the “dawn of man” as a curious introduction before jumping forward to the 21st Century, which has been called the longest flash-forward in cinematic history. The depictions of space travel and life-in-space feel wholly authentic. 

But “2001” is peculiar in that it rejects traditional techniques of narrative cinema and is often a nonverbal experience, which leaves some viewers in awe and others bored. It’s not about conventional thrills, but rather disquieting awe. It’s not easy entertainment, but meditative, transcendent art. The 1985 sequel, “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” is more standard and less ambiguous yet a worthy companion piece. 

The soundtrack mixes classical compositions, e.g. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, with four creepy modernistic compositions by György Ligeti. The parts of the movie that utilize the latter pieces really evoke an unsettling sense of the unknown.

My favorite part is the astronauts’ exchange with HAL, which involves almost an hour of the runtime and is the only part of the film that generates a low-key sense of suspense.

Personally, I don’t believe that humankind began as apes (rolling my eyes). But, even if this were true, where did the apes come from? Did they just spontaneously manifest by accident? If so, when? How? Biogenesis is a scientific axiom meaning “life proceeds from life.” So what life form originally created the apes or the simple organisms that supposedly evolved into apes?

The film runs 2 hours, 29 minutes.

GRADE: A-/B+

Sigeki Ogino

I saw it for the first time when I was in middle school. I thought it was the worst movie ever. Then, some time later, as an adult, I rewatched it and was amazed at how wonderful it was. It was so beautiful and magnificent that I could not believe it was made in 1968, and I thought it was an unprecedented and solemn historical work, like Goethe's "Faust" in literature, one of the greatest masterpieces of cinema that mankind has ever possessed. First of all, it is a film in which dialogue is reduced to the utmost limit, and even if it had been in black and white, I could have watched it ten times without getting tired of it, regardless of whether I could have endured the "silence. It's Kubrick's magic that you can watch this film without any annoying sound effects like in "Jaws" but with classical music and with your heart rate regulated like in Charlie Chaplin's silent films. I don't know how well this film was received in the U.S. at the time, but in Japan, many people shy away from it, saying it is difficult to understand.

Filipe Manuel Neto

**A magnificent film, with beautiful music and great visuals... but smug, empty and unforgivably overrated.**

Stanley Kubrick is, for me, one of those directors who so quickly impresses us with a great film, as it makes us doubt his competence with an absolutely pathetic trash. I know that the director's fans are going to crucify me, but that's how I think, and I even say more: with each Kubrick film I see, I am more convinced that an aura of unjustified “cult” genius has been created around him. I loved some of his movies like “Spartacus”, “Dr. Strangelove”, “Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut”, but thinking about them and trying to compare them with “Clockwork Orange” and “Full Metal Jacket” is strange. They don't look like the work of the same director.

Released in the 1960s, at a time when the space race was at its height and when the future of Humanity seemed, more and more, to be outside our planet, the film addresses the question of the evolution of the human species in a “sui generis” way: it starts with monkeys and goes to the first contacts with extraterrestrial beings. The film was considered one of the defining milestones of sci-fi as a cinematographic genre, and I believe that this is indisputable. It's also one of the rare sci-fi movies that seems concerned with being scientifically credible, yet not without flaws that a good scientist will spot (and we might not).

Set in a hypothetical future, the film shows what space explorations and life in colonies made in space and on the Moon would be like. However, it is still ironic that, after the 60s and 70s, space exploration has been so secondary that many questions, even today, whether we really should spend industrial amounts of money and resources on it. The future that Kubrick imagined in 2001 seems, in 2022, even more imaginative and far from happening than when the film was released. However, some things really did happen and are, today, normal: this is the case of video calls and the extraordinary advances in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Among the various merits of this film, we have to highlight the extraordinary visual beauty, the way the director worked with the visual and special effects and the excellent camera work. At a time when CGI was a mirage far from a filmmaker's mind, this film gives us images and visuals that look like they were made this year. The film simply hasn't aged a single day: we have clear images, magnificently crafted light and details, excellent sound effects, a cinematography that makes envy to many 21st century films and, also important, a magnificent soundtrack where “Blue Danube” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” stand out, helping to popularize these melodies.

Despite these indisputable merits, I think this film deserves to be on the list of the most overrated films I've ever seen. And this is due, in good part, to everything else that I didn't say, and which is essential in a good film. Let's start with the absence of a script and horrible pace: for almost three hours, the film drags on unbearably in scenes of great beauty, but with nothing to say. It's truly exasperating. The only moments where the film really gains interest are when the ship's supercomputer turns against the astronauts, and even that segment feels loose, as if the script were a patchwork quilt. The allusions to aliens didn't fascinate me either, it's a regular cliché when making a movie set in space. One point that also didn't help is the lack of good actors, or any decent work for them to do, and the fact that Kubrick shows us life on the space stations as if it were a stay in a luxury hotel. And what about the extraordinary sense of arrogant conceit that the film conveys? We are the ones who have to recognize if the film is good, it can't be the film telling us that every minute!

CinemaSerf

From the opening bars of Richard Strauss's "Also spracht Zarathustra" you just know that this is going to be something unique - and that it is. Apes, playing by a puddle - occasionally engaging in some noisy territorial warfare with their neighbours until one morning, this great black monolith appears. Shortly afterwards these creatures have realised that old bones make new weapons - and that these weapons can kill! The next phase jumps forward four million years later to a mission to Jupiter where a crew of five astronauts under the helpful gaze of their "HAL" computer are making their way across space. Two of them: "Poole" (Gary Lockwood) and "Bowman" (Keir Dullea) are not in hibernation and are regularly engaging with there outwardly affable digital companion. It doesn't take the humans long to conclude that "HAL" might be both malfunctioning and malevolent, and all of a sudden the life of all the people on board becomes precariously balanced. Is "HAL" malfunctioning, or is it fulfilling it's programming and the crew are just not read in? What might that objective be? We know that the monolith has been seen since the apes, what does that mean? What is the symbolism of this perfectly hewn tablet of granite? Kubrick was visionary with this work. It is a tale of evolution, or progress - of intelligence. It doesn't always make immediate sense, but after you've watched it a few times, there are extra ingredients to this potent mix of adventure and intellect that emerge. The ending is a tad surreal for my rather non-lateral-thinking brain, but the trip they take and the trip we take are eventful and thought provoking. Of course, back in 1968 2001 was a lifetime away and obviously none of this came to pass, but if we renamed it 3001 and recalibrated, well I wonder...! Great stuff.

Absolute classic, must see, one of the best scifi movies ever made

James

This is the most pretentious crap ever made - but is it an amazing film? No. But it is an amazing _**piece of art**_. This is worthy of the label of film, but the label of film is not worthy of this. Kubrick has crafted a stellar and surreal experience, one of the greatest **_pieces of art_** ever made. Why, you ask, do I obtain from referring to this as a film? Because it is simply not, it is an overpowering sensory experience, not a film. If I seem to be losing my point, here is it straight. It’s too good to be a film. I wouldn’t say this is enjoyable, or entertaining, but it is a stunning experience. One of the greatest **_pieces of art_** ever made. I only lost a point because it’s not a film. Kubrick is often critiqued for his icy cold view of human emotion, and this is no different. The most affecting and human sequence in the film comes ironically (spoilers) from the death of a machine. Check this out, it may not be entertaining, but it IS worth it.

Pleasing on a technical level, even with barely anything to grasp story-wise.

<em>'2001: A Space Odyssey'</em> looks and sounds exquisite, it really is seriously impressive in that regard for a film from 1968. That is, however, the only reason that this gets a passing rating from me if I'm to be totally truthful. The plot itself is rather disappointing, with not much meat on the bones.

I get it's evidently going for the more artsy approach, made clear by the lack of dialogue/bona fide narrative alongside plenty of ambiguity. It's a Stanley Kubrick film after all, not that I've seen much of his work (this be the first, in fact); moreso what I've heard through the grapevine down the years. There are also a lot of long held, empty-feeling (as intended, I'd imagine) shots that bothered me throughout. It just didn't entice me, that's all. I can still respect it.

Given the aforementioned, the cast are basically nonentities - as harsh as that may sound. Douglas Rain does a good job, in fairness, and William Sylvester is alright. I can't say I blame those onscreen all that much, as they aren't exactly given much opportunity to showcase themselves.

As has been the case with a couple of other movies down the years, I'm certainly content to file this one with the 'I clearly didn't get it and I'm cool with that' tag. I'm still glad I watched it. I do appreciate it, if only technically, and naturally love that others love it.

Seeing _2001: A Space Odyssey_ on the big screen for the first time is an eye-opener. The vastness of space, the eerily precise shots of the spacecraft, and the careful pacing all come to life in a way a TV could never match. The immersive sound design, from the opening hum to the famous orchestral music, and in particular the equally orchestrated silence filling the cinema, makes you feel like you're part of the journey. Details that might seem faint on a smaller screen are clear and striking here: the textures of the spacesuits, the contrast in colours, and the scale of Kubrick's vision. This unique visual and auditory experience in a cinema is a must for any film enthusiast, as it genuinely lets the film's grandeur and mystery sink in.

Christopher Figaro

This is the second Stanley Kubrick movie I've seen that I didn't enjoy. The first was The Shining, which I found painfully slow and uninteresting. It annoyed me. And it's not because it was bad, but because everyone treats it like a masterpiece. I expected brilliance, tension, something gripping. I got none of that.

And this space movie is no different.

I'll give credit where it's due. The movie is well made. The visuals and cinematography are stunning. The effects and the music are genuinely impressive. You can clearly see how other movies like Star Wars, Interstellar, and Inception took inspiration from it. But that's where the praise ends.

The movie is pointless, painfully slow, and filled with way too many long drawn out shots. The opening title alone takes over four minutes. Four minutes of just music and a black screen. What was the point of that? Then we spend twenty minutes watching a bunch of monkeys in the wilderness. Later, we're stuck with two characters silently eating and watching an expositional video on their tablets for what feels like an eternity.

There are no characters worth mentioning or even remembering. The story goes nowhere, and by the end, it feels like the movie had absolutely nothing to say. I expected this movie to at least have a story, something to hold on to.

I don't think I'll be watching any more of Kubrick's movies. I don't care how highly praised they are. I'm done.

From an artistic point of view, I can certainly see the appeal of this movie. From its influence on media, as well.

But, to me personally, that's about it.

Very short summary:
- Very artistic movie that has very nice visuals, great use of classical music and use of sound or lack of sound to create an ominous atmosphere
- But sadly, extremely slow...everything. Which would be fine if it would lead to a satisfying, surprising conclusion. But ultimately the conclusion, also, is just an artistic one, and all possible story elements around HAL that could've been used...stay unused.

--
Longer:

The visuals, especially considering its age, are impressive. Little details, especially in the beginning, that show us how communication, food and such things work in this vision of future are quite interesting and made me optimistic to where it would lead to.

Sure, the pacing was slow from the very beginning, I'm certain the first hour would be handled in today's age in 20 minutes, but hey, I don't mind a slow start and I'm used slower pacing from older films.

Then the middle part, everything involving HAL, which, I assume, is the most well-known part of the movie, even to those that haven't watched it.

It's slow, but interesting. So much potential: Does HAL make mistakes? Is everything planned? If he makes mistakes: why? What's his agenda? And is it HIS agenda? Very much potential along with his natural question in an unnatural, calming, constantly calm tone.
Many interesting things could come from this.

But sadly...they don't. The possibly dangerous parts are resolved quickly, the "secrets" are more confusing than shocking and the last 20 - 30 minutes of the movie are basically just an art piece you'd expect from a museum or theater. In both, good and bad ways.

As said in the beginning, from an artistic point of view, I like this movie. Really nice designs, lovely and strong use of classical music and the sound, or more often, lack of sound, creates a really interesting atmosphere fitting to the "vast emptiness of space" mood.
If that is what you want, it's quite impressive.

But if you want a story, twists and possibly complicated or interesting revelations...I don't see any of it. Everything about HAL and the monolith had potential for so many stories, but in the end the creators decided to end the movie on an artistic yet confusing scene that offers no real resolution of anything and a very long drawn-out way to reach it.

It's a pity, I would've liked more story around HAL.

So...watch it if you're into art and movie artistry, but don't expect to be moved by the story, if you are like me.

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Keir Dullea and Ben Mankiewicz Discuss 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY | TCMFF 2025

The Moon Monolith

Terminating the Hal 9000 | Full Scene

Alfonso Cuarón on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY | ON FILM | TIFF 2023