2001: A Space Odyssey

'Stanley Kubrick' is an anagram of 'I R Tubels Cackny'. Typing this into Google results in no matches. Coincidence? I think not.

Whilst you ponder that, go to 'Underman's 2001' and read all of it. This little commentary isn't supposed to be an exhaustive guide to the film. It's just a collection of random musings.

   "likky trans cube"


Let's get the obvious images over with first. Look, it's the Discovery, heading for Jupiter. Notice how it's not quite in the middle of the frame. It's slightly off to the right. This must be symbolic of something or other. Stanley Kubrick fans are like that. They see symbolism all over the place. If you sum the digits of '2001' you get '3', which is precisely the amount of films Kubrick directed during the 1970s. Coincidence?
In reality, the shadowy bits would be completely black, as there isn't any 'fill-in' light in space. The only film that captures the total darkness of space is Disney's The Black Hole, a post-Star Wars adventure that borrowed some of 2001's sense of visual style.


In reality, the monolith was made out of chalk - it looks black in the film because Kubrick had the colours inverted (which necessitated that everything else was painted in 'inverse' colours). It was built onto the chassis of a modified Honda monkey bike, and could be driven around the set to provide a makeshift sunshield.


There's a popular promotional shot of astronaut David Bowman extracting a piece of equipment from one of the lockers along the side of this corridor. It's not actually in the film. Apparently about twenty minutes of footage (including Richard Burton's entire performance) were cut here and there after the film was premiered. I have no idea whether the footage still exists or not.

   "Kick Strange Buly"

1. This is the first line of dialogue. This is the last. And, for the first time ever on the internet, this is the middle line (taken just after the scene with the octagonal corridor illustrated above, as Bowman prepares to leave the Discovery for the first time, seventy minutes into the 140-minute film).

1. I first saw 2001 when I was very young. I was into sci-fi in a big way because of Star Wars. I remember being very unhappy when the poor astronaut was killed. And it seemed extremely isolated and lonely and miserable being on that spaceship so far away from home. I can't remember what feelings I had towards the apes and the star gate sequence. I must have just sat through them, patiently waiting for the spaceships. Despite all the shiny technology 2001 is a deeply pessimistic film. The message is that we're still apes waving our clubs around, and all the main cast are either killed or turned into a godlike superbeing, something which probably isn't much fun.
I then saw it again when I was about twelve and it had a big effect on me. Twelve is 'Lord of the Rings' age, the age when you can read 'Lord of the Rings' all the way through without getting bored or laughing. I liked the way 2001 looked, more than anything else. Not so much the models and special effects, although there was that, but the way that everything was in the exact center of the screen, and all the perspective lines went out to the corners, like an old-fashioned painting from the days when they had just discovered the vanishing point. The megalomaniac anti-NYPD Blue precision appealed to me, and still does. It's why the homepage of my website has a single picture in the very middle of the screen and some text in neat columns and nothing else. The grace of the camera movements affected me, too, particularly the way that there was never any wasted motion. I knew from reading books that spaceflight was like ice-skating in three dimensions, and 2001 captured this simplicity of motion perfectly. All its circuits were completely operational.
2001 quickly became my favourite film, although over the following years I realised with increasing despair that it was one of a kind, and that there was only a limited amount of films and that I'd seen all the good ones, and that there were no new worlds to conquer, both in the cinema and in real life.
Part of growing old is realising that the world isn't infinite, and that the good stuff is in short supply, and that you have to savour it when you get it because it won't last.
Oddly, although I spent the next couple of days humming The Blue Danube, my mind blanked out Georgy Ligeti's atonal music. It wasn't until seeing the film again on video that I realised that it was music, and not just some weird noises put onto the soundtrack at random. Ligeti's music inspired me to seek out new sounds and new possibilities, to boldly venture into Salisbury Library's 'Contemporary Classical' section and start listening to Stockhausen. If you want to irritate the neighbours, hip-hop played loud will do; but if you want to unsettle them, disturb them, make them think that you're weird, you need Ligeti and Stockhausen and La Monte Young.
For sentimental reasons 2001 will probably remain my knee-jerk 'What's your favourite film' answer. And I still like it a lot, but not in the same intense way. Everything fades as you get older, too. Unless you're a bomb, in which case things flare up but not for very long.
I still find isolated bits of it better than almost anything else I've seen. The short sequence where HAL turns off the hibernating astronauts is still disturbing, a testament to the power of editing. It's horrifying and creepy, despite being a set of almost entirely still images with some beeps. The close-up cuts to HAL's glowering eye achieve much the same effect as the quick shots of the knife in Psycho's 'shower sequence'.
The bit with the apes is extremely impressive, too, given that it has to get a large chunk of the plot across with grunts and wails. It's very slow and bores a lot of people, but once you slow down with it, it's fascinating.
Stanley Kubrick fans would say that 'it bores people who are used to the slam-bang action of shallow Hollywood blockbusters'. But then again, they probably have no friends. And they're probably the kind of people who will write to me to tell me that they do have lots of friends, and that I'm shallow. Damn you all to hell. Your kind ruin everything. You rip the life out of things and put them on a pedestal and then you wonder why people aren't interested any more.

1. 'Odyssey' is a bastard to spell. I can't count the amount of times I have written 'Odyessy' or 'Odyessey' or 'Odyssy'. According to the dictionary it's 'a long, adventurous voyage', derived from Homer's blockbusting fantasy novel of the same name, the star of which was Odysseus. Damn, the Greeks had groovy names. Not for them 'Arthur' or 'Giles' or 'Lancelot'; no, they had heroes called 'Telemachus' and 'Diomedes'.
I was going to write a little bit about Odysseus himself, but, according to the encyclopaedia, he did everything and went everywhere, and a full account of his life and travels would take up a very large book.
After reading about Greek myth, I've come to the conclusions that people who say Hollywood films are unoriginal are missing the point; it would appear that all modern drama is basically a riff on Grecian legend, from The Matrix to EastEnders and all points in between.
Except for, perhaps, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick's film is very much a film-film, in that it couldn't exist and retain the same impact in any other medium, not even 'real life'.
This is hard to explain. Imagine if Michael Mann's Heat was happening right now, and you could somehow transport yourself to the actual locations and watch as events unfold, hovering over the action like a remote camera from Quake. It would work just as well as, if not better than, the film as it current exists. Whereas 2001 would not be improved by being there. Even if you could transport yourself back to prehistoric times, or into space, it wouldn't have the same impact without that music and that cinematography.
Dramatic films have always been wedded to the theatre - ever since the novelty of watching trains driving towards us wore off, films have become limited by the fact that they have to start off as written material which must be translated along the way into moving pictures with, often as an afterthought, a soundtrack. 2001 is no different, but it seems hard to imagine how it might have existed in any other form. The stargate sequence, for example, that closes the film - how does that look in the screenplay? 'EXTERIOR : THE INFINITE - Bowman travels through the stargate (insert unusual visuals here, in accordance with the enclosed notes - AC). INTERIOR : HOTEL - Bowman grows old and dies (don't forget to remove all emotion except for a sense of futile hopelessness - SK)'? Not having a copy of the screenplay to hand, I can't tell.

Of course, Arthur C. Clarke's book exists, and is a glimpse of how the film translates into another medium - not particularly well, in this case. Not that the book is bad, as such, it's just that, despite sharing characters and situations with the film, it's a very different experience. It would be interesting to see what kind of reception the book would have had nowadays if 2001, the film, did not exist. Would it still be in print?
So far, there has not been a 2001 computer game (partially, I should imagine, because Kubrick himself would have prevented it from happening; and, for that matter, he only directed three films in the home computing era). The obscure mid-80s 8-bit game Astroclone had a loading screen which was based on the image of the Discovery at the top of this article, and see the note on Elite later on.
Apparently, whenever 2001 was shown on television, Kubrick himself had to give approval first, which might explain why it always seemed to be in widescreen. Presumably his wife and children now give approval, if approval is needed.

3. It's always puzzled me as to which bit of the film is set in the year 2001. The bit with the apes obvious isn't. The bit with the space station and the moonbase could be. The bit with the Discovery and HAL is set '18 Months Later', and presumably, as it takes place only three weeks after the Discovery has left Earth, the 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' section could well be a year after that.
I don't think that 2010, the book or film, clears this up. Not that it's particularly important.

   "any biscut Le Krk"

Goodbye to Hunter, Kaminsky and the other one. A while back there was a page on the internet devoted to Weirzbowski, the short-lived marine from Aliens. But it's gone now. I wonder if Clarke has ever thought of producing a 2001 - Episode One - The Adventures of Hunter, Kaminsky and the other one?


I know from my wicked photographic skills that HAL's 'eye' is stopped-down quite a lot, which means that he must be very sensitive to light (and furthermore he would have great depth-of-field). There's no obvious technical reason why his eye glows red, other than that Kubrick evidently thought it would look cool (and also give the audience something to focus on).
The one technological element of 2001 that could not be built today is HAL. There was much talk in the 1960s about how computer intelligence would surpass human intelligence by the beginning of the 21st century, the reasoning being based on 'Moore's Law' of the exponential growth of computing power over time. In reality, computers don't seem to be much smarter than they were in the 60s. There are still two distinct models - the 'top down' approach of filling a computer with lots of rules and a knowledge base, and the 'bottom up' approach of creating a physical robot that can learn about the world for itself - of which the former is used for domestic toys and the latter is still in the lab.
Presumably, in the world of 2001, home computers must be incredibly powerful. And kids would have little toy HALs which would probably go mad and try to lock them out of the playroom.


The film doesn't really explain why HAL goes off on one. Reviewers at the time assumed that HAL had misdiagnosed the faulty component that Bowman had to replace, and was determined to avoid being 'killed' because of this. I like this explanation. It's very classical. HAL is brought down by a character flaw, just like in proper Greek tragedies.
2010 explained that HAL had been driven mad by having to keep the true nature of the mission secret from the crew, but, despite coming from Arthur C Clarke himself, that strikes me as being a bit... contrived. And weak. Like the scene in Return of the Jedi where Ben Kenobi explains to Luke that, when he said that Luke's father was dead, he didn't really mean it.
I know how creative people think. They're as flawed as the rest of us. My guess is that Clarke and Kubrick didn't give HAL's mania a great deal of thought in the 60s - they just sat down one day and said "Why does HAL flip out? Er... he just does. Let's keep it a bit mysterious. We'll think of something". And then, when Clarke was writing 2010, he needed to create an extra plot thread.
Cue "How dare you suggest that the great Arthur C Clarke is lying - who are you, anyway?" e-mails.
  "Starin Belkk Yuc"

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5. The version I have on DVD has the trailer which, unusually for something from the 60s, is excellent. It consists of a series of short snippets of the film wordlessly set to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It's noticeable that there aren't any apes. It also pretty much covers the entire plot.

6. Also, the version I have has an 'overture' at the beginning, and an 'intermission' in the middle, both of which consist of a black screen with music. Which is nice, given that TV screenings miss these out.

6. Not so nice, however, is the way the film looks on DVD. When cranked up so that a film can be fit onto one layer of one side of a single disc, MPEG compression has trouble with subtle gradients and large areas of a single shade, such as the blackness of space. Which means that this version of 2001 looks surprisingly bad. The bits where there are lights in space - such as the sun, or the headlights of the pods - have big thick bands of colour around them, like looking at your screen in 16-bit colour mode. And the bit at the beginning, where the picture fades up on the prehistoric desert, is particularly dire. And I'm not a hi-fi person at all. It's not as if I scrutinise DVDs with a magnifying glass.

As for faults that aren't obviously that of the DVD transfer, there are quite a few. With a bit of digital remastering they might have been fixed, but 2001 is the kind of film that people would be scared to polish up, because Stanley Kubrick isn't around any more to authorise that kind of thing, and people might get upset that they aren't getting 'the original'. I don't mean that the studio should redo all the effects, I'd just like it if they cleaned up the negative a bit.
Specifically, the captions ('18 Months Later', 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite') look wonky. It's as if they had been written onto little squares of transparent plastic and filmed separately over the rest of the film. You can see an off-coloured square around them, and when they fade out the picture suddenly does a jump. Given that they're against a black background, it shouldn't have been too hard to scan the frames into a posh video paintbox and make them good.
The shots of the Discovery flying overhead have an odd jerkiness to them that I can't remember from television. Whether that's the DVD showing up faults I wouldn't otherwise see, or my DVD player, I don't know.

9. Judging by the user reviews on Amazon.com 2001 still confounds and dazzles people just as it did in 1968. There are many more positive reviews than negative ones, but it tends to either get five stars or one star with very little in between.

8. Much was made in 2001 about how 2001 was not an accurate reflection of how things were in 2001. I think this is unfair. The world of 2001 is not our world; but it could have been, if there had been the money and the will. With the exception of HAL, none of the technology in the film is beyond us, and the spacecraft could be built today, albeit at enormous cost and for very little apparent benefit. The Pan-Am shuttle, in particular, looks like a sportier version of the actual Space Shuttle, particularly the almost-identical wings. Mind you, the Space Shuttle was in development at the time, and NASA engineers were consulted for the making of 2001. It's odd to think that the Space Shuttle's design is now almost forty years old. It's ageing well. It's a shame that, until recently, it didn't actually go anywhere, it just went up into space and then back again, as if it was an ocean liner sailing from Southampton into the middle of the Atlantic, turning around, and then sailing all the way back.
As for the rest of the film, some of the non-technical details give it away as a product of 1968. Whilst the astronauts wear timeless blue overalls, and we see little of the world, the suits, 'modern' fonts, and chrome detailing lock the film into the tail-end of the modernist age, a time when fashion and design looked to the future instead of raking over the past. The meeting room on the moon appears to be the waiting room from a civic centre, and cyan does not have the same hold on people's minds that it did in 1968.
On the other hand, the title credits - always a giveaway - are simple white on black, whilst the cast and crew are listed at the end of the film in a manner that has not dated (until the sixties, films tended to end quite abruptly, with two quick pages of credits after which the lights came up). Musically, it's all classical, ranging from music which was already old-fashioned when the film was new to music which still sounds alien.
The computer displays are obviously dated, but in a better way than the computer displays from 2010. Those in 2001 are so far removed from real computer displays as to be abstract, whilst those in 2010 look as if they were produced with a BBC Micro.

The effects themselves are as good as they ever were, which is to say that you can often see that they're effects if you look with a critical eye, but it doesn't matter because they're done so well that you can suspend disbelief. The models, in particular, have not been bettered either in terms of detail or design. Some of the spaceships are cut-out photographs which are moved in front of the camera, but the effect isn't all that bad - they look a bit odd, but move well. The Discovery, the space station, and the Orion moon lander have nothing wrong with them, and the matte paintings of the Earth, Jupiter, and its moons look a bit washed-out but that's not a bad thing. Given that this was before Voyager 2 the images of Jupiter space are particularly good - Jupiter looks a bit less orange than it does in real life, but this makes it more menacing.
The space suits are odd, though. Presumably for practical reasons they're a lot slimmer and less constraining than actual space suits. The banded joins look a bit too close to Destination Moon for comfort, although the helmets are groovy.

9. How come the space station is only half-finished? Given that there's a giant Moonbase and Discovery and everything else? Wouldn't it make more sense to build the space station first?
Unless there are several of them, of course, and the one that we see is new.
Where does the Orion moonlander come from? It seems too big to fit into the docking bay of the space station. Presumably it must have floated alongside, with the passengers being transferred by shuttle.

9. In one of the film's many action-packed scenes of adrenaline-pumping excitement, astronaut David Bowman blasts himself into the airlock of the Discovery from a neighbouring space pod. You know the bit.
What, ah, happens to the pod's door? Wouldn't it have shot out of the pod, crashed into the airlock door, and bounced Bowman out into space?
And how does the pod manage to stay floating outside the door whilst the door and all that pressurised air blows out of the back? Wouldn't that shoot it forwards just like a bullet?
Clarke's novel doesn't raise these problems, as Bowman doesn't attempt to rescue his stricken comrade.
It's possible to explain it all away (perhaps the pod door didn't actually fly off, it just slid open forcefully, and perhaps the pod's could automatically maintain its position during the process). But why does the pod have explosive bolts on the door anyway? Isn't that a bit dangerous? From what I remember, the real-world Mercury space capsules had explosive doors, but that was because they landed in the sea and the astronauts needed a quick exit in case the capsule started to flood. Astronaut Gus Grissom got into trouble when his Mercury capsule door blew off after landing; although he argued that it happened of its own accord, and he was never officially disciplined, NASA officials believed that he had accidentally hit the lever whilst fishing about in the capsule for the many mementoes he had taken on the voyage for eventual sale.
In a black irony, he died in the Apollo One landing pad fire, in part because the hatch of the Apollo capsule lacked explosive bolts.
Modern opinion has it that Grissom was telling the truth after all; on the one occasion when the Mercury hatch was tested by hand, the tester received a nasty wound which Grissom did not exhibit.

9. As a lot of people have pointed out, the bit in the middle with HAL and the astronauts doesn't have anything to do with the main plot of the film. Although some of the more overanalytical fans have argued that it symbolises mankind's helplessness in the face of technology, it seems to me as if Clarke and Kubrick added it so that the film had some kind of dramatic focus. There's no reason why we don't just cut from the Moon excavation site to five minutes of life on the Discovery, and then Jupiter space, and indeed some of the earlier drafts of the novel (in Clarke's The Lost Worlds of 2001) do just that.
Given that the film was, in part, a showcase for Cinerama (see later), it isn't too hard to imagine a version of 2001 that abandons plot for this semi-documentary approach. In which case 2001 would have been very nice to look at but extremely dull, and I probably wouldn't be writing this.
It's interesting to note that there are similarities between the plots of the middle bit of 2001 and that of the Lewis Collins film Who Dares Wins. Both feature a bit where a professional person has to infiltrate a... no, forget it, I'm talking nonsense.
I'm not sure whether 2001 is the first 'rogue computer' film. There were plenty of 'rogue robots' before 1968, but not many cabinet-bound computers. 1969's excellent and obscure Colossus : The Forbin Project pretty much did the genre to death, although it continued through Logan's Run (sort of) in 1976 and Demon Seed in the following year, up until Tron and WarGames in 1982 and 1983. And I suppose The Terminator in 1984, although SkyNet was not really a personality.
I can't think of any memorable computer characters since the WOPR from WarGames. Perhaps the rise of home computers demystified the machines so much that people could no longer accept that they were evil.

   "Brick Slate Kuny"

You can't see it, but there's an IBM logo just above the middle screen. Yes, I could have zoomed in. But I didn't. 2001 is in proper 2.35.1 widescreen (well, 2.21:1 actually, but it's close enough) and I'm going to exploit that to the fullest. Along with How the West was Won and This is Cinerama, 2001 is one of the few Cinerama films you might have heard of. It was actually filmed in 'Super Panavision 70', but exhibited on Cinerama screens, none of which exist any more. In the same way that LSD is nowhere near as potent nowadays as it was in the 1960s, so 2001 probably does not have the same impact on modern cinema screens.
Cinerama itself was an early super-widescreen technique involving a big curved screen and a three camera / three projector setup (although '2001' used a single camera and projector). It was expensive and replaced by anamorphic Cinemascope and Panavision, and if you want to read more go here forthwith.


At the time, military and civilian jets still used multitudes of small dials and levers and so forth. From the early-1970s onwards, air- and spacecraft have used 2001-style 'glass cockpits' instead, as anybody who has played a modern flight simulator will testify. Both the Space Shuttle and the Airbus feature large colour displays, whilst military jets tend to have smaller, green-on-black screens.
There is one important difference between 2001 and reality, however. In real life the screens are often used to select options from menus, whilst in 2001 they're there purely to display information. Presumably all the data input tasks were achieved with verbal commands to HAL. There aren't any analogue backup instruments, at least, not visible. They could be hidden, or the creators might have decided that any malfunction major enough to knock out the computer systems would have killed the astronaut and destroyed the pod.
2001 was the first film to use convincing-looking futuristic spacecraft interiors, complete with hundreds of buttons and flashing lights that all looked as if they had a purpose.


In the bottom-left, we learn that HAL has Adobe Type Manager installed. That dates the film. Or that he can vend cash. One of the earlier drafts of the book mentions that the astronauts are receiving a higher salary than usual, an earthly detail which the film eschews (except for a single line of dialogue that alludes to a 'bonus'). Yes, this image is slightly skewed. Blame the DVD.
  "abceiklnrstuy"


9. 2001, needless to say, was very influential. It started a craze for films with a weird metaphysical ending that didn't make sense, such as Phase IV (the one with the ants) and, oh, lots of others that I can't remember. Special effects guru Douglas Trumbull went off to direct Silent Running, which had a similar look, whilst 2001's hyper-detailed models and sets quickly became the standard to which other films aspired. And, for that matter, the 'large spaceship gliding slowly overhead' shot became a cliché.
The ultra-modern, emotionless sterility of 2001 caught on in a big way, too, although its curious mixture of optimism and pessimism was generally flattened into pessimism by other creators. George Lucas' THX-1138 captured a similar look and feel at a fraction of the cost, and it wasn't until Lucas' own Star Wars that sci-fi became bouncy and alive once more. It's a horrifying thought, but there's a case for arguing that 1967's Barbarella is the father (mother?) of the modern sci-fi film, and that 2001 was a temporary diversion into the realms of the intellect. Certainly, the Kubrick film became a target of post-modern ridicule later on in the 70s, with John Carpenter's Dark Star and Ridley Scott's Alien showing a grimy future where the nobility of scientific enterprise is reduced to clearing up rubbish and towing oil. And in 1968 the 'new wave' of dystopian, literary sci-fi was gathering, with Arthur C Clarke's technical fantasies as one of their targets.

In terms of Hollywood, 2001 took a while to make money, sci-fi was still a niche thing, and the studios were about to temporarily turn away from blockbusters towards low-budget youth pictures such as Easy Rider. All of these combined to ensure that there wasn't a sci-fi boom until a few years later, and that 2001 was viewed as being something of a one-off - Westworld, Dark Star, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Silent Running, Logan's Run and so forth weren't released until the mid-70s. George Lucas' aforementioned THX-1138 came out in 1970, although it had the advantage of being a low-budget student project, and thus unencumbered by the deadening slowness of the studios. The exception is Robert Wise's 1970 The Andromeda Strain, one of the best post-2001 sci-fi films, and just as much of an oddity - the soundtrack was musique concrete beeps and fizzes, it had no star names, a dumpy middle-aged woman as one of the main characters, and was directed by the man who did The Sound of Music, back in the days when Michael Crichton was way cool.
Silent Running came out in 1971, although director and special effects man Douglas Trumbull was bound to be quick off the mark given that he had a head-start.

The look'n'feel of 2001's moonbase and some of the technology was borrowed by Gerry Anderson's Space: 1999 television series, although that's semi-fair given that Kubrick sourced some of his modelmakers from Anderson's earlier Thunderbirds. Space: 1999 was an abortive attempt to make a Star Trek-esque sci-fi adventure series with the realistic tone and look of 2001. The design work and models were impressive (when stationary, at any rate), and it was very expensive, but the series suffered from being humourless and flat, with none of the depth or intelligence of 2001 and none of the fun and character of Star Trek. And after a while it became a standard 'monster of the week' show, with some terrible monsters and wooden acting. It was a perfect example of how Britain just doesn't get popular television; professionally-made, but dour, unexciting, and spectacular in only the crudest sense.

The docking sequence was a big influence on the classic computer game Elite, and caused great heartache to interstellar traders who couldn't yet afford a docking computer. And The Blue Danube, which was also included in the soundtrack of Elite, because musical shorthand in numerous television documentaries for space travel. Furthermore, Elvis Presley's mid-70s Vegas shows were often introduced with a blast of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, presumably to illustrate the fact that Elvis had mutated.
In terms of direct copies, 2001 was too memorable and expensive for budding film-makers to steal visual elements, and Kubrick had almost all the props, sets and models destroyed after filming in order to prevent this. Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars uses the design of the space helmets, but that's about it.

There's 2010 as well, but I write about that later on.

7. Stanley Kubrick won an Academy Award for 2001, for special visual effects. I can't think of any other directors who have won academy awards for special effects. Planet of the Apes was also released in 1968, and won a special Academy Award for the ape make-up, despite the fact that the ape make-up in 2001 trounces that of Planet of the Apes thoroughly.
Arthur C. Clarke surmised that the ape make-up in 2001 was so effective that the Academy members assumed that they were trained apes. Personally, I think that the Academy members knew perfectly well that 2001's apes were men in costume, it's just that, being mostly old and extremely conservative, they were loath to give any awards to a film that they couldn't understand, by a young director who had insulted all of Hollywood by moving to England.
Of the non-technical categories in which 2001 was nominated, the Best Direction award went to Carol Reed for Oliver!, and that for Story & Screenplay went to Mel Brooks for The Producers. Meanwhile, the Best Film was Oliver!.
Of Kubrick's other films, A Clockwork Orange was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted screenplay but didn't have a hope in heck of winning, and didn't, whilst Barry Lyndon picked up some technical awards, The Shining wasn't nominated for anything, Full Metal Jacket was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and I have no idea how well Eyes Wide Shut did because my reference books stop in 1994. I can't remember it winning anything.
Not that it matters. People outside the film industry, such as myself, get the impression that Academy Awards are the most important thing in the world if you're a filmmaker, whereas I'm sure that, if you work in the film industry, they're just another promotional gimmick with no actual artistic merit. I was going to say 'they're just free advertising', but they aren't free because studios pay huge amounts of money to promote the films to Academy members.

8. 2001 has an odd cast. Keir Dullea (rhymes with 'pool hey') was a face of the moment and made no other memorable films. He grew a beard shortly afterwards and starred in the short-lived Canadian sci-fi series The Starlost. He reprised the role of David Bowman for 2010, sixteen years later, and didn't look a day older.
Gary Lockwood was a villain in one of the earlier Star Trek episodes and had a career in television. His character was killed off in 2001 but reappeared in Arthur C. Clarke's 3001, a book which I do not particularly wish to read.
Of the others, William Slyvester was a popular character actor. His character reappeared in 2010 but was played by Roy Schieder. Leonard Rossiter played a Russian diplomat and was also in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. He's more famous in Britain for Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. He was a fitness fanatic, back in the days when people who went jogging were called 'fitness fanatics', and died of a heart attack in the early-80s.
Alone of the cast, Douglas Rain is named after a meteorological phenomenon. Yes, I've made sure.

8. Rather like Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick is forever associated with sci-fi despite only producing two sci-fi films (one of which isn't really sci-fi). After 2001 he seemed to turn his back on special effects, too, although his later films were just as technically innovative. Barry Lyndon was filmed entirely with natural light, and required advanced, NASA-designed lenses to capture indoor scenes that were lit with candles. The Shining, on the other hand, brought the Steadicam to popular attention. Full Metal Jacket recreated Vietnam in and around London's Docklands, although this seems just as pointless today as it must have seemed in 1987. I suppose that Eyes Wide Shut was interesting for the digital manipulation performed on certain scenes in order for the film to avoid receiving an NC-17 rating, although digital manipulation was hardly new in 1998.
Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick's previous film, has an extremely effective 'war room' set but some very unconvincingly modelwork of a B-52 bomber, and Spartacus achieved the effect of having lots of extras by... having lots of extras.

   "A sly neck brutik"

In the late 1970s there was a home computer called the 'Aquarius'. And it looked a bit like the console on the right, but much smaller. It was black, with blue highlights.


Do you see a kind of greeny-yellow smudge? I presume that the caption was written onto a small piece of transparent plastic, filmed, negativised, and then composited over the starfield which you can't see in this image. But somewhere along the way the small piece of plastic was moved, or wasn't entirely transparent. This wouldn't be too hard to fix, given a bit of time and effort.
I don't know what font is being used here - it looks like Gill Sans, the London Underground font. It hasn't dated badly, unlike the blocky, bold font used elsewhere in the film (there's a famous publicity photo of Kubrick and Clarke on the set standing beneath a sign saying 'NO SMOKING' which uses this font, a font that is now indelibly associated with the Birmingham Bull Ring and 70s government buildings).


This bit is still cool. Even on a small screen, the 'slit scan' effect is striking. I've read several different explanations of how 'slit scan' works (apparently a camera moves along a track towards an extremely thin illuminated picture which also moves) and I still can't understand it.
The same effect was used to produce Tom Baker's Doctor Who credits sequence. More recently, the popular 'Geiss' plugin for WinAmp can replicate the slit-scan effect.


As a kid I just accepted that the bit at the end was weird. This is supposed to represent a giant cosmic phenomenon, but actually looks like some chemicals interacting in a petri dish. Similarly, the flight sequences are supposed to represent travel over an alien landscape, but they just look like tinted aerial footage of valleys and rivers. Not that this is a bad thing.
  "Sigourney Fetch Rumpole"

8. As previously mentioned, 2001 was released at the same time as Planet of the Apes. Both films were very popular at the time, and both are still available on DVD and video. However, whilst 2001 is frequently regarded as being one of the best films of all time, whatever reputation Planet of the Apes might have had was sabotaged by a string of increasingly-poor sequels and a television series. Sequels have the power to destroy a film more surely than apathy - in 1987, the original Robocop was a brutal sci-fi masterpiece, whereas nowadays if you mention it in casual conversation people think of the sequels and the television series and the toys and so on. The same with the Rambo films. First Blood was an effective little action film, a predecessor to Die Hard in which the lone hero used his wits and muscles to outwit a faceless enemy (put like that, though, it seems a bit dodgy - in the original book, Rambo was a violent sociopath, whereas in the film he's a survivalist role model), whereas the sequels were such that the following conversation is inevitable whenever I'm on a date with an attractive lady:

One: "Have you see First Blood?"
Two: "First Blood? Sounds a bit violent. Is it any good?"
One: "Yes. It was the first Rambo film but it's okay, honest..."
Two: [pulling a face] "Screw you, you sick wacko."

This KEEPS HAPPENING and it makes me ANGRY that people can be SO IGNORANT and UNWILLING TO LEARN.

Bad stuff's over. It's okay. Where was I? Yeah, Planet of the Apes is a very good film, although not perfect, and it would be remembered more fondly if there had not been so many poor sequels. Which leads me to the next bit.

7. Apart from Planet of the Apes, another contemporary of 2001 was Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit. It was marketed as a horror film, and wasn't nearly as visually spectacular as 2001, but it dealt with a similar idea - that man's evolution might have been assisted by outside forces. Quatermass actually explores the idea in greater depth than 2001 - whereas Clarke's novel makes it clear that the bone-wielding apemen easily obliterated the unassisted species, Kneale's screenplay imagined a world in which the two groups coexisted uneasily, waiting for a sign to start the ultimate form of 'ethnic cleansing'. Both featured a buried alien artefact, but that of Quatermass was an alien spacecraft unearthed by tunnelling work on the London Underground, and seemed far scarier than some abstract slab up on the moon.

8. 16 years after 2001, a sequel appeared. 2010 was directed by Peter Hyams, a director associated with sci-fi films such as Outland and Capricorn One. Whereas Kubrick was more of a star than his actors (certainly more than those in 2001), Hyams was and remains anonymous to the public at large. 2010 was actually fairly good, being more interesting than the novel on which it was based. As a standalone sci-fi adventure it was interesting and exciting, and unlike contemporary mid-80s Hollywood sci-fi films it was intelligently-written and aimed at a grown-up audience.
Technically, it's at least as striking as 2001, if not nearly as revolutionary. And, wisely, Hyams decided against aping some of 2001's unique stylistic touches - it didn't have any classical music (instead, it had the 'twannng' noise from Star Trek: The Motion Picture), spacecraft made noises as they whizzed past, and it had a conventional plot that took just 110 minutes to play itself out. On the other hand, the cold war plot (which wasn't present in the original book) became old-fashioned very quickly, and some of the Russian accents were a bit cod. Kudos to Hyams for getting a subtle performance out of John Lithgow, though.
Critical opinion at the time was generally favourable, although many wondered what the point of the exercise was, given that the hippies who had made 2001 popular were all working on Wall Street, and that 2010 had none of the mystery and atmosphere of the first film. This reaction hasn't changed much. The recent re-release of the film on DVD was greeted with generally positive reviews. It's currently available quite cheaply and is often shown on television a week after 2001.

   "Cute Brian Skylk"


Wouldn't it save resources if they just didn't shave? Surely razor blades must take up weight, and they probably only need to be clean-shaven when they have to do a public service broadcast, or when they have to fit into a spacesuit, which can't be all that often. And why don't they make spacesuits that accommodate bearded men?


And why do they have to have such perfect hair all the time? Wouldn't it be more practical to cut it all off, and undergo surgery to ensure that it doesn't grow back? Presumably if you were on a long-duration voyage to Jupiter and you let your personal hygiene standards slacken you'd eventually end up just letting go of everything and staying in bed all the time, slobbing around, eating cold pizza.


It's the docking bay of the space station at the beginning of the futuristic segment of the film. It looks much larger from the inside than it does from the outside. Star Wars used a similar design for the docking bays of the Death Star, although 2001 is actually more elaborate in this respect, as you can see people moving about in the windows at the top and bottom.


I think the font used extensively in 2001 is called 'Eurostyle' or something similar.
  "Banes Rikk cutly"
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