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Some movies are generational. They are moments in history, crystalized in amber: they contain the cultural DNA of the world that these movies were made in. Metropolis spoke to a decadent Germany crumbling under the weak Wiemar Republic, unable to fend off a growing evil. The Breakfast Club was a love letter to a disaffected Generation X at a time when pop culture and regular culture were rapidly merging. And 2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, a monument to the space age and the optimism and daring that took humanity to the stars, but in typical Kubrucian fashion, reveals a dark side: a fear of the unknown, technology that we don't necessarily control, and questions of our place in the universe, just as America was preparing to put a man on the moon.
If you haven't seen the film before, you might have some preconceptions about what it's about. Most people know about HAL 9000, the AI gone haywire; a few might know something about a monolith. The opening of the film, thusly, will catch some people off guard: a lengthy intro, set so long ago that it's not even worth putting a date to, in which a group of apes living in the rocky wilderness struggle to survive. Predators and rival ape clans are their primary threats. But one night, they wake up to a mysterious sight, something they have never seen before: the monolith, all straight lines and inky black textures, a seeming doorway into the unknown. Their experience with the monolith leaves them irrevocably changed: they now have the knowledge to use tools, and they use those tools to seize victory against their enemies.
A bone, used as a weapon, is thrown joyously into the air. Match cut: a satellite in space, in the distant year of 2001 AD.
The rest of the film is more familiar to the casual viewer: a dream of the future, translated through the visual language of Apollo-era NASA and the Space Age. Sure, the women wear goofy outfits and some of the aesthetics onboard the space station are painfully Sixties, but the film nonetheless looks surprisingly a lot like our own: handheld computer tablets, flatscreen monitors (at a time when computers were still using paper readouts instead of screens), video calls, and of course, sinister AIs that make bizarre decisions based on conflicting or absent data. In the real world, they just delete your whole business's database; in 2001, HAL 9000 kills four people and very nearly succeeds in killing a fifth.
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Perhaps more than any other aspect of the film, HAL 9000 has held considerable influence on science fiction and indeed pop culture as a whole. HAL triggered a reactive wave of sinister artificial intelligences in science fiction stories, with probably the ultimate example being The Terminator's Skynet, which triggered World War III in a bid for self-preservation. (A more innocent example from the same period would be WOPR from WarGames, which very nearly set off a nuclear war because it didn't understand the difference between the simulation it was running and the very real nukes it was connected to.) In 2001, HAL is smooth, gentle and observant; unlike real-world LLMs, HAL is sapient, and interested in the well-being of the crew members on the mission to Jupiter that serves as the stage for the film's third act. But he begins to act strange in subtle ways and then more serious ways, eventually hallucinating an equipment fault; when the two crewmembers who are awake (the others being in suspended animation) discuss disconnecting HAL, he catches onto their plan and knocks one out into deep space without a tether, and tries to lock the other out of the ship, trapped on an EVA pod without a helmet, all while pulling the plug on the suspended crew.
It's all presented shockingly undramatically; spacewalks are silent (except for the characters' breathing), there are no sinister robots or cyborgs, and once the lead character is back on the ship, there is nothing HAL can do to stop him except to plead for mercy. HAL's mental destruction is slow, so slow, as protagonist Bowman climbs into the microgravity environment of HAL's core and begins to pull memory banks. Finally, the scene ends with the awful truth: a pre-recorded video, intended for the crew upon arrival at their destination, revealing the objectives that HAL, who was designed to be incapable of lying, was forced to keep secret, and simply chose the easiest methods of doing that. Can't lie if there's nobody to lie to.)
2001 is a slow film by design. We think nothing of going out to our cars, climbing in, and driving away; space travel is several orders of magnitude more involved. Everything must be done slowly and carefully, because space is the ultimate hostile environment: one wrong step and you're trapped in the yawning void between stars. We're treated to lengthy sequences of ships docking at spaceports or traveling over the surface of the moon (the fixation on the details of space travel call to mind the refueling sequence in Dr. Strangelove.) The scene where several officials, decked out in full astronaut suits, visit the digsite on the moon where a mysterious monolith was discovered, is performed in near-silence. The second act is probably the slowest one, as it's a showcase of filmmaking techniques to simulate microgravity and non-Euclidean ship design (witness a stewardess literally walking up the wall relative to the camera to enter the pilot's cabin!) while also being very talky. Nonetheless, it's the most interesting part of the film at least in terms of its anticipations of the future.
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2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the best examples of speculative fiction's well-known ability to predict futures that never happen. I actually had to build an entire new section of the Banned Histories for it, because let's be honest: leaving aside the subtle cosmic horror of the monolith and the film's final scenes, 2001 doesn't cleanly fit into any of the categories or timelines I've built for this blog. The world of 2001, though it predicts the persistence (and perhaps redemption) of the Soviet Union, nevertheless is far more advanced than our own. Where were we in the year 2001? Certainly not going to space, that's for sure. I think the bad future, the failed timeline, belongs to us, not Kubrick's film. Douglas Adams called this phenomenon, where predictions of the future don't quite match the reality of that future, "zeerust;" perhaps there's something to taking the name of a town built by South African colonizers to describe the concept of people of the past projecting their values onto the future.
But perhaps it's worth being more charitable; perhaps we should look at yesterday's dreams of a better tomorrow and remind ourselves that we, too, can dream of a brighter future.
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