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YMMV / 2001: A Space Odyssey

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  • Adaptation Displacement: This film was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", which isn't nearly as well known as the film.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Does the famous bone-to-satellite Match Cut indicate technological progress - from the use of primitive tools to complex machinery - or does it, when you consider that said bone was used as a weapon by a man-ape to kill another ape, indicate a lack of progress when you consider that the satellite that matches the bone is actually a nuclear weapons launching platform? Note that despite the 4-million-year cut, it's all included in "The Dawn of Man" segment of the film.
    • Right when the lobotomization of HAL is complete, a prerecorded message from Dr. Floyd starts playing, giving full details about the discovery of the Monolith, details that only HAL had been privy to. Was the broadcast accidentally triggered by Dave Bowman's actions, or was it intentional on HAL's part, to share the information with Dave to complete the mission?
    • Some fans see HAL in a much more sympathetic light. Midway through the movie, HAL has a sit down with Dave, asking about the peculiarities surrounding the mission. Dave knows that the ship A.I. would know exactly what is going on and catches on that HAL is fishing for something. HAL, realizing he slipped up, changes the subject by saying the AE-35 unit is acting up, and that it needs to be repaired. Dave and Frank try to do so, only to realize that it is working perfectly, and later discuss if HAL is malfunctioning and the possibility of disconnecting him, which appears to be the equivalent of lobotomizing or even killing HAL. It is a bit harder for the audience to sympathize with HAL since he is a faceless A.I. who decided to prioritize completing the mission at the expense of the entire human crew. If he were human, since HAL's colleagues were planning to harm him out of distrust at best, and for a trivial mistake at worst, having an emotional break and responding by taking action against Frank and Dave would have been completely justified.
  • Applicability: Kubrick designed the film as an intensely subjective visual experience and wanted the viewer to feel free to speculate at will about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film. Kubrick refused to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer would feel obligated to pursue or else fear that he's missed the point.
  • Award Snub: Considered one of the greatest and most influential films of all time, but it notoriously didn't get a Best Picture Academy Award nomination. And the Best Picture category was quite weak that year, too.Explanation
    • Kubrick received Oscar nominations for Director and Original Screenplay but didn't win either one.
    • The film did win the Oscar for Visual Effects, which was awarded to Kubrick. It remained the only Oscar he won for his entire career.
      • Even then, the film's only Oscar win for Visual Effects was still a snub as Kubrick wasn't the only one who contributed to the film's special effects. The film's credits list four other effects contributors: Douglas Trumbull, Tom Howard, Con Pederson, and Wally Veevers. However, according to Oscar rules at the time, only three people could be nominated for their work on a single film, so only Kubrick's name was submitted, snubbing the other four effects contributors.
    • The film was passed over for an Honorary Oscar in Makeup in favor of Planet of the Apes (1968), despite the makeup in 2001 being arguably superior. Many joke that the ape makeup in 2001 was snubbed because the Academy thought that the film used real apes rather than superior makeup, or more seriously, ascribe it to chicanery on the part of Apes producer Arthur Jacobs. It's probably more likely that the Academy specifically wanted to honor the make-up artist on Apes, John Chambers, who had worked on a huge number of movies and TV shows back when studios generally didn't consider make-up artists to be a role worth crediting on-screen. In addition, giving this film an award for its ape suits would have been redundant seeing how it had already won the Best Visual Effects award.
    • Despite 2001's technical brilliance, it received only two Oscar nominations in technical categories: Visual Effects (which it won) and Art Direction. The film's editing, sound, and beautiful cinematography weren't even nominated.
  • Broken Base: Some see it as one of the greatest examples of visual storytelling and immersively awe-inspiring in its depiction of how enormous space really is. Others, however, view it as a very meandering project whose plot trugs along at a snail's pace with few memorable characters outside of HAL and an ending that's mostly a mishmash of unexplained psychedelic surrealism.
    • Among the film music community, it's a bit of a sticking point as to whether Kubrick should've used the studio-commissioned score by Alex North or if he was right to keep the temp tracks as a Permanent Placeholder. Fans of North's score say that it has a more unified and cohesive sound compared to the eclectic groups of classical composers used in the final cut and that Kubrick junking it made the film worse by robbing it of a more grounded, emotionally resonant score. Defenders of Kubrick's decision say that North's score tried too hard to have an "epic" tone that would've been completely at odds with the film's cerebral tone and that the pieces Kubrick chose fit the images of their scenes perfectly. As Roger Ebert noted in a retrospective review, North's score tried to underline the action and give the audience emotional cues like a conventional score, but Kubrick's final track is great because it exists outside of the action on screen. Both sides agree that Kubrick not telling North that his score was junked was a low blow, however. (For what it's worth, while North said he was devastated by Kubrick's decision at the time, in hindsight he felt that his "Victorian approach with mid-European overtones" was a bad fit for Kubrick's vision.)
  • Common Knowledge: Many film critics will say HAL is the most personable character in the film, with some saying he seems more human than the two human astronauts. While both David Bowman and Frank Poole are The Stoic for the most part, they still have some humanising and more emotional moments, including the interview with BBC 12 and the fact they do activities like drawing and playing chess.
  • Creepy Awesome: HAL is one of the most outright disturbing artificial intelligence in fiction, but also one of the most iconic.
  • Delusion Conclusion: Given the film's notoriously trippy ending, it's not surprising that some viewers have interpreted the final act as some kind of delusion experienced by David Bowman; some even claim that it's actually due to Bowman running out of oxygen and hallucinating as he slowly dies of asphyxiation in space.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: HAL in a weird way; some fans insist he only attacked the crew out of self-preservation.
    • Though to be fair it was revealed in 2010 that in a way what happened wasn't HAL's fault. He was ordered to keep the true nature of the mission a secret, which conflicted with his basic programming, which caused his actions in the film. The man who planned the Discovery mission was LIVID when he found out what had been done to HAL.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Ooh, 2001! It's that movie about HAL, the evil computer, and... astronauts, we think? Maybe something about monkeys?
  • Evil Is Cool: HAL is by far the coolest character in the film.
  • Fandom Rivalry: Among cinephiles, 2001 is paired against Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) with the debate on which is the better space movie. Tarkovsky claimed not to have seen 2001 when he made Solaris, and after seeing it thought it was a very cold, sterile film. Interestingly enough, both movies have opposite views on space. Kubrick's film is about the universe being filled with things beyond our comprehension, while Tarkovsky's film is essentially about the loneliness of being in space, being apart from Earth, and the ability of astronauts to readjust to civilian life after spending time "up there". Ironically according to Kubrick's producer Jan Harlan, Kubrick himself liked Solaris.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Pan Am, in 1968, was all but ubiquitous—it was the international airline for the US and a cultural icon. Pan Am folded in 1991, partially absorbed by United Airlines (Pacific routes) and Delta (transatlantic routes).
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: One of the film's most famous scenes has HAL-9000 begging Dave not to deactivate him, and then singing the song "Daisy Bell" as his mind powers down. The exact opposite happened in real life: February 2019, when NASA lost contact with the Opportunity Mars rover (after it sent back its last message, "My battery is low and it's getting dark"), NASA tried thousands of times to revive it with recovery commands, and when that failed, the mission control team officially declared its mission complete by sending a recording to Mars of the Billie Holliday song "I'll Be Seeing You."
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • When Kubrick adapted the book to movie form, he changed the setting: instead of having Discovery head to Saturn and its moon Iapetus, he moved it to Jupiter and its moon Io. He did it because he couldn't create the special effects to make Saturn. Lo and behold, in 1979, the Voyager probes discovered that the next moon out around Jupiter, Europa, is very icy, and later observations have found it likely has a tidally-heated subsurface ocean of liquid water. Not only did it inspire 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but today Europa is considered more likely to harbor extraterrestrial life than Mars!
    • As to the design of Kubrick's space liner...something about a winged orbiter with stubby delta wings with a cockpit of centralized computer displays that can rendezvous with a large space station should be a little familiar. Harry Lange, the head of NASA Future Projects, helped design the ships of the movie.
    • MAD Magazine's parody of 2001 ends with the Monolith revealing that it's really a book called How to Make an Incomprehensible Science Fiction Movie & Several Million Dollars. In 2014, Taschen published The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey by Piers Bizony, which is a large black hardcover book shaped exactly like the Monolith.
    • HAL's control panel monitors display text and graphics in white on a background of bright solid color, which makes them look a lot like the Microsoft "Metro" design language from Windows 8 and 10, Windows Phone, and Xbox 360.
    • Not only is HAL a one-letter shift from IBM, but IBM later built the sophisticated AI Watson, who successfully defeated the two most successful Jeopardy! contestants ever WITHOUT being connected to the internet.
    • In one scene, crew members can be seen using devices that are remarkably similar to modern-day iPads.
    • Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may find the early hominids in the Dawn of Man segment reminiscent of the notoriously bad first appearance of the Ferengi.
  • Hype Backlash: Arguably a poster child for this trope. People who don't like this movie tend to hate it all the more for the praise it receives. The film has breathtaking visuals, but it's sluggishly paced and deliberately unexplained. The story is also great, but you need to read the novel to understand what's actually happening.
  • It Was His Sled:
    • Does anybody not know what HAL does by now? The phrase "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" has become far and away the most known aspect of the film, basically giving his true colors away to any first-time viewers.
    • Dave becomes a space fetus in the Gainax Ending, a scene that has received countless parodies and later became a focal point of the sequel's advertising.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: It is very common for people to only watch the movie for HAL's scenes or the infamous ending.
  • Mainstream Obscurity: There are way more people who know about the monolith and the HAL 9000 than the amount of people who have seen this film, especially thanks to Parody Displacement, and the fact that its status as the first real sophisticated science-fiction film was usurped later on by the likes of Star Wars, Blade Runner and The Matrix.
  • Mandela Effect: A lot of people remember the famous line "My god! It's full of stars!" being uttered in the movie, when it's really only said in the book, in the sequel, and in an audiobook where it is also said, which may be why some people claim to so clearly "hear" someone saying it in their memories.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Older Than They Think: Most people who watch the film and do not know its age believe it to have come in the wake of Star Wars or thereabout - i.e., the late 1970s. Part of this is the impeccably accurate portrayal of modern spaceflight, technology, et al, and part because of the gorgeous quality of the cinematography and special effects, which rival Star Wars can make it appear as though it were made in the late '70s.
  • Once Original, Now Common: Some viewers may find that the "Star Gate" sequence reminds them of the audio visualizers in MP3 player software, when at the time of its release, it was seen as one of the most impressive visual effects in film.
    • The film as a whole has become this in the eyes of many science-fiction fans, who praise it for its contributions to the genre but find that aside from HAL and the movie’s overall surreal tone, it is a fairly standard sci-fi film.
  • Out of the Ghetto: Kubrick made this film specifically to bring science-fiction into the mainstream. He was fascinated by concepts of the genre but disappointed by most of the genre's books and movies. Drawing from external references (modernist literature, painting, and philosophy), he deliberately approached the genre in a more realistic and enigmatic fashion. His film eschewed some of the genre trappings of Worldbuilding (space jargon, technology, alien species) and focused on how mysterious and bewildering space travel and alien contact could actually be. The groundbreaking special effects and greater sophistication made many people treat 2001 as an art-movie and Epic Movie spectacle rather than with the usual B-Movie contempt with which science-fiction was usually treated.
  • Padding: Done for artistic rather than budgetary reasons, but still, let's not kid ourselves: this is a very long and very slow movie, one that's 140 (or in some versions, 160) minutes long but only has about 70 minutes worth of actual plot.
    • The perception that it's very slow may be related to most people only having seen it on relatively small TV screens. Seen on a proper full-size cinema screen, where the long shots allow viewers to examine the details of the image much more closely (as Kubrick always intended), anecdotal evidence suggests that it seems to go by much faster.
  • Parody Displacement: As time progresses, it becomes more likely that the first time somebody will see something related to the film will be as a Shout-Out made in another more current work rather than in the movie itself.
  • Re-Cut: In the early 2010s, Steven Soderbergh released an edit of the film on his website (through Vimeo) as part of a personal project to practice editing techniques. His edit trims about half the length of the film off, and notably inserts HAL's eye frames into monolith-oriented scenes.
  • Refrain from Assuming: "Daisy Bell" is the song HAL sang (or rather, covered), not "Daisy, Daisy" or "Bicycle Built for Two". It was the first computer-synthesized vocal performance (vocoder), in 1961.
  • Retroactive Recognition: An ape is played by Anthony Jackson, who would later be best known for playing Trevor Lewis in Bless This House and Fred Mumford in Rentaghost.
  • Song Association: Try to hear "Thus Spoke Zarasthustra", "The Blue Danube", "Gayaneh's Adagio" or "Atmospheres" and not think of this film.
  • Special Effect Failure: There are no truly bad special effects in the movie, but when seen on the big screen or in 4k, some shots are easy to identify as matte paintings or still images being manipulated rather than actual footage of the models. In any other movie, these would go unnoticed, but because the other effects in 2001 are so good, even minor imperfections jump out.
    • That said, at the end of the Dawn of Man sequence, as we view the ape-man pounding the skeleton with his weapon before throwing it into the air, some of the low-angle shots make it clear that this is an individual in a costume, whereas suspension of disbelief is easier in the scenes leading up to it.
    • Notably, the minor special effects failures are frequently cited in arguments about moon landing conspiracies. For example, non-rigid objects, like hair, don't behave at all like they would in zero-g. More damningly, in the scenes actually set on the Moon, there is no attempt to fake the lower gravity at all. The characters just walk around like they would on Earth.
    • There's a scene on the moonliner where a tray briefly floats up. The way it raises up and just sort of wiggles in place for a second is obviously not how it would work in real life.
    • The close-ups of Dave jogging around the centrifuge have a very strange angle, making it look like he's leaning 45 degrees to the floor.
  • Squick: The novel describes how the ape-men pulled off the leopard's tail by the roots.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Soderbergh recut mentioned above. Some of the cut scenes include exposition regarding the Moon monolith and even includes most of the EVA pod conversation, resulting in audio synchronization issues (e.g. during the moonbus landing sequence, the beeps from the landing guidance displays start long after the POV has changed to the Tycho base ground station, where they shouldn't be audible), and a lot of monolith and Stargate-related scenes include flashes of HAL's eye in places that don't seem to make much symbolic or narrative sense, especially one of HAL's still-on eye seconds after he's been disconnected.
  • Tough Act to Follow: Cracked's "5 Works of Art So Good, They Ruined Their Whole Genre" calls 2001 a tough act to follow in its genre.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: This film was made in 1968. And it took five years to make, meaning they started in 1963. Try finding a subsequent non-CGI movie that has better space scenes. Heck, it was made over 40 years before the likes of Gravity and Interstellar but can still give those movies a run for their money!
    • Hell, even the computers look better than most of what came between this and the CGI era, or even the real-life computers from The '80s.
    • The technique used to create the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence — a camera trick known as "slit-scan" — was impressive enough to be reused well into the early CGI era, and still holds up excellently more than half a century later. So impressive was the sequence that it inspired a bevy of similar slit-scan sequences in other media, including ABC's ad campaigns in the 1970s and early 1980s, the title sequence for Doctor Who from 1974 to 1980 (which became iconic enough over the years to serve as a template for later title sequences in the show from 1996 onwards), the credits for Superman: The Movie in 1978 (which improved on 2001's techniques by using an animation stand, rather than the room-size contraption 2001 used), and a whole bunch of other pre-CGI motion graphics work in The '80s.
    • The floating pen deserves to be mentioned as it is awesome in its simplicity; they simply used scotch tape to tape the pen to a sheet of glass, then rotated the glass around.

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