50 years ago today was the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey . The movie came about when Stanley Kubrick wrote to Arthur C. Clarke about a movie idea. Clarke was enthusiastic: The ‘really good’ science-fiction movie is a great many years overdue. So began their collaboration on Journey Beyond the Stars . Of course, the movie didn't end up with that name. The picture on the left is the two of them on the set. I'm going to make the assumption that anyone who is reading this blog post has seen the movie. It doesn't really have a conventional plot, so it's hard to say that anything in this post would really count as a spoiler. I can hardly reveal the dialog since there is famously only about 20 minutes of dialog in the nearly three-hour movie. A lot of the lines of dialog are, deliberately, banalities as a way of conveying the ordinariness of space travel by 2001. Realism One of the most amazing things about the movie is just how well it has stood the test of time. The two men went to great lengths to try and be realistic. Clarke had been interested in space and space travel since his childhood, and is famous for a 1945 article in Wireless World (a British electronic hobbyist/professional magazine) titled Extra-Terrestrial Relays . In this article, he proposed the idea of a geostationary satellite. If you put a satellite in orbit, the rate at which it rotates around the earth is determined by its height. For example, at a height of 254 miles, the International Space Station circles the earth every 92 minutes. But if that height is 22,000 miles, then the satellite will orbit the earth once every 24 hours. If the orbit is also aligned over the equator, the satellite will remain above the same point on earth, and you can point an antenna up at it and it will be able to communicate continuously, or the satellite can direct a signal downwards and it can be picked up by fixed dish. This is how satellite TV works. You can tell which way is South (in the Northern hemisphere) by looking at domestic satellite dishes—they have to point South since the satellite they are aiming at is over the equator. This was an amazing analysis in many ways, since it was still more than 10 years before Sputnik was launched in 1957. One challenge in the movie was deciding how communication devices would work. What they came up with is pretty much a modern laptop, with a hinged screen, keyboard, and audio. There are some amusing things about it, one being that despite having a keyboard, it also had a rotary phone dial (touch-tone phones with buttons were still in the future). I think it is interesting that if they had come up with something much more like a modern smartphone, it would have looked as if they had given up trying to be accurate. It would have been too accurate to have been believable in 1968. Being too accurate to be believable actually has a name, the Tiffany problem. Tiffany is a very old name, dating back to the 11th century (it is the English version of the Greek Theophania) but it looks very modern. So if you put a character called Tiffany into a historical novel it would be too accurate to be believable. There was a famous 7th century English bishop called Chad too. The computer in the movie is called HAL. It is apparently a coincidence that you can get the name by taking the letters of IBM and moving them back one place in the alphabet (in the same way, Dave Cutler, the chief architect of Microsoft's W/NT, was also the chief architect of DEC's Vax VMS, one letter different again). The computer hardware, which you see when eventually the computer is disengaged, doesn't really look like computers of today, but it looks much more like a modern server farm, than the computers of the time, or their depictions in other contemporary movies and TV series. Remember, when the movie was made in 1968, microprocessors were still in the future, so there was very little to go on as to how future computers might look. The apes in the movie were famously realistic, to the extent that people still ask if they were real. Kubrick apparently intended to use early humans instead of apes, but since they would have to be naked, it would have been slapped with an X rating by that era's film rating process, so he went with hairy apes. I suppose the biggest thing that the movie got wrong was portraying space travel as ordinary by 2001. With the moon landings imminent when this movie was made, I think everyone assumed that the age of manned space flight beyond low earth orbit was just getting started, not that it was then at its peak, and would soon end. Nobody has been to the moon since my first term as an undergraduate, so not in the lifetimes of many of you reading this. Oscars The movie pre-dated CGI, of course, since it pre-dated computer graphics completely. But the movie, and Kubrick, won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Surprisingly, in his whole career, Kubrick only won this one Oscar. It was controversial since he didn't really create the effects or the techniques, he just directed them. So despite being one of the best film directors ever, he only won an Oscar for something he didn't really do. Kubrick's other nominations were: 1965: Dr Strangelove was beaten by My Fair Lady for best picture and best director 1969: 2001 A Space Odyssey was beaten by Oliver! for both best picture and best director, and by The Producers for best screenplay 1972: A Clockwork Orange was beaten by The French Connection for best picture, best director, and best screenplay 1976: Barry Lyndon was beaten by One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest for best picture, best director, and best screenplay 1988: Full Metal Jacket was beaten by The Last Emperor for best screenplay About the only thing you can say is that none of these were occasions where the Academy totally screwed up (as it does sometimes, like when it awarded the 1979 best picture Oscar to Kramer vs Kramer instead of Apocalypse Now ). All of these other winners are great movies that are also classics decades later. And, perhaps the biggest injustice of all: 1980: The Shining was beaten for best picture and director by Ordinary People (say what?)...because The Shining wasn't even nominated Every movie set in space subsequently, from Star Wars to Alien , Interstellar to The Martian , owes something to 2001 and the work of Kubrick and Clarke that first premiered 50 years ago today on April 6, 1968. Another take: Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica and Wolfram:Alpha fame) wrote a piece this week in Wired on seeing 2001 at age 8, and what has aged well and badly: 2001 A Space Odyssey Predicated the Future—50 Years Ago . Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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