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The 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey is forever cemented in film history for good reasons. Stanley Kubrick has one of the most significant filmographies of all time, including movies like Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, among other influential classics. Even in such an impressive list of features, 2001: A Space Odyssey stands out. It is widely considered Kubrick’s magnum opus. The director had a «larger than life» style in general, and often opted for controversial and thought-provoking stories, but this film in particular is about events that transcend time, and touch upon human nature at a cosmological level.
It is no surprise that this film would go on to impact generations of filmmakers emerging in the following decades. The science fiction genre has been heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Directors who love this film include George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Christopher Nolan. Steven Spielberg has referred to it as «the Big Bang of his film-making generation.» But the movie also caused discomfort among others, who criticized its pessimistic take on the past, present and future of humanity. Andrei Tarkovsky, who also directed one of the most extraordinary science fiction films of all time, famously hated it. Either way, it can be argued that 2001: A Space Odyssey always provokes strong feelings in those watching.
2001 Exposes Violence in the Evolution of Humankind
Kubrick Connects the Dawn of Humans With Artificial Intelligence
2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, and continues to gain new meanings as time passes. The film was co-written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the context of the Cold War, but seeks to tell a timeless story of the tragedy of progress. The Space Race was at its height when the film came out, just months before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Unlike most other American filmmakers at the time, Kubrick refused to paint an optimistic or nationalist picture of space exploration in his art. In fact, Kubrick’s sci-fi is somewhat closer to Soviet concepts of form and content than it is to traditional Hollywood.
The Soviet Montage Theory, developed empirically during the 1920s by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, revolutionized the art of cinema worldwide. Stanley Kubrick publicly acknowledged Eisenstein’s impact on his work, even though he rarely admitted to his influences or named idols. That influence is evident in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film in which the editing plays a crucial role in shaping the meaning. The film’s core theme is the ideology of violence and its role in human evolution, and the plot decenters human agency, which also strongly contrasts with the heroism and the technological optimism that define American mainstream cinema. But Kubrick’s take on the genre is not exactly aligned with Soviet cinema either, especially not politically. It sits in a gray area of the political spectrum, a common place for arthouse American cinema to this day.
The cycle of life depicted in the plot is mirrored in the evergreen art of interpreting 2001. Life and technology change so much, and so fast, that each new development becomes a new opportunity to return to the 1968 film. Today, with artificial intelligence creeping into many aspects of human society, it is impossible to interpret HAL 9000 in the movie in the same way as critics have before this technological revolution. According to Geoffrey Hinton’s public position in relation to AI today, Kubrick’s ideas are proving to be more realistic than pessimistic. Hinton — the «Godfather of AI» — was also inspired by 2001 as a child to pursue computer science. More indirectly, it is often questioned if its monolith drove the Jungian Collective Unconscious to develop iPhones and other «black monoliths» as technology. This interpretation connects 2001 all the way to Black Mirror.
The monolith, which appears as the mythical aura of progress in moments of domination, may represent the unexplainable human urge to solve problems with violence. In the Dawn of Men sequence, it can seem to be a symbol of human curiosity: the seductive and scary void of the unknown. But it soon takes on a new, much more layered meaning when the ape’s bone becomes a spaceship in what is arguably cinema’s most iconic cut of all time. Whenever the monolith reappears, it reaffirms the idea that our evolution is rooted in violent dominance and that all of our tools are created to harm and kill. Our progress is always a return to nature in this sense.
2001 May Be the Movie That Aged the Best in History
The Story and Themes Remain as Timeless as the Music and Visuals
The effect of the monolith connects to the reference in adding «space odyssey» to the title. In reference to Homer’s Odyssey, Kubrick compares the Space Race to Odysseus’ mythical journey at sea after the Trojan War, using the Trojan Horse from Greek Mythology. An odyssey is more than just a long adventure back home. It’s a spiritual and existential journey that unfolds alongside physical travel, in which monsters symbolize the eternal struggle for peace. There lies the true paradox of both the Odyssey and 2001: humans want peace, but seek it with violence and deception. Following two World Wars, and two atomic bombs dropped by the United States on civilians at the end of WWII, and at the peak of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke clearly saw a parallel between the Western mindset at play and the Odyssey.
The divisive ending delivers the final blow to Kubrick’s message of technological pessimism: there were dinosaurs before the apes, and there will be something else after us. The shot of the monolith from the ground in The Dawn of Man implies a new horizon for humanity. This is an artificial horizon, rooted in the endless pursuit of the unattainable through technological progress and demonstrations of force. By making violence the human «cosmological constant,» 2001 carries an interesting false paradox. It reveals a pattern in the cosmic design while portraying life as a chaotic experience. The perfectly symmetrical photography, paired with deeply emotional music, highlights this apparent paradox, which is, in fact, only a matter of perspective.
Much can be said about the visual aspects of the film, but the equally important use of music is often forgotten in discussions about it. Classical music is a constant in Kubrick’s filmography, but it represents very different things in each film. The song «Also Sprach Zarathustra,» composed in 1896 by Richard Strauss, was used in the opening credits and other moments. It is an unsubtle reference to Friedrich Nietzsche. His book Thus Spoke Zarathustra is central to the development of his concepts of Übermensch, nihilism and eternal recurrence — all clearly imprinted in the plot of 2001. But even for those who may not catch the reference while watching, the impact of such a timeless and intense piece of music evoked the range of emotions necessary to tell a timeless and intense story.
Due to its timeless set design, photography, and music, as well as deliberate choices like limiting dialogue and conveying emotions through classical music, and its nuanced approach to universal themes of materialism, 2001: A Space Odyssey may be the one movie that has aged the best in film history. It is a sci-fi made in the 1960s, but it still looks and feels futuristic for all of these reasons. The philosophical references and undertones also cement it as an important piece in the discussion of how ideology evolves through art.
2001 Had an Impact on Christopher Nolan and Other Creatives
Movies Like Inception and Interstellar Reflect Kubrick’s Influence
As discussed, the influence of 2001 is so massive that it extends beyond art. It also had an impact on people pursuing other fields, inspiring generations of creatives. Yet, it hasn’t always inspired others solely through admiration. It famously drove Andrei Tarkovsky to create an anti-2001. He hated Kubrick’s take on the genre so much that he countered it with his own sci-fi movie, Solaris, in 1972. Even if the Russian director hadn’t publicly expressed his dislike for the Kubrick film, it would still be obvious that Solaris was made as a critical response to 2001. Tarkovsky abominated Kubrick’s reduction of human nature to technological advancement. Kubrick’s obsession with cosmic truth, as if life were a monolith, ignores the role of identity, trauma, and memory found all over Tarkovsky’s work.
In contrast, the vast majority of science fiction filmmakers worldwide cite 2001 as one of the best in the genre. Christopher Nolan, who often returns to the genre, is an avid fan. Much like the effect of watching Solaris without the historical context, it is possible to see the ripple effects of 2001 in movies like Inception and Interstellar, even before knowing this fact about Nolan. In both, Nolan explored the concept of reality being composed of layers, of which the deepest can only be accessed by one or very few characters. His approach to epic sci-fi adventures is almost like transforming 2001 into a powerful narrative formula.
When listing his favorite films for Indie Wire, Nolan placed 2001: A Space Odyssey in the number 1 spot. It is followed by 12 Angry Men in second, and Alien in third place. Ridley Scott, the director of Alien, is another filmmaker who loves 2001. But perhaps Nolan is the film’s biggest fan after all. The director played a crucial role in the «un-restoration» of the film, a re-release of the 70mm original 1968 version in theaters in 2018. He was too young to have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters when it came out, but he was able to see it on the big screen during a re-release in 1977. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2018, Nolan shared how the experience of watching it on 70mm marked him forever. He says it stayed with him «as an inspiration for what movies could do,» and that he wanted to share that with newer generations.
In the same interview, Nolan noted how he believes 2001 is incredibly «authoritative» in science fiction. And it is a fact that it has an overwhelming influence on American sci-fi, in particular. It completely changed cinema forever, becoming a blueprint. «Kubrick always had this masterful sense of calm in the way he told stories — nothing is wasted, there are no extra shots, there are no extra lines, extra words,» Nolan added. This points to another paradox 2001: A Space Odyssey holds: the fact that Kubrick’s filmmaking can be seen as overall minimalist and maximalist at the same time. The epic story across millennia, the grandiose music and the meticulous photography are met with a dialectic montage of scenes with little to no dialogue, with no subplots, in which one image can have a thousand meanings.
