2001: fifty years ago

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Sooner Boomer

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The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out 50 years ago. I was spending the summer with my dad that year. He had a bunch of errands to run, so he dropped me off at the movies after checking what time the film ended. He asked me what it was about when he picked me up later, and I had a hard time telling him.

The critics hated it when it came out. It was panned as "a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick's inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view." I'm not sure if it deserved that harsh of a criticism, but it dragged tediously in several spots. It did set some high marks for following science fiction pictures, and has become a cultural icon. Today it's considered one of most influential films of all time and perhaps the greatest science-fiction film. In 2010, the Moving Arts Film Journal went one step further and named it the greatest film in history.

When did you first see it, and what did you think? Is it any better with age?

One of the funniest spin-offs is the movie "Moonwalkers", about a group of British hippy druggies that are mistakenly hired by the CIA to make a fake movie of the moon landing in case the actual moon mission failed (they thought they were hiring Kubrick, but instead hired Jonny (Rupert Grint), the front man for a failed rock band.
 
I remember my dad taking me to see it. 1974..1976.. somewhere around there.. I love love love the scene / sequence of the PanAm approaching & docking with the space station.. J Strauss 'Blue Danube..

[video=youtube;q3oHmVhviO8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3oHmVhviO8[/video]


My wife commented that she's only ever seen it from start to finish.. once. And, the end bit tends to confuse a lot of people.. I've seen it a few times, love it each & every time. (I also love movies from long ago portraying 'the future', and comparing it to 'today's reality'! PanAm & Howard Johnson's are kinda gone now! :D )
 
Very few movies have left me leaving them saying "Wow...". 2001 was the first. If it was released today it would still be state of the art moviemaking.
 
I remember seeing bits of 2001 when it was on network TV around 1975 or 1976. My parents wanted me to go to bed but I wanted to watch. My young brain (of 5 or 6) wanted something interesting to happen but all I saw was the moon bus and some coffee and sandwiches, maybe part of the photo op at TMA1. The next morning I asked my mom how the movie ended - I'm not sure she had the faculty with words to tackle that with somebody of my age!
 
Isn't that the one where these guys fake a moon landing ... ?

Seriously, though, reading the book makes it all make sense. It is a great cinematic achievement, but with limited appeal to the general movie-going audience. Kind of like Citizen Kane. When I watch it, I think "Welles was a genius." Other people watch it and say, "That was boring."
 
I saw it when it came out and had my mind blown. I disregarded the light show and the ET stuff and was entranced by the depiction of space flight in the near future. The model photography was and still is brilliant and inspiring. The movie convinced me we could be doing that. I did some math and realized that in 2001 I would be old enough to be that guy on the shuttle to the moonbase. I joined NASA and was poised to be there for it, but it didn't happen. The dream perished. I watched the film again last month on TCM and I still believe we could have done that. We got the shuttle and a space station, we're still waiting for the rest.
 
I saw it when it came out and had my mind blown. I disregarded the light show and the ET stuff and was entranced by the depiction of space flight in the near future. The model photography was and still is brilliant and inspiring. The movie convinced me we could be doing that. I did some math and realized that in 2001 I would be old enough to be that guy on the shuttle to the moonbase. I joined NASA and was poised to be there for it, but it didn't happen. The dream perished. I watched the film again last month on TCM and I still believe we could have done that. We got the shuttle and a space station, we're still waiting for the rest.

Sorry your dreams didn't work out. I'm sure that is a common situation for kids who grew up in the 60s.
 
Sorry your dreams didn't work out. I'm sure that is a common situation for kids who grew up in the 60s.
My first memory of the Space Program was finding out I had missed Halley's Comet, then Challenger.

I'm glad we're going back, I just wish the dream could have been mine at least for a little while. I've always been certain I was never going to the stars.
 
I was in college at the time enrolled in aeronautical and astronautic engineering. It was very exciting times. The Viet Nam war, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the women's rights movement were all going on. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. At times it seemed like the whole world was coming apart. And then there was the one bright spot, the Apollo program was doing well. "2001" came out right about at the end of all this. All the college students were seeing it and discussing it. Without reading the book by Arthur Clarke, it was impossible to understand what was going on. It provided many hours of discussing the meaning of the movie. In ways for space exploration it was very exciting times.
 
Being 12 years old when I saw it at the movie theater, made a deep impression that still lasts till this day. Shortly after, the moon landings. It seemed as if anything was possible.

I was already building model rockets, having been "zapped" in the head by a TV program years earlier, showing potential astronauts training in the vomit comet aircraft. From that point forward, the entire human enterprise of space exploration consumed my thoughts and dreams.

I often wondered why we just seemed to stop, and then spiral down into a whirlpool of relative social mediocrity compared to those accomplishments. After all the decades since, I just have to conclude that it is human nature, economics and politics not withstanding.

Arthur C. Clarke himself seemed to have a handle on why. He hosted a program called "Mysterious World" several years ago. In it he talked about "lost wisdom" of past ages. The one program of that series I really remember, had him lamenting that if we had continued on in technical knowledge and development, since the creation of the Antikythera mechanism, today might be quite different. His soliloquy starts at 24:50 in this youtube program.

[video=youtube;3Cl9n6D4-vo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cl9n6D4-vo[/video]
 
Yeah, I remember that episode and Clarke's lament about the missed opportunities.

It was an idea that had some currency in Clarke's youth. A sort of complement to the "Golden Age/New Age" nonsense that informed the cults of Lemuria and Atlantis. The idea that we were somehow betrayed out of a golden age to built on the wisdom of the ancients. L. Sprague deCamp wrote book about this -- sort of. Lest Darkness Fall.

About the crystal skulls, a little earlier in the episode...

https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i9/Crystal-Skulls-Deemed-Fake.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/archaeology/crystal-skulls/

As to the original question, I think I probably first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on broadcast TV. I kind of think it was a movie-of-the-week on some network in the 70s or 80s.

I saw it in the theaters when I was in college, at a midnight showing. Then I saw it again that same year as part of an ill-conceived Philosophy of Science Fiction class, taught by a professor who did not understand the "science" part of science fiction at all

I am a fan of the movie. I think it holds up pretty well.
 
I didn’t see it until about 1995.

I was 9 in 1968 and Kubrick was supposed to be a very “adult” filmmaker (see “Lolita”) so my parents didn’t think it was suitable kiddy fare. It was also rumored to be possibly drug-influenced.

Over the years I usually didn’t watch it on cable teevee because several people told me, “you have to see it for the first time on a big screen with stereo sound, watching it on a 17 inch screen with tinny speakers is a waste of time.”

Finally I got a big screen teevee in about 1995 and watched it. Awesome. I’ve seen it probably 50 times since then.
 
Just a moment . . .

Just a moment . . .

I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit.
 
I saw it when it came out and had my mind blown. I disregarded the light show and the ET stuff and was entranced by the depiction of space flight in the near future. The model photography was and still is brilliant and inspiring. The movie convinced me we could be doing that. I did some math and realized that in 2001 I would be old enough to be that guy on the shuttle to the moonbase. I joined NASA and was poised to be there for it, but it didn't happen. The dream perished. I watched the film again last month on TCM and I still believe we could have done that. We got the shuttle and a space station, we're still waiting for the rest.

I saw it in Cinerama the week it premiered at at the Uptown Theatre in Wash. DC.
My father took us...he was a practical missileman...he liked the movie, but said "son ...we aren't going to have all that stuff in 2001."

As for the youthful vision at the time...this song kinda says it all:
https://youtu.be/LPRci2BFTMc

[video=youtube;LPRci2BFTMc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPRci2BFTMc[/video]
 
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The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out 50 years ago. I was spending the summer with my dad that year. He had a bunch of errands to run, so he dropped me off at the movies after checking what time the film ended. He asked me what it was about when he picked me up later, and I had a hard time telling him.

The critics hated it when it came out. It was panned as "a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick's inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view." I'm not sure if it deserved that harsh of a criticism, but it dragged tediously in several spots. It did set some high marks for following science fiction pictures, and has become a cultural icon. Today it's considered one of most influential films of all time and perhaps the greatest science-fiction film. In 2010, the Moving Arts Film Journal went one step further and named it the greatest film in history.

When did you first see it, and what did you think? Is it any better with age?

One of the funniest spin-offs is the movie "Moonwalkers", about a group of British hippy druggies that are mistakenly hired by the CIA to make a fake movie of the moon landing in case the actual moon mission failed (they thought they were hiring Kubrick, but instead hired Jonny (Rupert Grint), the front man for a failed rock band.

There is a very good documentary about Kubrick's film career and in it - Woody Allen says he disliked 2001 when he saw it, and it took friends talking to him and several viewings before he appreciated it.
After hearing that....I kind of understand how a creative person that is ahead of his time can do something other people in the business, and the population in general, just doesn't get....quite yet.

When the song "Yellow Submarine" came out, I thought, geez, what is this vaudeville crap ? ....this is surly the end of the Beatles career. LOL
Some very creative people have the insight - and the courage - to go where no one has gone before.....
Although I do recall my first year in college, I had a film class where the teacher said there was absolutely nothing unique about 2001, as far as cinema as art was concerned.
 
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