![]() ![]() And he wouldn’t have had a chapter entitled The Dawn of Man, in which man, having dawned, bashes another man’s brains out with a club. It may be going too far to call 2001 a cynical political comedy, but if Kubrick hadn’t wanted us to laugh, he wouldn’t have focused on a “zero-gravity toilet”. One thing which is clear is how much it has in common with some of his previous anti-war and anti-authority films, 1964’s Dr Strangelove in particular.Īnd look at the convictions which underpin both works: that humans are intrinsically, self-destructively violent, and that anyone who believes himself to be 100% right is probably a dangerous maniac. He likened the film to a painting and a piece of music, something to experience “at an inner level of consciousness”. But the director edited out anything which might have made it too easy to comprehend. “You’re free to speculate about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film,” he told an interviewer in 1968, “but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.” Kubrick’s co-writer, Arthur C Clarke, answered some of the story’s questions in his tie-in novel, which was published just after the film’s release. Kubrick himself wouldn’t be too upset by all this head-scratching. When Nicolas Cage almost became Superman What, for instance, is a shiny rectangular monolith doing in prehistoric Africa? Why does an astronaut hurtle through a psychedelic lightshow to another universe, before turning into a cosmic foetus? And considering that the opening section is set millions of years in the past, and the two central sections are set 18 months apart, how much of it actually takes place in 2001? But 2001 is one of the most puzzling films ever made, too. Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece is regularly voted as one of the greatest films ever made: BBC Culture’s own critics’ poll of the best US cinema ranked it at number four. It’s been 50 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we’re still trying to make sense of it.
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