First, all those childhood memories from when I first saw it. Was it really 1968, or a bit later? Whatever the case, I was a teenager coming to the end of a sci-fi infatuation. Despite moving on, we took for granted that by 2001 there would be moon bases, expeditions to Mars, and that space would be normalised.
Clarke and Kubrick tried so hard to make it as accurate as possible, and the wonderful HAL's legacy has a whole lot of stories about that. The most remarkable is of the two of them visiting Bell Labs and
The late 60s and 70s were a golden age for American film: 2001, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Deer Hunter, and it's impossible to imagine that something like 2001 could be made now. Why?
First the speed of the thing: it's slow – with little dialogue – but the sound is so carefully done. Heavy breathing when Dave is in the spacesuit, some isolated conversations … and the music is only played on its own: you hear the music, and see how it works with the visuals: it's emphatically not used simply to pump up the adrenaline.
Then the visuals: remember then no one had even seen the earth from the moon (“earth rise”) when the film was made: it is mattes and models, but even though it's not photorealistic, it works. Way before CGI, but just as good!
HAL, as Stork suggests, is the real star of the film … one big brain, of course, and no PCs, but less anachronistic now (“internet of things”) than it was in 2001 itself.
And the actors? No famous lead players, but good old British character actors: Leonard Rossiter – Reggie Perrin – and Margaret Tyzack – Forsyte Saga – who also appears in A Clockwork Orange.
Of course, some things are “wrong”: there are no PCs, for instance, but the most noticeable is the prominent PAN AM logo on the space shuttle: Kubrick and Clarke were good on the science, but less on the economics …
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