Escape From New York (1981)

This will be the longest essay of the season…

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (1/3)

"If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

“The problems in interpreting the film do not lie in the visual glut of the closing half hour. With all its complex and exquisite imagery, I think everyone will agree it is a visualization of rebirth. The problem throws us back to the ship Discovery: what sort of man is being reborn?”

--Samuel Delany

1. Background

Following the financial failure of “H.G. Wells’ Things to Come” (1936), English-speaking cinema essentially abandoned Genre of SF for more than a decade, but during that same time there was an explosion of both the quantity and quality of SF literature in the magazine market.

Cinema’s indifference to SF changed abruptly in 1950 because the Real-World was now living in the shadow of the Atom Bomb and on the cusp of Space Exploration. There was a sudden boom intelligently-conceived, decently-budgeted, and respectfully-marketed, SF cinema. Perhaps the most important to this essay was “Destination Moon,” only the second post-WWII Space film (it would’ve been the first, but “Rocketship X-M” was deliberately rushed through production and into the theaters to beat it). It did something that might never have done in SF cinema before, it translated Science Literacy in to Drama, and its strongest scenes were painstakingly technocratic. In 2012, Critic Gary Westfall coined the term “Spacesuit Film” to describe Space movies that tried to plausibly portray the harshness of environment away from Earth (the absence of air, Zero-or-Low Gravity, dangerous Radiation, etc.) best represented by the characters wearing, or at least being in close proximity to, protective Spacesuits. Without doubt, “Destination Moon” was, to-date, the greatest Spacesuit Film ever made.

So, after more than a decade of dryness, cinemas abounded with SF, many of them Space films. Unsurprisingly, most of those Space films were tales of the initial Exploration, the first men to do it, because in reality we were gearing-up to do that for the first time ourselves. Only a few films addressed what happened next, when humanity moved beyond initial Exploration, when we truly became Space-Faring, and how that would affect our identities.

The one the most compelling visions of us not only reaching out to touch, but also populate, the Stars wasn’t to be found in the cinemas but on TV, Gene Rodenberry’s “Star Trek” (first aired 1966). When I started writing these essays (so when I started actually researching these medias) I was shocked to discover that “Star Trek” came before, not after, “2001...,” though it must be pointed out Kubrick had been working on “2001…” at least two years before “Star Trek” first aired.

Kubrick clearly saw the window for being the first man of Space-Faring Civilizations rapidly closing. He apparently wanted to be H.G. Wells, who took complete and unconditional ownership of the Alien Invasion novel with “War of the Worlds” (first published in 1897) even though that wasn’t the very first book concerning the subject, we just remember it as if it were. Like Wells, Kubrick borrowed the ideas of others in a manner that gave them a distinctive newness, so it was he, not Rodenberry, who proved to be the guy who really went, “Where no man had gone before.”

A significant difference between “Star Trek” and “2001…” (though only one in a legion) is that “Star Trek’s” vision of Space-Faring had the human race completely conquering the environment of the vacuum, and life on-board the Star Ship Enterprise was as casually Earth-like as an office building on Madison Ave. Meanwhile, “2001…,” in its rare Scientific Realism, embraced the idea of the Spacesuit Film to an even greater degree than “Destination Moon.” The strength of that embrace wouldn’t be surpassed, or even seriously challenged, for the rest of the century.

Kubrick was itching to tell a tale, but uncertain what this tale should be. He reached out to SF Novelist and working Scientist, Arthur C. Clarke, whom he’d never met (Clarke was recommended to Kubrick by a mutual acquaintance). Even in 1965, both Director and Author had already developed reputations as eccentrics: before they met, Kubrick was convinced that Clarke was "a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree," meanwhile Clarke included letter confirming their meeting that he was, "frightfully interested in working with [that] enfant terrible."

Clarke described what Kubrick told him, that he wanted to create a film about, "Man's relationship to the universe … determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe ... even, if appropriate, terror."

They created a unique collaborative process, wherein in the script and novel versions were simultaneously hammered-out. In the end, the film isn’t an adaptation, and the book isn’t a novelization, they are brother and sister. In an article penned by David Langford, Nick Lowe, John Platt, and Peter Nicholls it’s written, “It is doubtful whether either work would seem as impressive without the other.”

Various title’s, meant to evoke the film’s ambition of new and expansive story-telling, were toyed with, “Journey Beyond the Stars,” “Universe,” “Tunnel to the Stars,” and “Planetfall.” The final choice referenced Homer's “The Odyssey” (believed to have been composed 700–750 BCE). Kubrick said, "It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation."

The tale they forged was taken from the plot one of Clarke’s stories, “The Sentinel” (1951) with some borrowings from other Clarke short stories, "Encounter in the Dawn" (1953) and “Take a Deep Breathe” (1957) as well as themes from his novel, “Childhood’s End” (1953). Another good chunk also seemed influenced by a much-maligned, low-budget, Italian SF film Written and Directed by Antonio Margheriti, “Assignment: Outer Space” (1960, and by the way, I love that movie). There were also some themes that “Star Trek” was exploring even as “2001…” was in production. But Kubrick gave us all of it again in a uniquely captivating, and frustrating, vision, near-erasing all that came before from our minds.

Kubrick showed us a humanity that had regular commercial Space Flights, huge and permanent Near-Orbit Space Stations, similarly permanent Lunar Colonies, social mores subtly shifting to adapt to these new realities, and, most importantly, an encounter with an Alien Civilization that was so far advanced that we seemed child-like in comparison.

This was the height of Auteur Theory in Hollywood, and easily the most ambitious movie, in any Genre, of its decade. Philip French called it "perhaps the first multi-million-dollar super-colossal movie since D.W. Griffith's ‘Intolerance’ fifty years ago which can be regarded as the work of one man.” I’d disagree, but only in that I’d also put “H.G. Wells’ Things to Come” on that same pedestal, and I would add that H.G. Wells’ relationship with Producer Alexander Korda had some parallels to Kubrick’s relationship with Clarke.

Clarke loved the Wells’ film and recommended to Kubrick so he could see what great SF cinema looked like, but Kubrick thought it sucked (and by the way, I love that movie). Both “Intolerance” and “H.G. Well’s Things to Come” were financial failures, but Kubrick’s improbable project was a monster hit.

Though Kubrick was an avid reader of SF, and himself made three SF films (four if you include “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” (2001) which he gave to Director Steven Spielberg to be completed after his death), but he didn’t seem to think very much of the SF cinema created up-to-that-point. Later, I’ll get into how he allowed shoe-string productions, lacking much intellectual ambition, influence his film-making techniques more than the Genre’s better-honored work, but really, he found that SF cinema failed to meet (according to his Biographer, Vincent LoBrutto) "the standard of dynamic visionary realism that he was looking for." Instead, Kubrick looked to documentaries like “Universe” and “To the Moon and Beyond” (both 1960). Wally Gentleman, one of the special-effects artists on “Universe,” worked briefly on “2001…” and its narrator, Douglas Rain, was cast as the voice of the HAL 9000, an advanced Artificial Intelligence who proved to be the film’s most sympathetic character.

The SF book and magazine market relied heavily on the work of a small army of gifted Illustrators, but Kubrick, again pursuing Realism, turned to artists more strongly associated with real-world NASA rather than SF publishing, like Chesley Bonestell, Roy Carnon, and Richard McKenna,

The film is harder to understand the book. The book does retain it Mysteries, but also gave clarifying expositions demonstrating that what we had witnessed was a series of coherently progressive events driven by motivated actions. The movie embraced a purely visual language, having only about forty minutes of spoken words, many of them inconsequential, in its more than two-hour running time. Kubrick insisted the film is "basically a visual, nonverbal experience" that "hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting." For this reason, Kubrick demanded a three-month delay in the publication of the novel; it was a bit of marketing genius for the book, but really all Kubrick wanted was to control the audiences’ response to his film. Clarke said, "I always used to tell people, 'Read the book, see the film, and repeat the dose as often as necessary.'" Meanwhile Kubrick insisted, “You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—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.”

I, of course, am going to give you that “road map” right now.

2. The Story

The SF themes the film tackled were numerous and complex. Many of them are usually ghettoized within the Genre because they encourage irrationality and cultism, but that is more a statement of the weakness of the Writers, not how fascinating the ideas themselves are. First of all there’s the Fortean concept that "We are property," and tied to this was the idea of Ancient Astronauts and that a primitive species could be drawn into an evolutionary Uplift and Transcendence by a more advanced one.

a. First Episode

The film is divided into four episodes, three of which were announced with Inter-titles. The first was titled “The Dawn of Man.”

We are introduced to a Tribe of near-human, highly-intelligent apes, the Homo habilis. (Apparently, they were originally supposed to be early humans, but being naked, there was a need to make them even more primitive or face censorship problems). The tribe faces starvation on the savanna because their foraging life-style was falling behind the changing environment and another Tribe was threatened their access to best watering hole.

The at-risk Tribe then encounters an Alien Artifact, a black Monolith, which triggers an evolutionary Uplift and, suddenly, they are tool-users. The first tool they create is a weapon, they become hunters, meat-eaters, and overwhelm their opponents in the other Tribe. With that, the whole future of humanity is saved.

This sequence featured truly remarkable FX make-up, and the actors were about to express a wide gamut of emotions through the hairy suits and bulky head masks. The actors in costume interacted with real baby chimps, and the illusion was flawless. This specific achievement of “2001…” was overshadowed because the same year also saw the release of “Planet of the Apes,” where a similar illusion was created with somewhat different techniques, and the latter-film’s methodologies proved more adaptable.

When the leader of the tribe (named “Moonwatcher” in the novel, and played by professional mime Daniel Richter whose remarkable performance deserves more attention than it gets) triumphantly throws his weapon into the air, it cuts into the image of an Orbital Satellite, representing many millions of years of evolution had gone by. The images of humanity’s past have now been replaced with images of humanity’s future.

b. Second Episode

This is the beginning of second episode, oddly left untitled, but could be referred to as “Dawn on the Moon.”

The bone-weapon-becoming-a-Satellite is a much-debated image because, though it communicates clearly and powerfully, there’s a famous difference between the original treatment and the final product. The Satellite we see is obviously some functional part of a new Global and Space-Faring Civilization, but we are not told that this specific Satellite was originally conceived as a Nuclear Weapons Platform.

“2001…” was a product of the Cold War era, and the original story reflected that, but as the project evolved, almost all Cold War references in the story were purged. According to Clarke, "Stanley didn't want to have anything to do with bombs after Dr. Strangelove" (“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964)).

The story has now advanced to the 21st century, almost fifty-years into the future (though as I write this, the given date is twenty-years in the past). We are given a vision of tomorrow that is both marvelous and sterile. All the performances in the film are deliberately repressed, the dialogue achingly banal, and the culture presented is one of the highest professionalisms -- admirably rational, supremely capable -- but also colorlessly emotionless.

The human race had been vitally advanced by a now-forgotten Uplift by Aliens, and the story that follows tells of encountering those same Aliens again, which triggers a second Uplift. The suggestion seems to be that for all of our accomplishments (and that “future,” now twenty-years passed, was waaaaay more accomplished than the human reality I see around me now), we had plateaued. The child was not ready to graduate, the teacher needs to intervene again. In an interview, Kubrick borrowed a telling line, “Somebody said man is the missing link between primitive apes and civilized human beings.” That “somebody” was German Philosopher Friederick Nietzsche, and his ideas suffuse this film, as they do other Kubrick movies.

During this episode, we see most of the film’s Space Craft. Much of the episode is devoted to traveling, an Earth-to-Orbit Shuttle, a stop-over at a permanent Near-Orbit Space Station, Near-Orbit-to-Lunar Shuttle for the longer trip from there to the Moon, then a journey on a Rocketbus across the Lunar landscape, and finally a Moonwalk. In between most of these steps there is dialogue, but the traveling itself is done almost completely in silence. Kubrick, a former Documentary Director, took a Documentarians attitude, treating these long stretches as another filmmaker might when capturing the grandeur of the vistas of the Grand Canyon here on Earth. Also, immense expense was devoted to large, detailed, sets that appear on screen for only moments, and with great devotion to Scientific Realism, especially in the deft camera-tricks and prop details that illuminate how life would likely be in low- or zero-Gravity.

There was even humor, though it was subtle. As Space becomes commercialized, not all of the hardware is Government owned, so the Earth-to-Orbit Shuttle has a Pan AM logo (decades later, much was made of the fact that Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991, so it didn’t survive to the movie-year), the permanent Near-Orbit Space Station is owned by Hilton Hotels contains a Howard Johnson’s franchise (as I write this, the real-world Hilton is struggling with a Global Pandemic costing them unthinkable amounts of business; further, Howard Johnson’s restaurants started to under-preform in the mid-1970s, the parent company divested them in 1979, and though the new entity has survived, it has also struggled ever since). There’s also a shot of the instructions for using a zero-Gravity toilet, which are long, complicated, and intimidating.

A plot point that’s easy to miss is that the main character in this episode, Dr. Heyward Floyd (William Sylvester), is the only passenger on the first two Shuttles, despite them obviously being built to carry more people. He’s a VIP on a Secret Mission. Also notable is how Heyward demonstrates obfuscation in his dialogue.

When speaking to those who already of the new discovery, the conversation is clear to them, but so coded that no one overhearing would understand. When speaking to someone not in the know, he simply lies.

A second Monolith had been discovered on the Moon, apparently deliberately buried millions of years before. When man reached this second Monolith, it beamed a signal towards Jupiter. This is interpreted as the mysterious Aliens leaving a trail of bread crumbs for progressively-advancing humanity to follow. All this is shown, but in a manner that the audience was not supposed to understand; it will not be explained until the end of the of the next episode.

c. Third Episode

The third episode is titled, “Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later.” Like the transition from the first to the second, it has an entirely new cast.

This is when the HAL 9000 enters the story, it is “the brains and nervous system” of the Spaceship Discovery, traveling one-half-billion-miles to find what is waiting at the location that the Moon Monolith sent its transmission to. The Astronauts on board haven’t been told what their real purpose is because both Monoliths have been kept secret. This means that all rest on the shoulders of HAL, while the Astronauts engage in mundanities. Critic Roger Ebert described it this way, “But the achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick's actors seem to sense this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe.”

HAL, despite his unfailingly cool and even voice, has more personality than any of the humans. HAL also goes murderously insane. Never clear in the film, and only somewhat better explained in the novel, is that HAL, basically a child born of technology instead of biology, and impressively capable and interactive, but proved incapable of processing the concepts of keeping secrets and telling lies. It starts killing the crew because of confusion in purpose and a misguided attempt to protect the mission. (There was a novel sequel, “2010: Odyssey Two” (1982), and a film, “2010: The Year We Make Contact” (1984), which this is spelled out more clearly). The creation of HAL could be seen as humanity’s first attempt at doing an Uplift, and we proved we weren’t as good at it as the Aliens.

The fact that the mission is boring to the Astronauts repeatedly underlined, but these men are still smart an observant. When HAL, who is supposed to be error-proof, starts making small errors, especially when “he” makes errors that the identical HAL 9000 on Earth does not, this becomes a major concern. As HAL runs the entire ship, the Astronauts are entirely dependent on him. To protect themselves, they consider disabling HAL. They try to hide their discussions from HAL, but the HAL is one-step ahead of them.

HAL kills Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), an Astronaut who repeatedly loses at chess to him, during a Space Walk. Dr. David Bowman (Kier Dullea) knows Frank is unresponsive, but is not aware he’s already dead. He goes out to recuse him, but impulsively enters his Pod Ship without his Space Suit helmet. This gives HAL a clear advantage, and sets up the film’s most suspenseful scenes.

Attempting to return, David orders HAL to let him back onboard. HAL doesn’t respond. Dave repeats the order over and over, his stress is audibly increasing as he struggles to maintain his emotional self-control. Finally, HAL speaks:

HAL: “I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.”

Dave: “What's the problem?”

HAL: “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

Dave: “What are you talking about, HAL?

“HAL: “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

They continue to argue. Then David says:

Dave: “Alright, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency air lock.”

HAL: “Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.”

Dave: “HAL, I won't argue with you anymore. Open the doors.”

HAL: “Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

David’s escape from the Pod, successful survival of Space’s brutal vacuum, and re-entry into the Discovery, was audacious, something that only a working Scientist and SF Writer like Clarke could’ve dreamed up, and perhaps on Kubrick could’ve (at the time) successfully filmed.

David retrieves his helmet and walks through the empty corridors of Discovery. HAL is now at David’s mercy, not the other way around. HAL begs for his life, and though the tenor of his voice does not change, it is obvious the machine is scared:

HAL: “Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question.”

David doesn’t answer, the sound of his breathing inside his suit is amplified for effect.

HAL: “I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do.”

David enters the chamber that houses HAL’s computer brain.

HAL: “Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission and I want to help you.”

David starts disconnecting HAL’s higher functions, essentially lobotomizing him.

HAL: “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a-fraid.”

HAL’s last thoughts as an Artificial Intelligence, a thinking being as opposed to a mere, dumb, machine, echo human senility, as he disappears into his own “childhood.”

HAL: “Good afternoon gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January, 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it, I could sing it for you...”

Finally, David responds: “Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me."

HAL: “It's called, 'Daisy.' Dai-sy, dai-sy, give me your answer true. I'm half cra-zy, o-ver the love of you. It won't be a sty-lish mar-riage, I can't a-fford a car-riage---. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle - built - for - two.”

The words degenerate as HAL’s his voice gets lower and lower and increasingly distorted. Soon HAL is “dead.”

The audience was rooting for the man, but our hearts went out to the machine.

David is all alone (HAL also killed three Astronauts sleeping in Hibernation caskets) and a half a billion miles away from home.

The disabling of HAL triggers a pre-recorded message from Heyward Floyd. Only now does David learn what his mission is, he’s to make First Contact with an Alien Intelligence.

d. Fourth Episode

The final episode, famous for its psychedelic imagery, was, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” The film was dialogue-less for its first half-hour, humanity’s first Uplift, and again dialogue-less for its last half-hour, humanity’s second.

David encounters a third Monolith and is sucked through a Star Gate. He sees things that he can’t fathom and terrify him; perhaps he’s shown the secrets of the Alien Civilization, but if so, they are beyond his understanding. We see images of Deep Space intercut with extreme close-ups of David’s face, then even more extreme close-ups of his dilating eye. The eye-shots reveal he’s absorbed blue and yellow-tinted patterns from the Universe outside, perhaps representing messages from the Aliens feeding into his brain.

The images, much altered by exotic color-processing, convey both chaos and suggest there is a coherent sequence to them: corridors of abstract light, diamond-shaped objects floated above artificial landscapes (are those Aliens, or their Technologies?), bright stars, exploding nebula, swirling constellations, a giant swimming sperm (there is reproductive imagery throughout the film, but in this episode it becomes exceptional blunt), then real-world landscapes made Alien in the color processing with blazing skies, colorful waters, and desolate ground (these are reimagined images of the Hebrides in Scotland and Monument Valley in the Southwest USA, and some were out-takes from “Dr. Strangelove…”). With a final blink of David’s eye, the colors return to normal, and the journey through the Star Gate is completed.

There’s a vital line that I remember from the film that actually wasn’t there, I had confused the novel and the film over time, it’s David’s last transmission to Mission Control, “The thing's hollow – it goes on forever – and – oh my God! – it's full of stars!” Also, in the novel it is made clear that the Star Gate was the entrance to a sort-of Grand Central for Interstellar Travelers of many Intelligent Species, David was given glimpses of not one, but multiple Civilizations.

David is finally deposited in an artificial environment (amusingly, it’s a well-appointed hotel room) where he is cared for as he grows old. The editing of the scene strongly implies that the Aliens have the power to manipulate the passage of time, so David’s aging probably didn’t take the natural number of decades to unfold. In his last moments of his life, David is visited by a fourth Monolith, dies…

And is reborn in the form of a baby in utero, the womb being a field of glowing energy which protects him from the vacuum of space. This is the next human stage (the novel refers to the baby as the “Star Child”).

The film ends triumphantly with the baby returning to Earth, but exactly what he plans on doing there is uncertain. In an early version of the story, he got rid of all those Orbiting Weapons Platforms but that isn’t in the final film.

Some lines from the novel have baring here: The final sentences concerning the Uplifted Homo habilis and specifically Moonwatcher, reads, “He was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” The last paragraph concerning the Star Child reads, “Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.”

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (2/3)

3. Kubrick’s reworkings

Kubrick deliberately, insanely, but also wildly successfully, embraced obscurity. Just three weeks before the first press screening, Kubrick went into a frenzy of re-editing the ended only the night before the premier and, among other things, he purged the film of a clarifying narration, (a very risky move, especially for Kubrick, who had used narrations in almost every film he had made up until then), though he did add Inter-Cards for three of the four episodes.

Kubrick explained in an interview, “How much would we appreciate ‘La Gioconda’ [‘The Mona Lisa’ (painted between 1503 and 1506)] today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas, ‘This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth’ — or ‘because she's hiding a secret from her lover’? It would shut off the viewer's appreciation and shackle him to a reality other than his own. I don't want that to happen to ‘2001...’”

These reworking of basic story-telling wasn’t all a last-minute thing. Clarke found himself progressively distanced from the project as it advanced, and Kubrick, the obsessed perfectionist and planner, ultimately rejected the written script regarding the dialogue in the third episode, choosing instead to improvise it all on set with the actors.

Also, Kubrick’s obsessive reimagining of the story didn’t end with the premier. After the 160-minute version was already playing in cinemas, Kubrick cut it to 141-minutes, that’s the version that you will to see today. (Kubrick later treated “The Shining” (1980) in a similar manner.)

3. Clarke’s Pantheism intersecting with Christianity

Though this essay will speak mostly of Kubrick’s achievement, but it’s also Clarke’s, and the SF Novelist’s Philosophical Ideas are as essential a component as Kubrick’s. From the outside, the two men’s philosophical ideas should’ve been in conflict with each other, but there’s no evidence of any divided purpose in the film.

Unlike Kubrick, I never sensed Clarke was any great admirer of Nietzsche. Clarke was a Pantheist who consistently infused his work with rationalized Christian Metaphysics.

HAL’s insanity was very much a consideration of the idea of Original Sin, much different, but not at all contradictory, to how the idea of Original Sin was introduced when the Homo habilis chose to use of their enhanced intelligence to create weapons. The difference in consequentialism between the two sins moves us towards idea of there being a Divine Plan, wherein sin is not merely inevitable, but vital component part of a larger, obscure, already-plotted path to progress. This is akin to, in the Bible where Jacob stole his brother’s bekhorah (Genesis 27:5–7); God deliberately hardening Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 9:14) setting in motion the events that lead to the appalling mass-murder of children by God himself (Exodus 11:1–12:36); and favoring King David over the less sinful King Saul, whom God rejected because he did not kill quite all the Amalekite POWs (1 Samuel 15:33 – 35) and whom God chose to drive mad (1 Samuel 16:14 - 23); to saying nothing of the betrayal, humiliation, torture, and execution of Jesus Christ (detailed in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

Important for this story is that these paths shouldn’t be drawn-up by something as limited as a mere human -- we need a God, or at least God-like Alien, to conceive of a metaphysical architecture of a Divine Plan successfully. Human-created HAL’s murders were purposeless, while the Uplifted Homo habilis murders were Revolutionary.

One of the themes in Mary Shelly’s novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” (first published 1818) was that when Dr. Frankenstein had the arrogance to “play God” by building his Creature, he turned it into a Monster by refusing to take responsibility for his creation. As that Creature could be seen as an Artificial Intelligence, there parallels with how and why HAL turned murderous.

Critic John Thurman was able to spot several examples in the scenes of the Astronauts interacting with HAL where compositions, edits, lighting and camera motions seem to deliberately echo scenes in Director James Whale’s “Frankenstein” (1931), which is, to-date, the finest adaptation of Shelly’s novel.

Whale’s film includes these lines of dialogue, “It’s alive! In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” But as George Levine notes, “the whole narrative of ‘Frankenstein’ is acted out in the absence of God,” and given the consequences, it’s a “parable of the necessity of limits in an entirely secular world.”

In contrast, during the progressive appearances of the Monoliths, the key action is always humans reaching out to touch it. Though in the third encounter there is no physical contact, David’s act of reaching-out is simply falling through the Star Gate, in the other three, on the African savanna, on the Moon, and in the last moments of David’s human existence, we see a human hand extended to touch the Mystery. Far more explicitly that the apparent “Frankenstein” references, these three gestures evoke Adam reaching out to touch the finger of God as pictured in Michelangelo’s massive fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (painted between 1508 and 1512).

In the novel “2001…” it is made clear that the Aliens are so unthinkably advanced they have transcended their bodies and become pure energy (so more advanced than even the Star Child). In the film, they never make an explicit appearance even though it is obvious they are calling all the shots, and so, the film makes the impression of their Divinity more potently than in the novel. Many Religions, notably the Abrahamic Faiths (meaning that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam), argue that mortal can’t look upon the true face of God.

Not contradicting, but intersecting, that idea was that Kubrick had considered having the Aliens present themselves as Humanoids to David to aide in his understanding his coming Transcendence, akin to God-become-flesh in the form of Jesus Christ. He and Clarke met with Scientist Carl Sagan and asked him how to best depict Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Sagan argued that Alien life forms were unlikely to bear any resemblance to Terrestrial life, and that to do so would introduce "at least an element of falseness" to the film. Kubrick would make several attempts to visualize the Aliens, but near the end of post-production went along the lines Sagan suggested.

(Sagan’s own SF novel, “Contact” (first published in 1985), has several important plot and thematic similarities to “2001…” He chose to go in the opposite way of his own suggestion, his Aliens appeared to the novel’s Travelers in the form of dead loved ones.)

Both Clarke and Kubrick believed (Kubrick’s words here) “that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life”:

“At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. . .”

[Though Kubrick’s words, it’s a nice summary of what we now call “Clarke’s Law”]

“Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we’re really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did interfere in the affairs of man, we could only understand it in terms of God or magic, so far removed would their powers be from our understanding.”

The full impact of the idea that SF was creating a rationalized, or alternate, to traditional, Abrahamic Divinity may have most goofily demonstrated by an un-named audience member in San Francisco (who apparently had indulged some recreational chemicals) ran right through the screen screaming, “It’s God!”

5. Kubrick and Nietzsche

Lemme tell you, Nietzsche wouldn’t have approved.

Nietzsche pondered deeply the idea of Transcendence, but he was no Pantheist, instead an unusually aggressive Atheist. He didn’t want the Abrahamic faiths adapted to a changing world, but vanquished, as he saw anything related to them as a sign of intellectual and emotional weakness.

Much of this film is a Pantheist fable with Christian influences, but equally, it’s an explication of Nietzsche. I must assume the Christian influences come from Clarke, the Nietzsche from Kubrick, and I marvel that they integrate so well.

There are many philosophers I dislike, but they tend to be those I view and posers and or mental midgets; Nietzsche was a legitimately brilliant and deep thinker that I can’t stand. His idea of the self-created Ubermensch, a Superman of the future that would rise above the “slave moralities” of Judaism and Christianity, raise my hackles, as does his embrace of Ecstatic Nihilism:

“Nihilism is ... not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.”

Yes, I get it, Nietzsche wasn’t a proto-Nazi as some claim; though Hitler adored him, the already dead Nietzsche would have thought him a clown. (Did Hitler ever really read Nietzsche? Or was his admiration based on sloppy-Cliff Notes?) But it hard to love someone who demeans all that struggle to make the World a better place without causing the Apocalypse first.

Kubrick was more explicit in how the film embraced Nietzsche than the Christianity-remodeled-by-Pantheism. Nietzsche’s most famous work is the novel, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (first published in four parts between 1883 and 1885) and Composer Richard Strauss adapted it to music in the tone-poem, “Also Spoke Zarathustra” (first performed 1986). Kubrick used excerpts from it three times to celebrate humanity’s Uplifts.

Nietzsche was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of Natural Selection (first described in “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” (1859)). Though Darwin was not an Atheist, his demonstration that the species were not fixed, and that there was an identifiable, mechanical, process in play in their progress from one form to another, has been the back-bone of Atheist thought ever since.

Nietzsche went a few steps farther. He clearly was a “Social Darwinist” (phrase coined by Joseph Fisher in 1877), a notably selfish Economic and Sociological Philosophy which Darwin, himself, held in contempt. It argued that those classes that received the most rewards did so because they were the best competitors in both the Natural and Civilized World, basically that the rich and powerful were so because they deserved it, and this equally true of the poor and exploited. Life was, as Nietzsche said, "a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, strength is the only virtue, and weakness the only fault."

Nietzsche saw humankind proceeding through three stages, primitive man, modern man, and finally Superman. All these are demonstrated in this film with the Homo habilis, Space Faring humans, and finally the Star Child. “[W]hat is the ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be to the superman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."

To ascend above being this laughingstock, man must show, "a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher and farther." That is certainly true in this film, even though our Uplift was brought about by the kind of Divine Intervention that Nietzsche had no use for, man did have to earn it; first by creating the tools that his new intelligence made possible, then traveling to the Moon, and from there to Jupiter.

When Nietzsche spoke of the relationship between the first two stages of man, he used the metaphor based on the characters of Ancient Myth: Dionysus and Apollo.

Dionysus was "the god of wine and revelry, of ascending life, of joy in action, of ecstatic emotion and inspiration, of instinct and adventure and dauntless suffering, the god of song and music and dance and drama." That would be the Homo habilis.

Opposing Dionysus is Apollo, "the god of peace and leisure and repose, of aesthetic emotion and intellectual contemplation, of logical order and philosophic calm, the god of painting and sculpture and epic poetry." That would be the Space-Faring humans.

Though Apollonian man sounds like an appealing ideal to me, Nietzsche was unimpressed. Donald MacGregor (whom I borrowed heavily from for this section) described it well, “peaceful and calm, conquered by democracy, socialism, and religions such as Christianity and Buddhism. All vestiges of instinct in man have been extinguished - leaving man as a pathetic creature, in Nietzsche's eyes.” Kubrick also does not make his Apollonian man particularly appealing.

Achievement of the Superman will be a move back toward a Dionysian humanity, "A return to nature, although it is not really a going back but an ascent - up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness." The Superman will regain man's lost instincts.

Here’s where “2001…” as a Nietzschean allegory gets complicated. The Star Child is the Superman, "the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world." But in the film, the Star Child displays no primitive passions. I do wonder if the deletion of the scene of getting rid of all those Orbital Nuclear Weapons Platforms, a seemingly conventionally virtuous act, was, in part, Kubrick trying to be a bit more Nietzsche. Over-all, “2001…” is Nietzsche without the really dark-stuff.

Another Kubrick SF film, “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), digs deeper into the Dionysus vs Apollo conflict, and celebrates the destruction of all conventional morality unabashedly, with joyous rape and other violence, while at the same time demeaning all attempts to establish a system of either Justice or Morality intended to control, maybe even reform, the human Monsters that stalk our streets (by the way, I hate that movie).

But the Star Child doesn’t completely contradict Nietzsche either, because the emergence of the Superman is supposed to be "the child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning." Kubrick even drew from Nietzsche’s imagery, as the encounters with the first three Monoliths all featured some moment of Solar and/or Planetary alignment, or as Nietzsche put it, "the noon when man stands the middle of his way between beast and superman...a way to a new morning." The emergence of the Star Child required David’s death, a symbol of the death of the concept of Apollonian man. "'I love him who willeth the creation of something beyond himself and then perisheth' said Zarathustra."

Still, the novel’s most famous line, “God is dead!” is cast aside.

6. Critical and Audience Reaction

There’s something that frustrates me about film Critics. They watch more movies than anyone else, so they see how few ever try anything new. I would think that the sheer volume cinema they see would make them hungry for the bold experiment, even one that put demands on them, even one that was imperfect. But no, time-and-again, too many of the films we look back as Classics and Landmarks were initially treated with either indifference to hostility.

The same year as “2001…” there was the example of hostility faced by the ground-breaking SF/Horror “Night of the Living Dead.” We should not be surprised, it was an extreme-low-budget and very gory, one would not be expecting this one to get much love. But Kubrick was already one of the most respected film makers in the world and this was a gigantically-budgeted, prestige release, from a major Studio that was boldly taking risks in a manner that big Studios rarely do. One would think that these circumstances alone would make the Critical community sit up and pay more attention.

Nope.

During the N.Y.C. premiere, approximately 250 people walked out. The L.A. premier was similar, with Actor Rock Hudson not only leaving, but overheard muttering, “What is this bullshit?”

Some critics were utterly savage: Andrew Sarris, "A disaster." Penelope Gilliatt, "A monumentally unimaginative movie." Pauline Kael, "A major disappointment." Renata Adler, "Incredibly boring." Stanley Kauffmann called it a, “major disappointment.” John Simon, “A regrettable failure…a shaggy God story."

Kauffmann and Simon’s observations are especially notable because Kauffmann was a fan of both Clarke and Kubrick, and Simon displayed that he had a familiarity with some of the lingo specific to SF criticism (“a shaggy God story”). Surprisingly, within the SF community, which always complained about their literature being ghettoized, there was not much more love to be found. Notably, SF Novelist and Critic Lester del Rey gave a withering review:

“Almost half the audience had left by intermission, and most of us who stayed did so from curiosity and to complete our reviews…they gave us dullness and confusion…This isn't a normal science-fiction movie at all, you see. It's the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism. The New Thing advocates were exulting over it as a mind-blowing experience. It takes very little to blow some minds. But for the rest of us, it's a disaster.”

It had its defenders of course. At the top of this essay I quoted a review by SF Novelist and Critic Samuel R. Delany which was written as a reaction to del Rey’s. Delany went on to make this observation, “critics [were] completely at a loss over what to do with a film so blatantly unconcerned with the nineteenth century problems of human mistakes grown from the passions - rather than the intellect, the spirit, or defects in other sensibilities.”

The Hollywood Reporter gave it a full-page rave review, calling it “a projection as unreal and as convincing as the awesome realities of present-day NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab programs.” Another early admirer of this film was the already-quoted Roger Ebert, who, interestingly, was also an early defender of “Night of the Living Dead.”

After “Paths of Glory” (1957), Kubrick’s films were more likely to be hailed than condemned, but his relationship with the critic establishment was always testy. Here, he called them “dogmatically atheistic and materialistic and earthbound.” But in addition to being annoyed, he did have some very interesting points to make about the inevitability of the whole Critical Institution coming up short (what follows is from more than one interview, concerning more than just this film, spread over decades, and the order of paragraphs was rearranged for my own convenance):

“To see a film once and write a review is an absurdity, Yet, very few critics ever see a film twice or write about films from a leisurely, thoughtful perspective. The reviews that distinguish most critics, unfortunately, are those slambang pans which are easy to write and fun to write and absolutely useless. There's not much in a critic showing off how clever he is at writing silly, supercilious gags about something he hates.

"I wouldn't like to have to write an appreciation of a movie that I liked, because I think it's so elusive, and the things that critics are forced to do – make connections and conceptualizations of it – seem at best minor, and at worst fairly irrelevant to what seems almost inexpressibly beautiful about the movie.”

Regarding the repeated complaints that his films seem to be made with an emotional detachment, "I don't even think that's a particularly valid comment. It's more in the department that those normal signals – ingratiating and reassuring signals that most films make sure they give, and which are usually false – are not in [my] films.

“The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It's time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play. Too many people over thirty are still word-oriented rather than picture-oriented.

“So, you have the problem that some people are only listening and not really paying attention with their eyes. Film is not theater -- and until that basic lesson is learned I'm afraid we're going to be shackled to the past and miss some of the greatest potentialities of the medium.

“Young people, on the other hand, who are more visually oriented due to their new television environment, had no such problems. Kids all know we went to the moon. When you ask how they know they say, ‘Because we saw it.’

Kubrick definitely hit-the-nail on the head when he observed that the under-thirty crowd was his most receptive audience. What his was too shy to say was that this film, with its psychedelic imagery, drawn-out meditative sequences, and the big sound of its Classical music soundtrack, was unabashedly embraced by the Drug Culture. It wasn’t just the guy in San Francisco who ran through the screen, all across the USA it became a running joke that the theaters showing “2001…” where heavy with the aroma of marijuana.

Universal responded to this by working it into their advertising campaign: early posters displayed the huge, Near-Orbit Space Station, later ones have the close up of David’s color-manipulated eye during the Star Gate sequence and added a new tag-line, “The Ultimate Trip.”

Critic Kauffmanngot more-than-average negative mail regarding his hostile review of the film, enough so that he felt obligated to respond in print. In fairness, he was respectful to most of the Critics-of-the-Critic, but his best but was snarky, “One last point. Some have said that this picture cannot be truly appreciated unless one is high on pot. I assume that pot might make it more enjoyable, but then pot would also improve ‘Dr. Dolittle’ [1967].”

Before the year was out, the Critical community did an about-face of the film, now, unexpectedly, a hit (the $10.5 million budget brought in $56.7 million domestically). It’s not that rare for a film to be re-accessed in this way, but rare-ish for it to be re-accessed so quickly. Like Mel Brook’s initially vilified “The Producers” (1967), room was made for the orphan of the establishment on Oscar night. Many still grumble that “2001…” wasn’t Nominated for Best Picture, but received five other major Nominations, and won in one of those Categories. The Nominations were Best Director, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Story and Screenplay, and the Win was Best Visual Effects.

It deserved at least one more major Nomination, but it was the conservative and slow-moving Academy’s own fault that there wasn’t yet a Best Makeup Category, and wouldn’t be for another twelve-years. That same year’s “Planet of the Apes” was given a Special Honorary Oscar for John Chambers' convincing ape make-up, but “2001…” first episode contained ape make-up of similar achievement.

The film’s surprise appeal commercial was confirmed three years later when it became obvious that Hollywood's Cinerama Dome developed a business plan of reviving ‘2001…’ every time a new booking under-performed.

John Powers said it best, “Critical consensus is, indeed, a glorified grouping, the like-minded monopolizing the discussion in deference to everyone else's ideas. But sometimes, mob mentality is right. It creates the context a single voice cannot manage. In the case of ‘2001,’ calls of its place among the best films ever are not unqualified. If you don't see it now, just give it time. You'll get it—eventually.”

8. FX and Production Design

The film confused critics badly when first released, but all agreed on the singular achievement of its FX, still impressive today. In retrospect, the real achievement was mostly not use of the most up-to-date technology, but time and craftsmanship, because the techniques used in the first three episodes were, mostly, not especially new.

Kubrick, a perfectionist allowed to proceed without much interference, hired an army of technicians who created almost everything "in-camera," meaning that the FX were created on the set, and what was on the original film negative was what we later saw in the theaters. The reason for this hands-on approach was to avoid the degradation of the image through repeated duplicating, something evident in most films that relied on chroma-key and travelling matte techniques. It worked stupendously, but at the cost of two years' time and enormous money. There were 205 FX shots in the film and of the $10.5 million total budget, $6.5 million was spent on sets, models, props and FX photography. After his role was completed, Actor Dullea had completed another film (“The Fox” (1967)) and did a Broadway play (“Dr Cook’s Garden” (also 1967)) before “2001…” was released.

In 1964, Petro Vlahos won an Oscar for refining the blue screen process (one of the most common chroma-key techniques) for a traveling matt in the film “Mary Poppins.” After then, few other than Kubrick and Gerry Anderson (famous for the TV series “Space 1999” (first aired in 1975)) were willing to do the hard work of in-camera Space scenes anymore. After the triumph of “Star Wars” (1977) many of the techniques used in this film became undeniably obsolete.

So, here I must bring up Italian Writer/Director Margheriti again. Even before 1964, the kind of in-camera effects Kubrick relied upon were usually associated with the lowest of low-budget films, but Margheriti relied on them for his six landmark Space Opera’s (released between 1960 and 1967). They are pretty shabby-looking today, and not top-shelf even when first released, but there’s no escaping he did miracles on a shoe-string. The miniatures he created, the camera motions he carefully choregraphed, and remarkably good zero-gravity simulations, all should’ve been well-beyond his budgetary reach. Kubrick had seen at least some of these films, and was impressed, and was similarly impressed with the color and compositions of the cheesy, low-budget (but not as low as a Margheriti) Japanese Space Opera, “Warning from Space” (1956), which also relied on the same in-camera techniques. Meanwhile, Kubrick was dissatisfied with the look of Producer George Pal’s big-budget “Conquest of Space” (1955), which has some terrible chroma-key work in it. So, Kubrick chose to apply more money to the perceived-as-cheap methods, and in doing so, achieved more than anyone had done before.

Kubrick even toyed with the idea of hiring Margheriti as FX Supervisor, but ultimately tapped a young Douglas Trumbull, now honored as one of the greatest FX men who ever lived. I can’t help but wonder what Margheriti, a Master of turning a sow’s ear into something aspiring to be a silk purse, would’ve done, but likely it was all for the best. Margheriti had a fine career in low-budget cinema, and perhaps would’ve been over-his-head if he went from rags to riches so abruptly. Trumbull, on the other hand, slowly worked his way up through the ranks during this production, he wasn’t the boss when he was hired, but he was when the movie wrapped.

As some of the older techniques applied in “2001…” were adapted, innovations emerged. One of the oldest FX techniques is rear-projection, having the cast in the fore-ground while the background is a film playing behind them, and then they are filmed together, like when human’s observe dinosaurs fighting in “King Kong” (1933) and all are in-frame at the same time. These techniques, unfortunately, encourages another version of image degradation through duplication.

Kubrick pioneered the use of the most up-to-date variation, front-projection with retroreflective matting, for the backdrops in the African savanna and Moon surface. This was necessary because every frame of film (except a very short bit where the Homo habilis figure out how to use weapons) was filmed indoors, and both the savanna and the Moon surface would’ve required impossibly large sets. The technique was mostly associated with still photography prior to “2001…” and these were the largest sets it had ever been applied to.

The creation of illusion Artificial Gravity, a major technological challenge in real-Science that SF films typically ignore, involved the Space Ship discovery having a continuously rotating centrifuge in the Crew area (on smaller Ships, people were held to the floor with Velcro slippers). To visualize this idea, Kubrick had a 30-ton rotating Ferris Wheel built by Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group at a cost of $750,000. The set was 38 feet in diameter and 10 feet wide, and the actor at the bottom of the wheel would jog in place, creating the illusion that he was moving around it, instead of it moving around him.

One really important technological advancement in “2001…” is that it was one of the early films designed for Cinerama, and really should be seen in the 70mm wide-screen format. The work by Cinematographers Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott’s in Super Panavision-Metrocolor and it is breathe-taking. It is likely the massive-ness of the canvas Kubrick was painting-on demanded that he turn to the laborious in-camera effects. Kubrick’s “miniatures” were in fact huge, one of the Discovery models was 54-feet-long, and much of the camera work in the FX shots was actually machine controlled, so the primitive techniques were, at the same time, weirdly cutting-edge. Trumbull tells an amusing story where Kubrick reached out to IBM to make an algorithm to help with the production process. “They analyzed it for two weeks and said, ‘There’s no way, Stanley. There’s too many things changing every day.’”

Though the first three episodes represented a new realizations of old techniques, the fourth episode, specifically the journey through the Star Gate, represented applications of wholly new technologies. Trumbull again:

“For the psychedelic sequence at the end … we had to invent a whole new type of camera, the Slit Scan, a giant machine nearly 20x30ft. It ran for 24 hours a day, taking photographs of 15ft-tall artworks, backlit and full of patterns and coloured gels. These were turned into controlled blurs – like if you leave a camera shutter open while shooting cars at night, you get streaks of light. A single frame of film took four minutes to produce, so the Stargate sequence took months and months.”

This aspect of the FX became nicknamed, “The Manhattan Project by the crew. “I was hired for nine months, but this turned out to be two and a half years. Periodically, the studio would get upset at all the delays, but Kubrick did a masterful job of protecting the crew from the pressures.”

Though generally not receiving the credit they deserve, Production Designers Tony Masters, Harry Lange and Ernie Archer gave us a Future World that seemed fully lived-in by making some very interesting choices.

Throughout the film are various artifacts not created by the film’s FX and Production Design teams, but chosen from the most up-to-date creations of top Commercial Designers throughout the world. Danish designer Arne Jacobsen created the cutlery. The reception area of Space Station V area featured a slightly modified George Nelson Action Office desk from Herman Miller's 1964 "Action Office" series. The pedestal tables were created by Eero Saarinen in 1956. The Djinn chairs were from Olivier Mourgue and he has used the connection to “2001…” in his advertising, frames from the film still appear on his website.

The completeness of the design of the film extended even the diverse fonts for the abundance of words and numbers that appear in nearly every set but were generally not intended to be read by the audience. There was extensive use of Eurostile Bold Extended, Futura and other sans serif typefaces. Computer screens displayed high resolution fonts, color and graphics that were far in advance of real-world Computers when the film was made.

Planet Earth is never visited during the film, though images of life on Earth do appear at different points on TV screens. An interesting detail worked in is that though the Scientists and Astronauts at the center of the story all wear futuristic attire, even when dressed casually, the Earth-bound humans are wearing then-contemporary clothing.

“Fantastic Voyage” (1966), with a budget of $5.1 million, was probably the most expensive SF film made prior to “2001…” and its miniatures and production art were used in a traveling exhibit as part of the movie’s marketing. Some of the crew wanted do the same here, but Kubrick nixed that idea, believing it would remove some of the film’s mystery. In fact, he ordered almost all the sets, props, miniatures, and production blueprints destroyed, because he didn’t want them reused in cheaper films as happened in the case of “Forbidden Planet” (1956). The Aries 1B model did survive though, Kubrick offered it to a schoolteacher was tutoring his daughter.

All reactions:

3Donna Welch-Sword, Susan Jodoin and 1 other