Slashdot Mirror
The 50th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the original release of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," a seminal film in motion picture history and one that has awed millions over the years. Kubrick's title has often been credited with paving the way for science-fiction films that took a realistic approach to depicting the future. Even as "2001" has grown to become one of the most iconic movies of all time, the reception it received when it originally premiered wasn't good. An excerpt: The film's previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film's iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick's panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.
Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day's reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie "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." And yet that afternoon, a long line -- comprised predominantly of younger people -- extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee. The Cannes Film Festival will celebrate the 50th anniversary of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the world premiere of an unrestored 70mm print, introduced by Christopher Nolan. The event is set for May 12 as part of the Cannes Classics program. The screening will also be attended by members of Kubrick's family, including his daughter Katharina Kubrick and his longtime producing partner and brother-in-law Jan Harlan.
Further reading: Why 2001: A Space Odyssey's mystery endures, 50 years on (CNET); 50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- how Kubrick's sci-fi 'changed the very form of cinema' (The Guardian); The story of a voice: HAL in '2001' wasn't always so eerily calm (The New York Times); and The most intriguing theories about "2001: A Space Odyssey" (io9); and Behind the scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the strangest blockbuster in Hollywood history (Vanity Fair).
Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day's reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie "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." And yet that afternoon, a long line -- comprised predominantly of younger people -- extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee. The Cannes Film Festival will celebrate the 50th anniversary of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the world premiere of an unrestored 70mm print, introduced by Christopher Nolan. The event is set for May 12 as part of the Cannes Classics program. The screening will also be attended by members of Kubrick's family, including his daughter Katharina Kubrick and his longtime producing partner and brother-in-law Jan Harlan.
Further reading: Why 2001: A Space Odyssey's mystery endures, 50 years on (CNET); 50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- how Kubrick's sci-fi 'changed the very form of cinema' (The Guardian); The story of a voice: HAL in '2001' wasn't always so eerily calm (The New York Times); and The most intriguing theories about "2001: A Space Odyssey" (io9); and Behind the scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the strangest blockbuster in Hollywood history (Vanity Fair).
Any non-paywalled links?
which were borrowed heavily from for the famous Alien soundtrack.
...The OP wrote "borrowed from for...", meaning that musical constructs were borrowed from 2001 for the Alien soundtrack.
Avoiding phrases like "from for" is exactly why you should avoid using passive voice construction.
Active voice: "The famous Alien soundtrack borrowed heavily from the 2001 soundtrack." Clear, concise, and doesn't contain "from for".
Often times there is a book and then a movie is based on the book. Owing to difference in narrative style, even a wordy movie script is much shorter in length than most novels, the movie script writers and director have to find a different way to express the book. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail (cough, Dune, cough).
With 2001, the movie came first and the book was either co-written or came shortly later. It is also my understanding that the movie storyline was really Stanley Kubrick's creative product with the Clarke collaborating or advising, and Kubrick did not want to explain everything. He wanted the aliens to be a confounding mystery rather than being the cheesy guy-in-a-rubber-suit from Lost in Space or even from Star Trek.
Physicist Freeman Dyson explains this in one of his popular books. Dyson was interviewed as a "scientific authority on the possibility of contact with aliens and what that could be like and how this could differ from the typical science fiction movie." He told about how they filmed him using the IBM computer in the studio's accounting department as a movie prop, which they had to power down because its cooling system was making too much noise for the audio technicians to get a clean recording of the Dyson interview, which was a big hassle to the business office of the studio trying to get their payroll checks printed on time. Dyson also explained that his "part" in 2001 ended up on the cutting room floor, Dyson explained that Kubrick wanted the aliens to be a mystery and decided to do without a "scientific authority on the possibility of contact with aliens . . . and how this could differ from the typical science fiction movie" and let the visual imagery tell the tale. Dyson also writes that he agreed with Kubrick even if that meant that he Dyson couldn't be in the movie; Dyson argues that not explaining the aliens made 2001 a better movie because Dyson believes that our first contact with aliens will be bizarre beyond any sci-fi imagining of it.
Whereas Kubrick had a reputation for relying on the visuals to move his story forward, Clarke had a reputation in his novels for explaining everything beyond recognition. So yes, the book differs from the movie, famously having Discovery 1's continue to Saturn rather than stop at Jupiter, where famous special effects expert Douglas Trumbull didn't feel confident he could "do" Saturn's rings until later when he worked on Silent Running. So the movie only guesses at HAL's breakdown whereas the book explains that HAL never properly learned how to lie in protection of the secret regarding the Monolith and the nature of the Discovery 1 mission, which is a Star Trek trope that a computer can be messed up when Kirk reasons with it and catches it in a logical contradiction. Kubrick just shows the Star Child gazing over the Earth, playing Thus Spoke Zarathustra that is supposed to build on Nietzsche's notions of a Super Man as a next step in human evolution. Clarke goes into details regarding what the Star Child is and how the Star Child willed a premature detonation of the orbiting atomic weapons that gave the people of Earth quite a fright regarding the manner in which they were delivered from a potential world-ending war. Clarke needed the Star Child to have a purpose whereas Kubrick wanted to appeal to the viewers' imaginations.
Whether 2001 is a good movie or not, it certainly sparks a lot of geek discussion, and there hasn't been anything like it since despite attempts to imitate -- consider Mission to Mars being rendered a silly movie by having the aliens explain themselves to tie up all the loose ends rather than leaving loose ends as in 2001. .