Tomorrow, 2001: A Space Odyssey will be forty years old. April 6, 1968 certainly doesn’t seem like forty years ago.
It’s amazing to me, not in a good way, that a film four decades old is still the most accurate in terms of the science presented. It’s also one hell of a messed up story toward the end, but 2001 has always been more an experience than a movie.
Indeed, calling it a ‘movie’ seems to be a matter of mislabelling it entirely. Compared to just about any other movie you’re likely to see, even the good ones, the only common attributes are that they were shot with a camera. For some films, this implies more of a relationship than is apparent on the screen.
The Pan-Am spaceplane docking sequence set to the music of the Blue Danube is one of the greatest sequences in all of film history.
Seeing this film in 2008 makes me ask where all the wonder has gone, both in film and in society at large. A lot has changed in forty years, and not all of it for the better.