I think that Kubrick’s special effects are holding up fairly well, but I do not think the lack of character development was ever a good idea. Perhaps the best developed character is the inventor of the club. I had to read the book in order to understand most of the rest of the movie, which does not speak well of the screenplay.

Leonov inspired the Earth Force ships from Babylon 5.

They NAILED Large Language Models. It is INSANE to me how the most unrealistic feature of the movie came true literally and exactly as they had it.

Those were really the days of “space shots” – After the launch, they didn’t know if it made orbit until the ground station somewhere near Africa picked up the signal.

On every other level, there has always been room for thoughtful criticism of 2001 as a film. I certainly grok the idea that the issues critics have identified ever since 1968 become more apparent on repeated viewings, once you get past the *beauty* of the thing.

All: My criticism of “2001” is entirely related to film-making. The film is simply not that good, in terms of story or character development. It has its moments, and yes, as Richard M notes, it is in many ways a tone poem. It however has not aged well, and that has nothing to do with how well or poorly it predicted the future.

Note that NASA plays a very small part in the film. Kubrick envisioned the future being built in space by private enterprise. He was right, but it didn’t happen by 2001 because America decided in the last half of the 20th century to adopt a top-down government approach. Thus, in 2001 there were no big circular space stations, no lunar bases, no routine commercial flights into space with stewardesses.

That is coming now however. The future is very bright for those who are young now.

I still think a lot of 2001 holds up very well, but it’s so unconventional as a dramatic property that it’s always been a challenge to critique. And this only intensifies once the rush of that first experience ebbs and you start thinking about what it’s actually doing — and not doing. It can hardly be said to be *dramatic* at all, because it doesn’t have a conventional plot as we normally understand it, and its characters are so undeveloped that they hardly even matter. There’s barely 5,000 words of script dialogue. It’s almost more of a tone poem.

I often wonder if its real fate is at risk for being a historical road marker — more important for how it changed the medium and the genre than its actual ability to engage in the way it was intended. I think about how how young Gen Z friends I know think about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner when they first see them. They can appreciate the craft and beauty, but they do not have the impact they originally did; these films’ fingerprints are all over so much cinematic work (all of ’em with even greater technology at their disposal) in the years since that it’s hard to appreciate the great leap they made. And maybe it’s easier for them to notice the weak or — shall I say — underdeveloped aspects.

But 2001 certainly is important in that way: It was what made *serious* science fiction possible, thanks to its major advances in film-making craft, its realism, and the big ideas it tried to engage. But maybe when a door is opened, it’s what lies in the room beyond that ends up being more interesting than the door itself.

This is not surprising. For its length, it is one of the slowest films ever released. The short film Bambi Meets Godzilla, released a year later, is slower and has almost as much dialog and plot.

Director Sir Alfred Hitchcock (although he was knighted after making his last film) sometimes used slow pacing and lack of action to help build suspense, such as the five minutes before his famous biplane scene. However, after the Odyssey and Bambi films, directors have been reluctant to allow a slow pace in their films, cutting out all kinds of scenes and acting performances for pacing reasons.

Another thing that ages Odyssey is the small amount of progress we, in reality, made in space after man first walked on the Moon. We will have to see how well commercial space fares thirty years after it gets its own first man on the Moon.

Who was it here on BTB that, a couple of weeks ago, pointed out that Odyssey imagined a commercialized space industry? It looks like that film got that concept correct. Government space: Odyssey pacing. Commercial space: Casablanca pacing.

It’s April 9.

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/4/nomination-hearing_66_2

“U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, will convene a nominations hearing for Jared Isaacman, nominee to be Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Olivia Trusty, nominee to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission, at 10:00 AM EST on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. ”

This is actually a little sooner than I expected.