For the second film it HAD to be 2001. First is the obvious; 2001 comes after 2000, but secondly, being classy sophisticates, it couldn’t JUST be fun campy movies, it had to also include slow burning, arty think pieces.

The added bonus is that 2001 is seriously one of my all time favorite movies as I really got into as a kid, even reading the novelization which weirdly was written in conjunction with the movie not really before or after and also includes plot details that are completely absent or changed from the movie, but I get it, Saturn is hard to make look good in a movie in 1969 or something. Whatever.

So the film stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain, and Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher, arguably the most important character in cinema history as he literally jumped mankind a few notches up food chain during his life.

The gist of the story is some aliens/god/something-along-those-lines leaves this pretty cool piece of modern art on planet Earth to allow the most advanced species to evolve into humanity by bestowing the knowledge of tool/weapon usage on a tribe of less evolved man. All while playing Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, which I guess if you’re going to have a song that is that triumphant it would be the one you’d want while you jumped out of the middle part of the food chain.

Flash forward to the distant year of what I presume it 1999 or 2001… It depends, because if it’s 2001 then the final act takes place in 2003. Anyway, not important, but what IS important is another one of those pieces of modern art is found intentionally buried on the moon. INTENTIONALLY BURIED!!! So naturally the first thing the scientists who find it do is take a selfie with it.

Not into having it’s picture taken without it’s permission, the modern art sends an annoying signal to Jupiter so we flash forward again to what I now presume is 2001 and 2 awake astronauts along with 3 frozen ones and a sentient computer are hanging out in a sperm shaped tube heading to Jupiter to check out something that apparently we couldn’t just send a probe to do. Whatever, I’m getting mired in bad details… So to sum up the next hour succinctly: The awake crew are bored… A LOT, the computer, HAL 9000, knows why they’re going to Jupiter, but apparently no one else does so he can’t really handle the truth and basically decides to kill everyone on board the sperm ship because it’s convinced they’ll kill him first… Ok… so then after Keir Dullea turns the computer off (seriously, an appliance just tried to kill him) he finds out why he’s going to Jupiter in a pretty janky VHS video. Turns out there is a GIANT piece of modern art hanging out in space orbiting Jupiter so of course he decides to go check it out first hand and gets sucked inside where we, the audience, are treated to one of those psychedelic bullshit scenes that were present in every movie from 1968 to 1970.

Where at the end of it suddenly our intrepid hero ends up in a human zoo aging rapidly before our very eyes like he drank from the wrong grail or something. Anyway, he suddenly becomes a fetus of more evolved man and Also Sprach Zarathustra plays again so I guess we’re left to assume he’s accomplished something akin to Moonwatcher.

What They Got Right:

• Tablets
• Selfies
• Information Technology
• Design
• Seatback TVs
• Skype
• Space Stations
• Tetherless Space Walks

Seriously, the future tech portrayed in this movies is bananas. They got so much right, just really missing on the “when” more than anything. We didn’t have iPads in 2001 but shortly thereafter and while the Internation Space Station isn’t nearly as grandiose as the “Wheel” space station in 2001, it is still a thing. Really you could argue that nearly everything was predicted accurately, just not by 2001. A few important notes:

The design of everything is amazing. It leans pretty heavily on mid century modernism, but it just looks amazing and more impressively; functional. Everything looks like it has a purpose and the rotating collar of the ship to produce gravity? Wow.

Some things really were just spot on though, particularly in concept, like tetherless space walks. Maybe this seems like an obvious one to some, but really that was SO forward thinking. Things like the Jetsons predicted Skype more or less, but it’s execution felt pretty right on (although the price of the skype call was $1.70 was meant to look like an expensive call, it seems cheap in actuality) along with the seatback TVs in the Pan Am shuttle.

The importance of information technology is highlighted incredibly well too. Aside from the obvious reliance on HAL 9000 to run the ship and some mundane tasks, the astronauts are constantly working in an environment complete dependent on information technology. Again, that might seem obvious now, but in 1969, it was practically unheard of. One of the themes in the movie, the inability to escape technology (i.e. HAL reads the astronauts lips) is also well noted as we, in current times, have to navigate a technology world that relies on analytics to (accurately) predict our behavior. Well done Kubrick!

What They Got Wrong:

• Moon bases
• Pan Am’s existence
• Technology was TOO advanced
• 18 months to get to Jupiter

The got wrong list really hinges more on just the predictions being a bit too early or WAY too early in some cases. Maybe if the movie were 3001, then maybe, but there are no moon bases, space tourism is AT BEST in it’s infancy and it takes 6 years to get to Jupiter, not 18 months. Where many movies fail is in style and while there are some overly retro things happening, the style just seems conservative, not anachronistic, so kudos. They did still think Pan Am was going to be a thing. Wow, wait until we get to Blade Runner for all the defunct brands.

There are a million themes in 2001 that are worthy of discussion, but there are countless posts about that all over the internet. I mean really, it’s such a fantastic movie overall, however, I’m going to poke a few holes because I feel like:

First off, what astronaut just say’s “Sure I’ll go to Jupiter.” Without finding out what they’ll be doing there. Also, why does this sign exist?

Also, aren’t there better ways to study the piece of art WITHOUT flying into it? I understand we had to get somewhere else in the movie, but this seemed pretty illogical. Frankly, if the movie has a glaring flaw it is in it’s own occasional lack of logic, but whatever, it’s a movie, not a documentary.

quote of the night: “Seriously, if we’re going to make a statue of anyone, it should be that guy (Moon Watcher). He did more for humanity than literally anyone.”

for context, this was during a time people were cancel culturing statues of people in the US.