First Contact Friday #0001
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Film
Welcome to the first ever BTOR’s First Contact Friday. Every week I'm going to point you at one science fiction film, novel, or show worth your time; something classic, something overlooked, or something that just deserves more people talking about it. Just a genuine recommendation and a reason to actually watch or read it. I am going to try an not bring up major franchises, so no Star Wars, no Star Trek, no Dune. Just pure science fiction goodness.
For the first one, it felt right to call out one of the best, if not the best, science fiction films of all time. Now this may seem contradictory to the whole “no major franchise or major popular story” rule that I mentioned a minute ago. However, I feel this is a rightful first recommendation, and the movie doesn’t get much love nowadays. It almost feels like it is a fringe science fiction movie except to those hardcore film lovers. This week we are talking 2001!
Why you should watch it this weekend
If you have ever loved science fiction in any form, there is a real chance that something you love traces directly back to this film. The match cut from a bone to a spacecraft. The eerie silence of space. The idea of an AI that reasons its way into something unspeakable. Stanley Kubrick put all of it on screen in 1968 and the rest of the genre has been living in that shadow ever since.
If you are looking for an action-packed, Michael Bay type of film, you are not going to find it here. Instead, you are going to find a slow-churned artistic masterpiece that will feel like it is moving at a fairly slow pace for the first twenty minutes. Some people will find this movie boring. Those people will be wrong. Give it a few minutes and you will be in a trance of space age science fiction constructed by a perfectionist only to be brought out by the credits screen.
2001 also features one of the most iconic movie villians of all-time, HAL 9000. HAL is still the gold standard for AI done right in fiction. He does not go evil. He does not glitch. He is given two instructions that cannot both be followed and he makes a decision, but that is what makes HAL so scary. Many of the AI stories you have read or watched since owes something to how Kubrick framed that problem.
The movie also is genuinely beautiful. The space sequences were so accurate that NASA engineers who consulted on the film said it was closer to reality than anything else made before or since. Kubrick hired a special effects team years before the shoot just to figure out how to do it. The result holds up better than films made thirty years later with ten times the budget.
My Take
I think this film rewards patience in a way almost nothing else does. The ending is genuinely strange and Kubrick never explained it, which used to frustrate me and now feels like the whole point. Plus, I’ve recently read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, and it does a great job explaining the ending. It is a film that trusts you to sit with something you do not fully understand, and that is rarer than it should be.
There are nights when you want to feel small in a good way. When you want to stare at something and remember that the universe does not owe us an explanation. Those are 2001 nights. This weekend feels like one.