#2001 a space odyssey space station movie#

#2001 a space odyssey space station movie#

The opening sequence where the camera slowly pans past a huge and fantastically detailed space ship has become a movie cliché, creating a reality far beyond the plastic models hanging from strings that characterized the early Star Trek episodes. While Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek had already premiered on TV in 1966, 2001 was the first high production-value space odyssey. Today, it is twenty-two years after the events predicted in the film, which makes me, from the perspective of the year 1968, not just old but a creature of even more distant future._STEADY_PAYWALL_

The prospect of colonizing space opened up a huge frontier of hope and possibility. The actual moon landing would occur the year following the film, which added to the widespread feeling that technology was advancing at a miraculous pace. In those days, science fiction could imagine that space travel would have become routine by that date, with human beings living on the moon and undertaking manned voyages to Jupiter. When Kubrick’s film came out, the year 2001 was thirty-three years in the future, which seemed incredibly far away. I watched it then though it has been discussed endlessly ever since, I hadn’t sat through it again until just recently.

The film first appeared in 1968, when I was sixteen and just entering high school. I recently watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey which was being streamed on one of the services to which I subscribe.