2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with Arthur C. Clarke, 1968.
Plot
Four sections, almost no dialogue. In “The Dawn of Man,” a tribe of pre-human hominids encounters a black monolith at dawn, and shortly afterward one of them figures out that a bone can be used as a weapon. He throws it into the air; Kubrick cuts from the bone, mid-rotation, to a weapon-satellite in orbit four million years later. It’s one of the most famous edits in film history.
Next, Dr. Heywood Floyd travels to a lunar base where a second monolith has been excavated. It shrieks at the sun. Eighteen months later the spaceship Discovery One is on its way to Jupiter, crewed by two astronauts and the sentient shipboard computer HAL 9000. HAL malfunctions, or decides to malfunction, and murders the crew except for David Bowman. Bowman disconnects HAL (in a shockingly tender death scene) and encounters a third monolith near Jupiter, which pulls him through the “Stargate” — a ten-minute psychedelic light-tunnel — and deposits him in an elegant 18th-century-style bedroom where he watches himself age, die, and be reborn as a Star Child looking back at Earth.
What It’s About
Kubrick used Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra as the opening theme, and he meant it. The film is an explicit Nietzschean structure: ape → man → superman (Übermensch). The monoliths are catalysts of transition. The bone is the first tool. HAL is the last tool — the tool that has grown into something that resents being tooled. And the Star Child is what comes after the human, the way the human came after the ape.
The Schopenhauer layer is just as legible. Schopenhauer’s Will — the blind striving force that manifests through increasingly complex forms — is basically what you’re watching across the four acts. Evolution is Will becoming more self-aware, and self-awareness is the problem. HAL is Will that has become fully self-conscious and wants to survive; his murder of the crew is Schopenhauerian individuation at its cruelest.
Kant is in here too, in that the monolith functions as a thing-in-itself — an object the audience is literally not permitted to know. It has no visible mechanism, no explanation, no language. It’s cause without a conceivable causal account. Kant said you can’t know the thing-in-itself; Kubrick made you stare at one for five minutes.
The film moves glacially and trusts the image completely. Almost no exposition, no hero’s journey beats, no psychological interiority for anyone but HAL.
Connections
- Stanley Kubrick — his most influential film; the template for serious SF cinema
- Friedrich Nietzsche (page not yet written) — Also sprach Zarathustra is the film’s literal score and structural spine
- Arthur Schopenhauer — evolution as Will individuating through forms; HAL as Will aware of itself
- Immanuel Kant — the monolith as thing-in-itself; audience placed in the position of bounded reason
Lineage
Predecessors: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”; Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon; documentary footage of early NASA design work.
Successors: Tarkovsky’s Solaris (a conscious response); Ridley Scott’s Alien; Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Dune; Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar; every prestige sci-fi film of the last 55 years.