After we have seen a stewardess walk up a wall and across the ceiling early in the film, we no longer question similar amazements and accept Kubrick’s new world without question. The credibility of the special effects established, we can suspend disbelief, to use a justifiable cliche, and revel in the beauty and imagination of Kubrick/Clarke’s space.
With 2001, we learned the real depth and mass of space, and discovered that “The Ultimate Trip” was going to be a cold, lonely one—an adventure more daunting to the psyche than the body.
Kubrick’s original plan was to open 2001 with a ten-minute prologue (35mm film, black and white) — edited interviews on extraterrestrial possibilities with experts on space, theology, chemistry, biology, astronomy.
Kubrick says that he decided after the first screening of 2001 for M-G-M executives, in Culver City, California, that it wasn’t a good idea to open 2001 with a prologue, and it was eliminated immediately.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took five years and $10 million to make, and it’s easy to see where the time and the money have gone. It’s less easy to understand how, for five years, Kubrick managed to concentrate on his ingenuity and ignore his talent.
Andrew Sarris famously panned Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, then reversed himself after seeing it under the influence.
Dilys Powell reviews ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ by Stanley Kubrick
In the following essay, DeBellis asserts that John Updike’s references to 2001: A Space Odyssey in Rabbit Redux underline the major thematic concerns in the novel.
Paul Schrader reviews Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Published in ‘Spectacle’, September 13, 1968
Pauline Kael’s infamous review of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, where she referred to the movie as “trash masquerading as art” and “monumentally unimaginative.”
2001: A Space Odyssey, a film in which infinite care, intelligence, patience, imagination and Cinerama have been devoted to what looks like the apotheosis of the fantasy of a precocious, early nineteen-fifties city boy.
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