![]() Three of the five astronauts are in suspended animation but one of the two left on duty go out to retrieve the AE-35. HAL detects a malfunction in the AE-35, a piece of equipment vital to maintaining contact with the earth. If you have seen the film or read the book the rest of the story will be familiar. If Clarke is telling the truth this is a fine example of finding connections where none exist. Clarke explains that HAL was intended to stand for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer but urban mythology has it that its name derives from selecting the previous letters in the sequence IBM i.e. HAL 9000 was not only the brain that controlled the ship, but intelligent enough to be considered the sixth crew member. The main action of both the film and the book concern a mission to Saturn. The attraction of the film was its presentation of a confident and well developed technology and HAL was a prime example. The movie was very impressionistic, so much so that many viewers must have been left wondering what the story, let alone the message, was. The opening scene certainly is - apes discovering that a bone can be a weapon or a tool to the opening fanfare from the tone poem Also sprach Zarathrustra. The image of a gently rotating space station wheel to the music of a Strauss waltz is now almost a cliché. ![]() It was visually stunning with special effects that are impressive even today. The movie was released in the spring of 1968, before the books' publication, and not only was it an immediate success it also created an excitement about the prospect of space travel. From our perspective 2001 has come and gone and now the gap between the film’s imaginary world and ours seems all too great. Fortunately in the end its name settled down to "2001: A Space Odyssey".Īt the time 2001 seemed far enough away for them not to be made ridiculous by the furious pace of real technological development but not so far ahead that it seemed too distant to the audience. It was enough for Kubrick to get backing from MGM and Cinerama for a film to be called "Journey beyond the stars" or perhaps "How the solar system was won". In fact the first version of the novel was very much a rough draft of about two thirds of the final book and it stopped before the conclusion. Conception of an OdysseyĬlarke wrote the novel first, talking it over with Kubrick all the while and then the pair of them derived the screenplay. This, and a couple of other stories, were to form the basis of the film. It described the discovery of an alien artifact on the moon, a kind of burglar alarm waiting to be set of by mankind’s presence. ![]() It wasn’t even publish but he still thought it a good idea. Clarke had written a short story called “The Sentinel” in 1948 for a BBC Radio competition. Strangelove and wanted something to follow up, something that would comment on man’s wider place in the Universe. Kubrick had just completed the successful movie Dr. Back in 1966 Kubrick wrote to Clarke asking if he had any good ideas for a science fiction movie.
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