Siri 2001 space odyssey9/4/2023 But the thing that captured the audience's imagination back then more even than a chatty computer decades before Siri and Alexa was that unnervingly, HAL had a mind of his own. The initials H-A-L preceded by one letter the computer company initials IBM. MONDELLO: Yeah, well, there's always a first time. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. So he showed how explosions don't make noise in a vacuum, how docking a spaceship would require slow speeds and delicate maneuvering - no little green aliens, no space cowboys, just reality as NASA knew it created with then-revolutionary special effects but treated as unremarkable, as was the talking HAL 9000 computer that would help the astronauts during their odyssey.ĭOUGLAS RAIN: (As HAL 9000) The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. Kubrick was determined to make what he called the first science fiction film that isn't considered trash. Unlike previous sci-fi films - say, "The Day The Earth Stood Still" - "2001" went to elaborate lengths to explain the physics of space travel. Also some things that didn't come to pass - a whole moon colony reached by way of a rotating space station with a Hilton hotel. SYLVESTER: (As Haywood Floyd) What are you doing? SYLVESTER: (As Haywood Floyd) How are you, Squirt? WILLIAM SYLVESTER: (As Haywood Floyd) Hello. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY") Clarke imagined a startlingly prescient future with something remarkably like iPads and interplanetary Skype. MONDELLO: What followed was equally awe-inspiring in an era when personal computers didn't exist, most phones still had rotary dials and humans hadn't yet walked on the moon. MONDELLO: How could you not be in awe? Later, after using the bone as a weapon against other apes, he threw it in the air in triumph, and a Stanley Kubrick jump cut replaced it with a spaceship, and - well, there's a reason this music still does it for me, does it for millions who saw the original film in what they were then calling single-camera Cinerama. He picked up a bone, used it as a club, his arm and the bone filling up a screen that stretched 90 feet wide. I remember being surprised that this outer space movie started with apes in a desert and a monolith that seemed to give one ape an idea. MONDELLO: I saw it where it premiered, D.C.'s Uptown Theater, on a curved Cinerama screen. The film must've just made me feel like a kid. (SOUNDBITE OF THE BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE OF STRAUSS' "ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA")īOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: I was sure I was 12 when I saw "2001," but in 1968, I would have been 19. Critic Bob Mondello saw "2001" when it first came out and remembers what made it one of the most argued over and most influential blockbusters ever made. By the end of 1968, the 2 1/2-hour science fiction epic ended up being the year's biggest box office hit. That weekend, though, the general public weighed in with lines around the block. Fifty years ago this week, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" opened to mixed reviews and hundreds of audience walkouts at its premiere.
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