Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey proving prophetic 50 years on

Arthur C Clarke certainly was. Within weeks he was in New York and the man from Minehead in Somerset and the auteur from the Bronx embarked on a collaboration that was to prove to be one of the most successful in modern cinema.

Indeed many believe that the film they created together – 2001: A Space Odyssey – is the greatest movie ever made.

It addresses themes such as human evolution, the possibility of alien life and the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Many of the gadgets on board Discovery One – the spaceship bound for Jupiter around which the plot revolves – presage technological developments that were to take decades to come to fruition such as portable screens (tablets) and picture calls (video phones).

Its depiction of a moon landing still looks eerily prescient given that Neil Armstrong did not take his giant leap until a year later. 

And the way Discovery’s onboard computer attempts to wrest control of the ship from its crew is a sinister precursor of what many fear will happen in the future.

As a result, 50 years to the day since it went on general release in the US, 2001 remains as relevant as ever to modern audiences.

But it is the fate of prophets not to be honoured in their homeland and so it was for Kubrick and Clarke. No fewer than 241 people walked out of the premiere.

The New Yorker’s critic Pauline Kael describe it as “monumentally unimaginative”. And the equally august Andrew Sarris agreed, describing it as “one of the grimmest films I have ever seen in my life… 2001 is a disaster”.

To understand how a work of such genius could be so misunderstood it is worth examining how it came into being.

For a start Clarke and Kubrick were the odd couple from central casting. While the British writer was an optimist who believed that technological progress was inherently good, his American counterpart had a much darker view of the potential for negative outcomes. 

As a result, a film that began life as a fairly straightforward movie about the future of space travel and an encounter with alien life forms developed an epic sweep.

This switch in tone is reflected in its change of title from the relatively bland Journey Beyond The Stars to the more sophisticated name under which it ultimately went out.

The duo assessed the potential of six of Clarke’s stories before settling on The Sentinel, the tale of a sort of cosmic fi re alarm left on the moon by ancient aliens.

Kubrick persuaded Clarke to turn his short story into a novel from which he would create the screenplay. One of the many radical aspects of the resulting film was its soundtrack.

Given that 88 minutes of its 139-minute running time was free of dialogue, music was always going to be an important element in its success.

A composer called Alex North, who had worked with Kubrick on his 1960 epic Spartacus, was signed up to work on 2001. 

But Kubrick soon became converted to the idea of using classical music and it proved to be an inspired decision.

The recording of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra that accompanies the opening title sequence has become so associated with Space Odyssey that many assume it was written for it.

The film begins with a scene depicting the dawn of man and the rigour of the actor who played the ape is symptomatic of the production as a whole.

Dan Richter revealed that he did his homework by studying the behaviour of Guy the Gorilla at London Zoo. Great care was also taken to make the special effects as convincing as possible.

Kubrick hired Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway, who had both worked with the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun at the US Army’s ballistic missiles agency, to design vehicles, spacesuits and sets for the movie.

The role given to the Discovery’s computer was also way ahead of its time.

Kubrick was initially keen to work with IBM to ensure that his system was as authentic as possible but when it became clear that the plot would require the computer to go rogue he dropped their branding and renamed the computer HAL.

The fact that the three letters of its acronym each precede the letters that made up IBM was not lost on cinema-goers. All this attention to detail plus the wisdom of their predictions paid off.

In spite of the critics, the film boomed at the box office becoming the biggest grossing film in the US in 1968. It was nominated for four Oscars, winning one for its special effects, and is regularly voted one of the best films of all time.

And when Clarke’s novel was published four months after 2001 hit the cinemas it sold one million copies in paperback.

Clarke, who was later knighted, said: “If you understood 2001 completely we have failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.” Perhaps that is the secret of its success.