2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick’s grand vision of mankind’s journey from its hominid beginnings to its star-child evolution is a towering achievement of science-fiction cinema.

  • Director

    Stanley Kubrick

  • With

    Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter and Douglas Rain

  • UK/USA 1968. 150min

  • IMAX with Laser

  • Certificate

    U

A year before the first moon landing, Stanley Kubrick envisioned an outer space where vast spacecraft revolve weightlessly to the strains of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. 2001 revolutionised the depiction of the cosmos on film, at the same time - with the HAL-9000 computer that fatally malfunctions during a mission to Jupiter - sounding a warning about unbridled technological advance.

Beginning with primordial apes discovering tools and climaxing with astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) travelling beyond the limits of the known universe, Kubrick’s film was an intellectual (and psychedelic) event in the late 1960s. A ‘match cut’ which quickly replaces a bone thrown upwards by an ape with a similarly shaped spaceship floating through space, thereby compressing millennia of human evolution, is justly celebrated.