Stanley Kubrick’s collaborative partner on 2001: A Space Odyssey was Arthur C.

Kubrick then found enormous acclaim with Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a biting black comedy about the nuclear end of the world. The DiscoveryĪt the time that he made 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick had risen as a director through some competent thrillers, Fear and Desire (1953), Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), and found a name with the war film Paths of Glory (1957) and the epic Spartacus (1960), before making the highly controversial Lolita (1962) about paedophilia. Interpretations have varied between the intelligent and the merely fatuous – those that have seen all the space-docking manoeuvers, the spermatozoa-shaped Discovery and the embryonic imagery in terms of Freudian symbolism – to those that have countered that Stanley Kubrick only said this to hide the fact that the film isn’t about anything at all. Stanley Kubrick, in interviews, stated that he wished 2001: A Space Odyssey to be a visual experience that circumlocutes the rational and that meaning should only be imposed in an existential sense. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a film that defies all that is supposed to make good storytelling – there are about four different stories going on, not all of which seem to connect up with one another there is approximately only twenty minutes of actual dialogue in the film, most of which consists of banal exchanges that have little to do with carrying the plot and it is a film that offers no clear explanation of what it is about, rather it demands that we piece meaning together out of the clues it gives us. Many of the science-fiction fans from the Star Wars (1977) generation lack the patience for 2001 – it is not adrenal adventure, it is slow-paced, its’ meaning is cloudy and it does not spell out everything in pat moral epithets. Although equally there have also have been a number of dissenting voices. There would be few All-Time Best Lists from science-fiction genre critics that 2001 would not appear on. Is 2001: A Space Odyssey the greatest science-fiction film ever made? Many people consider it such – it is the only science-fiction film to feature in the critics poll run every decade by Sight and Sound magazine, for instance.

A space odyssey 1968