Also Sprach Zarathustra: Looking Even Better Than It "Used Ta"

Speaking of Blu-ray and HD DVD…Netflix finally found me a copy of the Blu-ray pressing of 2001: A Space Odyssey (it’d been clogging my queue for several months), and I had the pleasure of auditioning it last night. The image quality is absolutely stunning, particularly considering that it came from a 40-year old film master, and I highly recommend the rental (or purchase) to those of you who own a high-resolution display and a PlayStation 3 or other Blu-ray player. I’ve seen the movie (as well as read the book) dozens of times so far in my life, and it still seizes my attention for the entire 2:28:51 playing time. The first 20 minutes (the early ‘caveman’ evolution scenes) are some of the most thought-provoking footage (in my opinion) ever shown on the screen, and the disabling-HAL sequence remains utterly riveting.

I smiled when I saw that there was no ‘chapters’ screen on the disc’s menu (although it is possible to quickly skip through the movie via the remote control’s previous- and next-track buttons), and that the movie immediately launched when I inserted the disc; both attributes are reflective of director Stanley Kubrick’s well-known minimalist insistence.

I don’t normally watch the ‘extras’ on a disc, but I decided to check them out this time, and was very glad I did. In my recent cover story, I made the claim:

I am a firm believer in the theory that science fiction not only forecasts, but also shapes the future.

The various documentaries in the 2001: A Space Odyssey extras sections drive home that point. Keep in mind that when the movie hit theaters, the Apollo 11 moon first-landing mission was still a year in the future. Kubrick and the others on his team had no firm (pun intended) idea what the surface of the moon would be like; they didn’t even know what Earth (or, for that matter, Jupiter and its moons) would look like from space! Given these practical limitations, the accuracy is uncanny. Note, too, how well the film and its special effects have ‘held up’ over the decades; few movies are its equal in this regard, and the interviews with Kubrick’s directorial peers bear out his genius.

Cynics will inevitably note several exceptions to the ’sci fi crafts the future’ rule. Nobody could know that Pan American World Airlines and "Ma Bell" would no longer exist in 2001…although modern-day AT&T is looking rather like its parent, isn’t it? Of course, 2001 came and gone without humankind visiting Jupiter, but as the ‘extras’ interviews point out, this is fundamentally because neither Kubrick nor manuscript author Arthur C. Clarke foretold an end to the Cold War-fueled Space Race that was rampant at the time of the film’s development. Clarke and Kubrick also significantly under-estimated the effects of Moore’s Law on computers’ capabilities and, specifically, their size and weight.

Ultimately, however, what most resonates with me are the philosophical and ethical issues raised in 2001, both with respect to artificial life and to extraterrestrial life. Consider the former, for example, in the context of Ray Kurzweil’s (optimistic) and Bill Joy’s (pessimistic) contenting predictions about the rate and ultimate achievement of artificial life evolution (along with its impact on the human species and bigger-picture Gaia). And consider the latter in the context of the contending visions of future human/ET interaction portrayed in films (and the books they’re sometimes based on) such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind versus The War of the Worlds.

Two other notes: First off, in the interview with Arthur C. Clarke, he definitively indicates that HAL was not a one-letter-off play on IBM; instead it’s short for ‘Heuristic Algorithmic’.. Also, I didn’t realize how poorly the movie did in its initial release, both in terms of reviews and rumps-in-seats. According to some of the people interviewed for the ‘extras’, MGM was poised to pull the plug on the film after its first 30 days, until theater owners began reporting budding (pun intended, again) interest from…shall we say…the psychedelic generation. Apparently the "Star Gate" sequence was particularly compelling…of course, I don’t have any personal experience in this regard…;-)

How has 2001: A Space Odyssey impacted you, readers?