How did ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ bocame Stanley Kubrick’s most influential movie?
No matter how much of a confident snob a person is, it is very difficult to make categorical statements about movies. Calling something “the best” or “the most important” is a fool’s errand because there will always be someone else who has an equally valid, contradictory opinion. You might think that Citizen Kane is the most influential movie ever made. However, it would be easy to make the counterargument that the German Expressionists heavily influenced Orson Welles and that FW Murnau belongs at the top of the list.
Arguing about which movie is “the best” is even more tenuous territory. Don’t even bother talking about The Godfather or Last Year at Marienbad because someone might come out with the assertion that Paul Blart: Mall Cop is actually the greatest masterpiece of all time, and you will discover that it’s very difficult to argue in absolute terms even if you are 100% certain that you are correct.
However, there have been attempts to rank movies objectively. A 2018 study published in Applied Network Science analysed 47,000 movies to determine their impact on cinema. The researchers based their conclusions on various metrics, including how often a film is referenced in other movies and how, soon after its release, its influence spreads.
When it came to the most influential sci-fi movie, the conclusion wasn’t surprising. Unless you’re counting Star Wars as science fiction rather than fantasy or adventure, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took the top spot. Overall, it ranked as the fifth most influential film of all time, behind The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Psycho, and 1933’s King Kong. Another Kubrick film, Dr Strangelove, landed in 18th place, one spot ahead of Gone with the Wind.
Kubrick’s cryptic masterpiece has been hailed as one of the most groundbreaking contributions to cinema since it was released in 1968. With stunning visuals, an operatic score, and a premise so elusive that its meaning continues to be hotly debated nearly six decades after its release, the film is the Platonic ideal of what cinema can be.
Beginning with the dawn of humanity, 2001 skips ahead to an alternate version of the early 21st century when humanity has built the technology to use outer space as a commuter corridor. Piecing together a plot for the movie is challenging, but it contains some of the most iconic set pieces of any film. There’s HAL, the obedient supercomputer that overhears astronauts plotting to disconnect it and becomes murderous. There’s the shiny black monolith, which appears in the opening sequence and reappears throughout the ages to baffle humanity (and audiences). And there’s the ending, in which the astronaut, Bowman (Keir Dullea), travels through tunnels of light and finds himself in a neoclassical bedroom where he rapidly ages before turning into a huge, floating foetus.
What any of this actually means is anyone’s guess, which is kind of the point. When you think about the most enduring works of art, many of them are similarly enigmatic. There’s a reason that a 15th-century Danish prince with mommy issues still captivates audiences. The number of actors who have shouted, whispered, or cried, “To be or not to be?” is practically infinite, and yet, without ready answers, it remains a pressing, fascinating, and infinitely timely question. You can debate the meaning of Kubrick’s classic for decades. You could even build a religion around it. And it’s this openness that keeps it alive.
Philosophical themes aside, 2001 was groundbreaking from a purely cinematic standpoint. Kubrick was a pioneering technician throughout his career, even turning to NASA during the production of Barry Lyndon to secure a camera that could shoot candlelight. With 2001, he made outer space feel three-dimensional even before the moon landing was broadcast on television screens.
Individual frames and sequences of the film are arguably even more influential. The astronaut dressed in yellow, walking through the intricate geometry of the white spacecraft, the watchful red light of HAL, and perhaps most importantly, the transition from the dawn of man to the future have all become visual touchstones. When the ape tosses a bone into the sky, and it transforms into a spaceship, Kubrick demonstrates how a story of human evolution millions of years in the making can be told in a single image.
There is no denying the influence of the film. It’s inspired everyone from George Lucas to Greta Gerwig and continues to baffle and mesmerise even the most academically-minded film scholars. Christopher Nolan is one of the filmmakers who has articulated its influence, revealing that when he watched it as a child, it opened his mind to the possibilities of the medium. “I was seven years old, so I couldn’t claim to have understood the film,” he said. “I still can’t claim that. But as a seven-year-old, I didn’t care about understanding the film. I just felt this extraordinary experience of being taken to another world.”
Quentin Tarantino, whose movies are much less obviously indebted to Kubrick’s masterpiece, has a similar view. “It’s one of the questions of cinema,” he said in reference to the meaning of the film. “[Kubrick] seems to ignore everything about drama except just enough rope with knots in it that connect it to the next knot to the next knot to the next knot.”
The film was a watershed moment in the development of cinema, but it was also a watershed moment in Kubrick’s career. Having spent more than a decade exploring the possibilities of the medium in movies like Paths of Glory, Lolita, and Dr Strangelove, he finally gained recognition as a visionary auteur. As such, he earned more control over his future projects, and although he made fewer films on average than he had before 1968 (he only completed five films between 1971 and his death in 1999), each of them bore the boldness, technical innovation, and meticulousness that he established with 2001.
