A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  2010's  cast, including Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren. Good script. Great visuals. Cons:  Real life rendered its Cold War political undertones obsolete. In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science-fiction film  2001: A Space Odyssey,  he and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name. Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was  Will you ever do a follow-up to  2001 ? Kubrick, of course, wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after  2001  were  A Clockwork Orange  and penning the basic story idea for ...

Pros: Good, if sometimes flawed, visuals; nice mix of sound and image; not kid stuff Cons: Slow-paced; no stereotypical space battles; no easily-interpreted ending It's hard to believe that 50 years have passed since Metro Goldwyn Mayer released director Stanley Kubrick's enigmatic-yet-somehow-captivating science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a serious (if not very prophetic) look at a future that could have been but wasn't. Conceived by Kubrick and the renowned science fiction author (and inventor) Arthur C. Clarke as the "proverbial good science fiction movie" in 1964 and involving a long production process that lasted nearly three years, 2001 tackles several Big Topics, including the notion that human evolution may have been given a boost by extraterrestrial intelligence, the dangers of mixing national security interests with scientific exploration, and the strange double-edged sword of humanity's dependence on technology (a them...