I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
I think an additional factor that discriminates 2001 compared with other films was that it was made at the height of the space race when there was a lot of technological optimism about the possibilities. When the film was released, Apollo 8 hadn't yet orbited the moon.
Also, the screenwriter (Arthur C. Clarke) was a confirmed space cadet (in the nicest sense of the phrase) and didn't see a need to throw in dystopian civilisations and evil corporations (standard fare in contemporary Hollywood SF) when there was so much scope in 'just' exploring the possibilities of the universe.
Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.
I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
Check out the third season of Twin Peaks from Showtime. It's more or less an 18 hour movie, with slow, seemingly-deliberate (or not!) pacing. A truly fascinating work for this age.
I love Tree of Life, but I’ve tried and failed to get into 2001 several times. The thing I love in Tree of Life is the humanism: I can see people sorting through their feelings through their memories in real time, and the characters feel absolutely real. 2001 is more interested in “philosophy” than people, and to be honest if I want that I’d rather just read a nonfiction book.
2001 is also one of my favorites but I also loved Interstellar.
The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.
There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.
Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?
Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.
Yeah, that's a funny aspect of realistic accuracy, where, if you're doing it in one place, you have to do it elsewhere as well, else you'll ruin the immersion.
I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
The problem is inception crossed the line into fantasy. Antigravity paint or whatever mcguffin you want to name is explicitly changing some rule. Inception went the magic wand route.
That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.
I may be misunderstanding this but isn't the point in Inception that what they are experiencing is explicitly not real?
That because they are inside a dream-like state the rules of reality can be broken and it is only by spotting when the rules of reality are broken that you can tell you're not in the real world.
Maybe some people wouldn't consider it strictly sci-fi but I really enjoyed "Upstream Color" and reading what Carruth was planning to create with "A Topiary" I really hope someone gives him the funding and creative control to complete a project on the scale of that.
Its a student film. Its a classic frat-house set in space with minor gems. One guy has a home-made jamjar and scraps piano he plays to keep himself sane. the "rimmer" annoying character keeps a very sad video diary. There is a talking bomb. the Captain is semi-alive in cryo-storage.
The thing with movies like interstellar and inception is that they're ultimately action/romance movies set in a sci fi context. 2001 is the only movie that I know of which is exclusively about themes such as human evolution, alien life, etc... and dispensing of all "hollywood fluff". I'm not trying to diss interstellar or inception (I loved both of them), but they're not of the same caliber as 2001.
In my opinion, 2001 feels cold, empty, and sterile when compared to Solaris by Tarkovsky. They both use space travel to touch on themes about the human experience, but Solaris is miles ahead dealing with human psyche.
Kubrick didn't think much of humanity, it's pretty clear in 2001 and in all his movies. His gaze is naturalistic: individuals are struggling for power and sex, sometimes they climb hierarchies through cunning and violence, sometimes they fall. He didn't seem to be that heavily interested in the human psyche.
On the other hand, 2001 is precisely a movie about humans trying to transcend themselves by suppressing anything emotional about them and exhalting pure reason- this is also a factor for the sterile appearance of the movie.
Sunshine by Danny Boyle dealt with human extinction, although the focus was on reigniting the sun instead of colonizing planets. The cinematography is beautiful and it gets into some heavy themes.
Exactly, Interstellar is good. The setting is a backdrop, but it's not a bad backdrop at all. In fact, I like how sci-fi and colonization of the solar system is made to look normal, it might give future generations a feeling of "of course we are going there". While it being a good love story in its own right.
Maybe I should try the book. I like me some good sci-fi (the Hyperion series is probably my favorite read-wise). I've never gotten through the 2001 movie. Several goes at it. I literally pass out asleep. Maybe I need to try a morning viewing. I think of movies as entertainment. Trying to watch this one has become a chore.
The book is essentially the same story but has a lot more description of what is going on. It'll certainly make sense, even if it isn't a page-turner suspense.
More generally, literary critics distinguish between 'show' (reader has to figure things out) and 'tell' (author makes things very obvious) modes of writing [0]. Show and Tell styles also appear in film making. Obviously the film and the book are in different media, but I think it's fair to say that the film 2001 is totally at the 'show' end of the spectrum while the book is mostly 'tell' (in common with a lot of Clarke's writing).
I'm in a somewhat similar boat to you -- I find the movie a bit too tedious. I've seen it thrice, and enjoy specific sections of it, but it just doesn't do anything for me. I think it may be because I left it until too late to watch it, and by then I'd already encountered a LOT of 2001-influenced sci-fi. By which time, very few of the concepts or examinations within the movie struck a chord inside of me.
Having said that, I REALLY liked the book, and would recommend that you give it go!
(p.s.: it's BS that you got downvoted for stating a contrary opinion in a measured, reasonable manner -- hopefully my upvote cancels out the haters!)
This will annoy a lot of people, but: turn on the subtitles and turn up the speed. Large sections of it can be zoomed through at 4x or 8x speed, returning to normal once people are talking.
Large ares of it are basically "wow factor" shots which looked really impressive in 1968 and lack a lot of that to present-day viewers. Sometimes it feels more like an agonisingly slow pan across the concept art.
For the last part of the movie, sure, speed through.
In the early part, the slow pace of the journey into space heightens the sense of isolation. It's something a modern movie couldn't get away with, and is a unique part of 2001 that you should really experience.
I'm in my late-30s but I think I'm simply to young to appreciate the impact of the space imagery in '2001' because I grew up post-Voyager and came of age in the post-Hubble world. I'm a huge fan of Kubrick and I'm highly tolerant of slow pacing but '2001' just never really grabbed me.
I was enraged at Gravity's rendering of space, which at the opposite extreme of 2001's: a crowded backyard playground, with plenty of traffic and people wandering around and having a great time.
I believe space is black, silent, and immobile- though this might be just the lasting imprinting of 2001. I doubt you'd see anything resembling Hubble images up there.
I actually enjoyed Gravity. But it was also the first example I thought of where something like 2001's long journey could have enhanced the feeling of how far they were from rescue.
This way of thinking is common, but you're missing out. There is an entire world out there where movies are art and they can be as perspective-changing as a good book.
I never saw the film, but the book is great. A neat fact is that Arthur C Clark, and Stanley Kubrick wrote the book and the film at the same time. There are actually 4 or 5 books, and they're all pretty good.
I had to learn a little about what went on behind the scenes to appreciate it. Once I saw the making of the ship models, watching the camera pan across one for an hour wasn't as boring.
I loved Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". I know it's not everyone's favorite movie but I keep thinking about it "in a deep manner" (for lack of a better phrase) from time to time, it makes me question my essence as a human being: "Would I be able to love a robot child? Yes, I would, wouldn't I? Or would I? I know I should, robots like the ones presented in the movie are just like humans, I should love them the same, if not more" and stuff like that.
Being originally a Kubrick's project, I wondered sometimes about what Kubrick saw in it, and what's the kubrickian theme under the, well, cartload of saccharine that Spielberg threw on it.
A vague possibility is that the story is about a machine that is programmed to require love, and because of that desperately searches for someone to love it until- and that's the punchline- aliens come and build a machine for it that finally wants to love it, so they're both mechanically happy. I can picture Kubrick cynically grinning at the idea.
The aliens are not actually aliens though, they are robots which have survived after humans went extinct, and they recognize the boy as an ancient ancestor of their kind.
A lot of people hate that film, but I liked it. It got me in to the books, and I think it's a fine scifi film.. though I wouldn't mention it in the same breath as 2001.
Try "alternative edition redux" -a fan recut the thing and made ... a really good movie out of it. Unlike the official cuts, you don't need to have read the book first.
To me, "Solyaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky comes close, even though the sweep is much more limited when compared to 2001.
And let's also not forget the greatest sci-fi movie never made, Jodorowski's attempt at "Dune". Even artifacts from that aborted attempt are iconic, like the Harkonnen chair:
Tarkovsky's my favorite director, but I really did not like Solaris. For me, Tarkovsky's Stalker is the infinitely better film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.
There are many of them. they are not made by the US film industry. Check out "Mr. Nobody", check out "The Congress", "Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind"... come on now, these are masterworks.
I loved Mr Nobody as a teenager, and I still think the overall concept is great, but when I watch as an adult, I can't help but cringe at a lot of the scenes. the acting is just so overwrought. maybe I've watched it too many times.
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.