[ggm]

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.

[KineticLensman]

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.

[keiferski]

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.

[eigenstuff]

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.

[dmos62]

I agree with these criticisms on Interstellar and Inception. I wonder, if there's people who enjoyed them, what did they like about them?

[zoul]

Pro tip: If you really want to hear opinions different from yours, do not sound like you are ready to dismiss them anyway.

[bshimmin]

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.

[virusduck]

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.

[veridies]

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.

[mongol]

I once saw Tree of Life, totally on a whim, no knowledge at all, bought a ticket when passing the cinema during an evening walk.

I left the movie in the middle. I thought it so bad, but fascinatingly bad. Well at home I found out it was directed by same director as The Thin Red Line, one of my favorite movies. Since then I have been puzzled, I really should give Tree of Life another chance.

[asianthrowaway]

> what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!

"excrement" comes to mind!

[dmos62]

I don't see my post having any hostility or dismissiveness towards others' points of view.

Sure, I'm dismissive of the films, but, by asking for opinion, don't I implicitly assert that that's subjective?

[BenoitEssiambre]

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.

[dmos62]

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.

[philwelch]

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.

[asianthrowaway]

They're both well made, well paced, engaging movies. I especially liked inception due to its unique premise.

[Retric]

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.

[Lio]

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.

[Retric]

That I don't have a problem with. You can have people see all kinds of crap while tripping on LSD without issue.

It's the mechanics like 10^(layers deep) where going deeper kept increasing time compression in dreams. Dragon Ball Z for example had space ships, but the mechanics of the world where based on fantasy ideas.

[jessaustin]

In what sense did "Matrix" cross that line?

[Retric]

The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results. If it’s a simulation then him picking up a rock and turning it into a spaceship is viable. Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world, though again same deal.

But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.

[kibibu]

2001 did exactly the same. Some magical fantasy space obelisk made monkeys kill each other. It's stupid.

[swish_bob]

Use tools. The tool use was the point.

[whywhywhywhy]

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.

[Freak_NL]

> "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi.

Never heard of that one (love the atmosphere of Silent Running though), is it any good?

Its synopsis reads like it may have been part of the inspiration for the seminal sci-fi-comedy series Red Dwarf.

[ggm]

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.

[scottlocklin]

It's tremendous and interesting for a school project. It is also referenced in many places in newer movies.

[asianthrowaway]

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.

[copperx]

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.

It's like Kubrick sanitized humanity out of 2001.

[Udik]

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.

[camjohnson26]

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.

[jacobush]

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.