Modelers owe a great deal of gratitude to Stanley Kubrick’s landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Based on a short story by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke called "The Sentinel", Kubrick reworked the story with Clarke to create one of the finest films ever released, earning a spot at number 22 in the American Film Institute’s "100 Greatest American Movies" list. Its tale of mankind’s discovery and first contact with an advanced alien civilization introduced filmgoers to an extremely realistic depiction of interplanetary space travel. Begun in 1964 and released in 1968, it provided a grandiose vision of how the space race with the Soviet Union would play out in technological achievement. In those heady days of project Gemini, Kubrick imagined that thirty-five years later we would have regular commercial flights to orbiting space stations and bases on the moon, as well as missions to explore the outer planets like Jupiter. Who could blame him? Space exploration was at an all-time fevered pitch in the 1960’s, and unlimited enthusiasm towards what the world would be like at the beginning of the new Millennium can certainly be excused in hindsight. The optimistic space infrastructure (who’s going to pay for all that stuff?), HAL’s artificial intelligence capabilities, and the suspended animation of the Discovery crew might be better slated for the year 2101 than 2001. Aside from that relatively small problem, the film has aged extremely well and still manages to make profound statements about mankind’s origins, our use of technology, and our ultimate place in the universe.

In the single greatest time leap in cinematic history, one movie frame moves us ahead millions of years from the feuding man-apes around the water hole to graceful shots of satellites in earth orbit. What is not widely known is that these satellites are all armed with nuclear weapons, meant for use in case of war among the world’s superpowers. The bone thrown in the air by Moon Watcher becomes a modern equivalent, only this time it has been fashioned from plutonium. Kubrick continues on a theme from his previous film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by telling us that millions of years of evolution hasn’t stopped our species from arming itself to the teeth. You can just make out a Chinese star and bar on one of the satellites as it drifts by. In one version of the film, the just-returned Star Child detonates these weapons, preferring, as Clarke writes in the book, "a cleaner sky". To the opening strains of the Johann Strauss waltz "The Blue Danube", we see the Orion III spacecraft slowly drift into view, a Pan American World Airways logo just visible on the side. Kubrick was dead-on in assuming that commercial interests would have a large part in bankrolling the exploration of space. We see an IBM computer in the center of the Orion’s instrument panel, as well as a Bell Telephone picture phone and Hilton Hotel in the space station. Too bad Stanley didn’t predict the ubiquity of Subway, Taco Bell, and McDonalds at the start of the 21^st century.

More realistic spacecraft are seen in the Aries I-B space shuttle, a moonbus, and finally, the Discovery itself. Not sleek and streamlined like its contemporary from Star Trek (filming of its pilot began a few days after 2001 started production), the Discovery is reflective of Arthur Clarke’s and scientific consultant Frederick Ordway’s thinking about deep-space requirements for manned vehicles. The command sphere at the front houses the small EVA pods (this before a LEM ever flew in the Apollo missions), the flight deck, and a centrifuge for the crew to live in while experiencing artificial gravity. At the rear of Discovery, separated from the front by a long and spindly set of storage bins, we have the nuclear-powered propulsion units. While the famous opening scene of the giant Imperial Star Destroyer cruising by the camera in Star Wars gets accolades for inventiveness, George Lucas simply stole the camera angle and the scene from 2001. As Igor Stravinsky once said, good composers borrow, great composers steal.

One of the down sides of being a film that was released in 1968 is that the models produced are -- how shall I say it -- kind of crude, especially when compared to today’s state of the art moldings. The Aurora moldings of the Moonbus and the Orion III spacecraft are rather simplistic and not terribly accurate. Airfix’s Orion is not that much better. The Lunar Models kit(s) of the Discovery and EVA pods are notoriously rough around the edges and difficult to build. The recent resin offerings from Captain Cardboard of the EVA pod and the Aries I-B shuttle are simply gorgeous, but quite expensive. You get what you pay for, but experience in non-styrene building techniques are required.

The ground-breaking special effects pioneered by Kubrick’s team (Douglas Trumbull being one of them) enabled the entire genre of science fiction films that followed. While today’s computer graphics have taken this art to whole new level, the fundamental methods of spacecraft lighting, depiction of planets, and zero-gravity motion were established by 2001. We as modelers have gotten more realistic subjects and therefore lots of cool things to model. The late Sir Geoffrey Unsworth’s amazing cinematography produced images so unique and stirring in their nature that the thirty-one minutes of dialog in the two-and-a-quarter hour film is almost superfluous. My personal favorite is the shot of Dave Bowman’s face while piloting the EVA pod, his helmet visor reflecting the colors of the instruments before him. It is a powerful image of a man, surrounded by his technology, fundamentally changed by the evolutionary step given as a gift by the mysterious alien race behind the black monolith.

Can we have a piece about 2001 that does not mention HAL? No. By design he is the most human element in the film, the ultimate technological achievement of a flawed human race. Like a lot of us, he screws up royally and kills virtually all of the crewmembers. The nerds who programmed him back on earth left him with a conflict he could not resolve internally, and he cracked under the pressure. Despite our best attempts, we still demonstrate all the failings of our human underpinnings. That’s a lesson we learn every time we pick up an X-acto knife and begin working on another model.

2001’s stature as a film cannot be underestimated. As a pure science fiction film, it succeeds tremendously. Very few other movies have been so technically sound or methodical in their depiction of the future of space exploration. Combined with philosophical and religious symbolism and spectacular imagery, it makes for a film that stands as one of the finest examples of cinematic art ever made. It still has the power to both confound and inspire its viewer, even thirty-two years after its release.

And we modelers also get lots of neat spaceships to model. Not bad at all.

Lee Kolosna