2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, MGM, dir. Stanley Kubrick, wr. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, with Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, in Super Panavision 70, often shown as Cinerama, PG) is the monumental film that outlined what we thought our future in space would be, but technology went in a different direction, becoming much more privatized (the Internet). At the time of this film, computers (like HAL, which becomes like a character in the film HAL + 111 = IBM) were seen as becoming bigger and more monolithic (even like the 360, which had been introduced a few years before), not decentralized and distributed to end users. I saw this at the Uptown Theater in Washington a few days after getting out of Army Basic Training. The screenplay is topical, starting with “The Dawn of Man,” where apes (hairy primates) find The Slab and suddenly learn to use tools. Millennia later, with the Blue Danube Playing (yes, the film starts with the famous Sunrise in Space to the opening C-major mantra of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra) man is living in space stations, traveling to the Moon on spaceships as if they were commercial airliners (who knew then that Pan Am would go down to competition from non-union companies like Southwest) and staying in chain hotels (I think HoJo’s is gone, too.) Of course, it is the discovery of the Slab on the Moon that sends the astronauts to Jupiter (on “The Discovery”), and the two major protagonists show a certain tenderness in their relationship that still fits within acceptable military buddy-bonding. They will encounter The Slab again near Jupiter. The mind-altering special effects were, I thought when I saw the film, a vision of what it might be like to fly into the atmosphere of Jupiter, although who knows what a liquid hydrogen ocean or metallic hydrogen core would look like if you could be there. At the end, one of the men is suddenly old, lying in a luxurious bed in some extraterrestrial-built hotel around Jupiter as he points to The Slab. Strauss plays again his mantra. Unfortunately, we could hardly imagine then what the year 2001 would really bring. For me, a career cardiac arrest.
The sequel to the film is 2010: The Year We Make Contact, (1984, dir. Peter Hyams, with Roy Scheider and John Lithgow) when Americans and Soviets form a joint expedition to find out what happened to the Discovery. We get to see Mars, and, as I remember, Io, before Jupiter turns leprous and is turned into a brown dwarf, in order to make Europa a new home of life. It is to be left alone. My feeling is that Titan (approached by the Cassini) is a much more interesting place, thiolins and all. Now, Jupiter really cannot become a brown dwarf.
The year 2010 turned out to be the year my mother passed. There is a problem with novels anmd movies predicated on specific timelines into the future -- they become obsolete. This has happened with some of my own writing attempts.
Above: Maidenhawk posts score of Richard Strauss "Thus Spake Zarathurstra", Op. 30, with its 'sunrise in space' opening, and its bitonal ending. (Also Sprach Zaragustra, Solti, Chicago Symphony. This would be the first CD I would buy in 1985 (London/Decca records).