2001 is not just one of the greatest sci-fi movies, it’s also what I call a foundational sci-fi movie. It has gone on to influence almost every science fiction film after. It proved that science fiction was a serious genre, that could be just as important and impactful as any other. It’s important to remember that this came out a year before man first set foot on the moon. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this film.

It is ALWAYS a delight to watch someone experience this for the first time.

You are one of the few who noticed the iPad-like pad. Most young viewers overlooks them, because they are everywhere today. Back in 1968, a CRT monitor was still heavy and big!

Matte paintings? No; front-projected photo transparencies.

I really enjoy watching your videos. You always give a very intelligent, thoughtful analysis of the story and how the film is made.

You don't see the aliens, but you see their works: The monolith, the baroque zoo, and the two times aliens gave Man a little boost.

Viewers today seem unfamiliar with film overtures, yet these musical preludes appeared in many films: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE....

The breathing sounds when Poole and Bowman are in their spacesuits was all done by Stanley Kubrick himself.

The explanation is much simpler than you're thinking. Some members of an extremely advanced alien civilization became aware of the Earth and our ancestors and decided to give is a little push in the right direction. They sent a machine, the monolith, to Earth and let it handle the situation. Its most obvious action was to put the idea in the apes' minds that object of a certain shape and size could be used as weapons. Previously, the apes had been starving in the midst of food animals because the lacked the means to kill them. They had also been prey to many predators, as when the leopard kills an ape at the beginning. Now they had a weapon, and were on the path of using and making tools. On their way out of our solar system, the aliens buried a monolith on the Moon so that when the apes' descendants become advanced enough to reach their own moon, they would find it. Shortly before the year 2001, humans find it and dig it up. Apparently its purpose is to send out a signal to the monolith at Jupiter when the sun's rays hit it for the first time. The people looking at the monolith when this happens hear the signal as a loud burst of radio noise. The Earth's scientists ask themselves why someone would bury something designed to be activate by sunlight, and decide that someone might do that if they wanted to know when it was dug up. They calculate that the signal was directed towards Jupiter and send a space mission there. In fact, the purpose of the monolith buried on the Moon is to let the monolith at Jupiter know that the apes' descendants (the human race) have achieved elementary space travel and that lesson #2 can begin. Lesson #2 is basically doing the same thing to David Bowman that it had done to the apes - take him to the next level. For the apes, the next level was using tools. For Dave, it was to change him into a more advanced being as evolution would have done eventually. Dave then returns to Earth with a single thought. The light show was just something the monolith did to distract Dave while it analyzed him to see how Earth people had changed since the apes. The hotel room is simply a traditional place of safety and comfort it had pulled out of Dave's mind so that he could be comfortable while it changed him. The more advanced embryo-like version of Dave is often called the star child. The story about Hal is merely a subplot. The humans had inadvertently created a programming bug. This is explained more in the sequel "2010." Hal did what he did because he didn't want to die.

The novel is more explicit about the ending. “The book explores the perils related to the atomic age. In Clarke’s novel, the Cold War is apparently still on, and at the end of the book one side has nuclear weapons above the earth on an orbital platform. To test its abilities, the Star Child detonates an orbiting warhead at the end of the novel, creating a false dawn below for the people on Earth. Roger Ebert notes that Kubrick originally intended for the first spaceship seen in the film to be an orbiting bomb platform, but in the end he decided to leave the ship's meaning more ambiguous. Clarke, however, retained and clearly stated this fact in the novel.”

Stanley Kubrick uses mostly experimental classical music throughout this film.

Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote this movie and also pushed for the idea of geosynchronous orbit satellites having a real scientific impact, also wrote a series of books called the Rama series (starting with Rendezvous with Rama) which explores similar themes but in a more approachable way. I recommend the Rama books.

Yes, the ape attacked by the leopard was a trained stunt man.

It was not unusual in previous years for very long features to have an overture that featured some of the music that would be heard (example: “West Side Story 1961”) and/or an intermission, again with music. There might or might not be various images on screen. The overture not only set the mood and tone of what was to come, but on a practical side, allowed people to get their seats, settle in and let their eyes adjust to the darkened room. What Kubrick did that was different was to make the screen so empty and so dark and almost force the viewers into a different state of mind; he was clearly alerting the audience that this would not be a typical cinematic production.

Thank you for reacting to this iconic movie. Imho, it's the greatest movie ever filmed.

This was an excellent commentary, thanks Will! PS: To be fair, even the book cover to Dune used to look like sand! Sand is the associated color with Dune, even when it was a book! I wouldn't lay that at the feet of "movies today", lol. This movie is such a celebration of human achievement, both in space, and in cinema. And in the brain!

Hopefully this little excerpt doesn't cause a copyright issue. In the movie, after the apes discover tools, one of them throws his club into the air in exultation and on the way down, it turns into a spacecraft. Obviously, this wasn't the way it was presented in the book, but there are a few paragraphs at that point in the book which are kind of equivalent and talk about how this has set Man on the road to controlling the Earth. It starts like this: "A new animal was abroad on the planet, spreading slowly out from the African heartland. It was still so rare that a hasty census might have overlooked it, among the teeming billions of creatures roving over land and sea. There was no evidence, as yet, that it would prosper or even survive; on this world where so many mightier beasts had passed away, its fate still wavered in the balance. In the hundred thousand years since the crystals had descended upon Africa, the man-apes had invented nothing. But they had started to change, and had developed skills which no other animal possessed. Their bone clubs had increased their reach and multiplied their strength; they were no longer defenseless against the predators with whom they had to compete."

I wonder, if Kubrick were still around, would he want to reshoot the scenes with Dave in the white room, because Keir Dullea is now 88 years old?

There is a myth that Pink Floyd was supposed to write the score for the film but he decided to go with classical music because it is already been proven and timeless thus making the film timeless! but little did he know that Pink Floyd has and will become as timeless as as the classical music he chose

Dave is pushed to the next stage of evolution for a reason that becomes more clear in the sequel. But as the 'space baby' suggests, it's just another step in the 'Space Odyssey' that began at the dawn of man.

Strong film. Really good reaction. I found out this year that there's actually a sequel to this film.

The "centrifuge" set used for filming scenes depicting interior of the spaceship Discovery. For spacecraft interior shots, ostensibly containing a giant centrifuge that produces artificial gravity, Kubrick had a 30-short-ton (27 t) rotating "ferris wheel" built by Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group at a cost of $750,000 (equivalent to $6,600,000 in 2023.) The set was 38 feet (12 m) in diameter and 10 feet (3.0 m) wide. Various scenes in the Discovery centrifuge were shot by securing set pieces within the wheel, then rotating it while the actor walked or ran in sync with its motion, keeping him at the bottom of the wheel as it turned. The camera could be fixed to the inside of the rotating wheel to show the actor walking completely "around" the set, or mounted in such a way that the wheel rotated independently of the stationary camera, as in the jogging scene where the camera appears to alternately precede and follow the running actor.” There is a seam, groove, track, running down the center of the white floor, and a camera could be attached in it.

Cheers mate i was 12 when i saw this. No cell phones the had cordage. And bristol was a lot smaller then

If you want to see very effective handheld camera work (done by Kubrick) check out Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It feels completely realistic for battle scenes. Also, there is a lot of footage taken flying over the Arctic Ocean and those regions, as well as Greenland, Iceland, Canada and Colorado in the US. It looks as if some of that footage was used with various filters and colorization to create some of the Star-Gate sequences that look as if they are over land or water.

Opening overtures were a thing in some movies for a few decades, the phenomenon mostly came to an end in the 1970s. I love watching reactors sort of bump into the phenomenon for their first time and work to sort out the convention without the broader context of the device in cinemas as a whole. It's always an interesting moment. I was born in 1974 and they were largely passé by then even, so there's no reason to expect folks born in the 80s or 90s or 00s to have had much in the way of a reference for them at all. It's just intriguing to see the device thru the eyes of someone bumping into it for the first time.

Poor people doing reactions to this don't know what to make of the first few minutes of darkness. Being confused myself I've looked into it and it doesn't seem to really have any significance. It's just an overture. An opening selection of music usually in an opera that kind of sets the tone for what's to come and allows people to take their seats knowing the show will start.

As others have said the black screen section is an overture. If you'd seen 2001 in a cinema at the time (as I did) they would have started to project the film with the house lights still up. The lights would dim during the overture and the curtains would open just before the MGM logo appears. It was Kubrick's way of pulling you into the film before it even started. I kind of wish they'd cut the overture from the home video releases, however, as 2001 is challenging enough without wondering if your equipment is knackered for ages. Same goes for the Intermission. Intermissions were the norm until the late '70s to give people a chance for a comfort break and to buy some popcorn and a drink but at home it's doesn't need to be there.

Enjoyed your unique insights!

The Dawn of Man has photograph backgrounds not matte painting.

Nah mate john williams kinda owns space music and chors hornier that dod the star trek music. Winging it both good composers

A excellent followup to this is the sequal 2010 THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT . Your questions will be answered .

hey will, love your reactions.

Please watch 2010 The Year We Make Contact for answers.

There is a sequel.

It's probable many people watched the end of the film under the influence of less than legal substances.

I enjoy some of your ideas about 2001. I'm not sure what is so advanced about a hive mind concept tho. I think it's a fairly primitive idea. This is no reflection on your video or your specific ideas. I'm just speaking generally about why it is that there's this trope about a hive mind and loss of individuality being somehow advanced Seems pretty terrible to me. I think it shows up in a lot of movies because the idea of it being an advancement is itself folly and that we all know that deep down. Losing identity and still being alive to experience it is worse than death.

The leopard was highly drugged.

A suggestion: Don’t talk over the dialogue and keep trying to predict ahead; you miss important details. Just pay attention to what is happening or in the frame or being said.

I don't mean to be rude, but talking over a movie ruins the experience for the viewer. But then again this is quite the norm among today's audience; endless banter while watching a movie. Imagine pausing and talking while reading a Wordsworth poem or while listening to Beethoven.

If you know SO much about the movie, why bother doing a reaction on video? I'm not going to watch your video because you know so much about the movie. What's the use? I want to see people seeing something for the first time and seeing their reaction. Knowing so much about the movie you just blew your reaction to smithereens.

You're a master of overthinking and guessing wrong.

The worst case of endless overthinking I've ever seen in my life.

The reactor's unending and constant chatter needed to have been much reduced. Such nattering might be appropriate for other films but here it was an impediment for any viewer trying to formulate their own assessment of this film.

You talk an awful lot, don't you? Sometimes it's better not to vocal your thoughts...