Summers at the Cinema: What Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey meant to a child unfamiliar with the adult world

2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick is a science-fiction epic about a trip to Jupiter derailed by the sentient computer named HAL.Introducing The Globe and Mail’s new series, Summers at the Cinema, in which Globe Arts contributors offer a window into their favourite summer-movie memories from years past. This week, Kate Taylor recalls a childhood pilgrimage to watchIn my childhood, before the rise and subsequent decline of the video store, every other small town had a movie theatre.

My family didn’t patronize the movie theatre often. In fact I recall only one occasion, the summer of an expedition to see. Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking science-fiction epic about a trip to Jupiter derailed by the sentient computer named HAL had divided critics when it appeared in 1968. Some thought its abstracted meditation on humans, technology and the universe was both beautiful and brilliant. Others found it boring, incomprehensible or pretentious.

I don’t remember the ride back – we were nine grandchildren in all; it was probably someone else’s turn – and I was well into adulthood before I would seeagain. Screening it today, it’s intriguing to see what Kubrick predicted: inflight entertainment, voice recognition, video tablets and artificial intelligence. And what he failed to notice: that social roles in the 1960s were changing rapidly.

Despite the lingering Cold War and the nuclear threat, the sixties and seventies were a period of modernist optimism in the West. For me, the grownup world was about my uncle’s prized Porsche and my mother’s smart new pantsuit, about the Beatles and the moon landing. Ifimpressed me at all, it was as another example of this chic modernity. I was blind to its themes, that technology’s promise was, if not false, at least deeply compromised.

For a child, the sports car, the jet plane and the rocket ship were the gleaming machines that would transport us toward a shiny new century. Today, no film as arty aswould ever be proposed as a summer blockbuster but, 18 years after the real 2001 finally did arrive, it is Kubrick’s ambivalent message about human innovation that really foretells the future.Story continues below advertisementLive your best.

Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)

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