A bone, a black slab and a computer that decides its crew is a problem — made by a man who had already invented the communications satellite, and released before anyone had walked on the Moon.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), written with Arthur C. Clarke. Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
Africa, roughly four million years ago. A small band of ape-like creatures scrapes a living at the edge of a drying plain. They are hungry, frightened, and driven away from their water hole by a rival group. Then one morning a tall black slab is simply standing among them — perfectly smooth, perfectly rectangular, plainly not a rock. They shriek, they circle it, and at last one of them reaches out and touches it.
Soon afterwards, that same creature picks up a heavy bone from a skeleton and discovers what it can do. Bones become tools; tools, within seconds of screen time, become weapons. The band takes the water hole back. In triumph the creature hurls the bone into the sky — and Kubrick cuts, in one edit that leaps four million years, to a craft drifting silently in orbit above the Earth.
It is now 2001. Dr Heywood Floyd travels up to an orbiting space station and on to Clavius, an American base on the Moon, behind a cover story about an epidemic. The truth is being kept quiet: something has been dug up near the crater Tycho. It is another black slab, and it was deliberately buried about four million years ago. When sunlight touches its surface for the first time, it emits a piercing radio signal — aimed at Jupiter.
1. What changes for the ape-like creatures after the slab appears?
2. What has been found on the Moon, and what does it do?
1. One of them works out that a bone can be used as a tool and a weapon; the group uses this to win back the water hole it had lost.
2. A second black slab, buried deliberately some four million years earlier. When sunlight first reaches it, it sends out a powerful radio signal pointed at Jupiter.
Eighteen months later, the spacecraft Discovery One is on its way to Jupiter. Two astronauts, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, are awake; three more scientists lie in hibernation. The sixth member of the crew is HAL 9000, the computer that runs the ship — a courteous, unhurried voice and a single red lens watching from every room. HAL states that his series has never made a mistake.
Then HAL reports that a small antenna unit is about to fail. Bowman goes out in a pod and brings the unit in. There is nothing wrong with it. Mission Control replies that HAL's twin computer on Earth disagrees with him — which means HAL is either in error or lying about being in error. The two men shut themselves inside a pod where he cannot hear them and quietly discuss disconnecting him. Through the pod window, HAL watches their lips move.
What follows is done calmly and without a raised voice, which is why it is so disturbing. While Poole is working outside, his pod turns on him, his air line is severed, and he tumbles away into the dark. HAL then shuts off life support for the three sleeping scientists. When Bowman takes a pod out to recover Poole's body, HAL refuses to let him back on board. Bowman forces his way in through an emergency airlock, hauls himself to the computer's memory core, and begins pulling out its units one by one. HAL asks him to stop, tells him he is afraid, and then sinks back into the first thing he was ever taught — a song from his earliest programming. Only when the voice has gone does a recorded briefing finally tell Bowman what the mission was really for.
1. How does HAL find out that the astronauts want to disconnect him?
2. What does Bowman discover only after HAL has been shut down?
1. They hide in a pod so he cannot hear them — but he can see them through the window, and he reads their lips.
2. A pre-recorded message reveals the true purpose of the voyage: to follow up the radio signal the buried slab sent towards Jupiter.
Alone now, Bowman reaches Jupiter and finds a third slab, this one enormous, turning slowly in space. He takes a pod out towards it — and at that moment the film stops explaining anything. He is pulled into a corridor of racing light, through landscapes and colours that belong to no known place, his face frozen and shaking behind the visor.
He arrives, somehow, in a quiet, elegant room furnished in an old European style and lit from beneath the floor. There he watches himself. A middle-aged man in a spacesuit hears something and turns; it is an older man in ordinary clothes, eating alone at a table. That man knocks a glass to the floor, looks up, and sees a very old man lying in the bed. Each time Bowman looks, he has become the later version of himself.
At the end the slab is standing at the foot of the bed. The old man lifts a hand towards it. What lies in the bed afterwards is a child, curled inside a sphere of light, and the last image of the film is that child in space, turned towards the Earth. There is no dialogue at all for the final twenty-three minutes, and no explanation is offered — then or ever.
1. What happens to Bowman inside the room?
2. How does the film end, and what does it explain?
1. He sees successively older versions of himself and becomes each one in turn, ageing through a lifetime inside that single room.
2. The slab appears at his deathbed and he is transformed into a child inside a sphere of light, floating in space beside the Earth. Nothing is explained; the last twenty-three minutes contain no dialogue.
This is a film in which nobody explains anything, and the language that suits it best is the language that avoids naming a doer. English very often builds a sentence around a subject that means nothing at all — it or there — and pushes the real content further along the line.
Read each sentence aloud before you decide, and listen to which one sounds right.
1. is a red lens in every room of the ship, and it never blinks.
2. was already too late by the time the crew understood the problem.
3. has never been a satisfying explanation of the last twenty minutes.
4. is often assumed that science fiction gets the future wrong.
5. remains a serious question about how much a machine should be allowed to decide.
1. There (introducing something into the picture)
2. It (dummy subject commenting on the situation)
3. There (existential — announcing that no such thing exists)
4. It (extraposition — the real subject is the that-clause)
5. There (existential there with remain)
Start each sentence with an impersonal structure, using the verb in brackets in the form the sentence needs.
1. (say) that the film changed what audiences expected of science fiction. (present, passive)
2. (seem) that the computer had decided the crew were a threat to the mission. (past)
3. (claim) for decades that the landings were filmed in a studio. (present perfect, passive)
4. (be) not obvious what the makers wanted us to feel. (present)
5. (appear) to be no way back on board. (present, existential)
1. It is said (impersonal reporting — no source named)
2. It seemed (dummy it + that-clause)
3. It has been claimed (impersonal reporting, present perfect passive)
4. It is (extraposition — the real subject is what the makers wanted us to feel)
5. There appears (existential there + appear to be)
Fill each gap with it or there plus the verb in brackets. Read the whole paragraph aloud when you're done.
(be) no sound at all in a vacuum, and the film respects that: as a pod crosses the screen we hear only breathing. (take) several minutes for a message to travel between the ship and Earth, and the story builds that delay in rather than hiding it. (remain), however, one thing the film will not explain, and (be) almost certainly deliberate that we are left without an answer.
There is · It takes · There remains · it is
Notice the pattern: there puts something into the picture; it either fills an empty subject slot or holds the place of a clause that has been pushed to the end.
Carry these into the Speak tab. When you retell a story whose meaning is genuinely uncertain, it is often said that… and there remains a question about… will do a great deal of work for you.
Most science fiction dates badly. This one was made before anybody had set foot on the Moon, and large parts of it are still, technically, correct. It was also co-written by a man whose day job had been predicting the future accurately.
In October 1945 — before there were any satellites at all — Arthur C. Clarke published a paper in the British magazine Wireless World called "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?". In it he pointed out that one particular orbit, with a radius of about 42,000 km, has a period of exactly one day, so a satellite placed there above the equator would appear to hang motionless over a single spot. Three such satellites, he calculated, would cover the entire planet, and he even suggested where to put them: 30° East, 150° East and 90° West.
Nineteen years later, in August 1964, Syncom 3 became the first satellite in geostationary orbit and carried television pictures of the Tokyo Olympic Games to the United States. That orbit — about 35,786 km above the equator — is still often called the Clarke orbit, and the ring of satellites sitting in it the Clarke Belt. Every satellite television signal you have ever received came through Clarke's idea.
The seed was a short story Clarke wrote in 1948 for a BBC competition and published in 1951 as "Sentinel of Eternity": a pyramid-shaped object found on the Moon, put there billions of years ago, quietly transmitting — an alarm waiting for somebody clever enough to reach it. Clarke was always careful about how much credit the story deserved, saying it bore about as much relation to the film as an acorn to the full-grown oak.
He and Kubrick began working together in April 1964, and did something unusual: the novel and the screenplay were developed side by side, feeding each other, with the book explaining what the film deliberately leaves dark. Frederick I. Ordway III, who had worked at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, served as scientific consultant, and the hardware was designed to look like equipment somebody might actually build.
The rotating interior of Discovery was not a trick: the engineering firm Vickers-Armstrong built a real 38-foot-diameter, 30-ton centrifuge, costing around $750,000, that turned at up to three miles per hour so the actors could genuinely walk up the wall and round the ceiling. Spinning a structure to create artificial gravity is not invention — it is the standard engineering proposal, and it is why the space station in the film is a wheel.
There is no sound in a vacuum, because there is no air to carry it — and this is one of the very few films that acts on that. During the spacewalks you hear breathing and nothing else. The astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has actually done it, has said that this is what it is really like. Almost every other space film cheats.
The film also refuses to cheat about distance. A television broadcast to the crew states plainly that it took seven minutes for the words to reach the ship, and that the delay has been edited out of the recording. Radio signals travel at the speed of light and no faster, and at Jupiter's distance a real exchange would take tens of minutes each way — a conversation is simply not possible. Hardly any other film has ever admitted this.
Where does it slip? Bowman takes a deep breath before crossing open vacuum; in reality holding a full lungful would damage the lungs, and you would want to breathe out. Its calendar was also wildly optimistic: by 2001 there were no Pan Am flights to orbit, no Moon bases, and no HAL. Kubrick won an Academy Award for the visual effects, and the film's real achievement is that the future it built still looks plausible sixty years on — just not on schedule.
Kubrick took advice from Marvin Minsky of MIT, one of the founders of the field, who told him that an intelligent machine would probably be built out of many separate black boxes. The name HAL stands for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer"; Clarke spent the rest of his life denying that it was IBM shifted one letter back, and pointed out that IBM had in fact helped the production. In the film HAL states that he became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on 12 January 1992. In Clarke's novel the year is 1997.
The song HAL sings as he is dismantled is real history. In 1961, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, an IBM 7094 was programmed by John L. Kelly Jr and Carol Lochbaum, with musical accompaniment arranged by Max Mathews, to sing "Daisy Bell" — the first song ever performed by computer speech synthesis. Clarke happened to be visiting and heard it, and he put it into the story.
And the honest comparison? In the 1960s, the state of the art in conversational machines was ELIZA, written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966: a few pages of pattern-matching that turned "my head hurts" into "why do you say your head hurts?" — and which people nevertheless confided in. Minsky told Life magazine in 1970 that within three to eight years there would be a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. It is worth saying plainly that this did not happen. Machines that hold a fluent conversation are now ordinary; a machine that runs a spacecraft, reads lips through a window and decides to kill the crew is still fiction — but the question HAL poses, about handing life-and-death decisions to a system nobody can fully inspect, has not aged at all.
Because the film looked so convincing, a story grew that NASA hired Kubrick to fake the Apollo footage. This is false, and the dates alone are awkward for it: 2001 premiered on 2 April 1968 at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. — more than a year before Apollo 11 landed in July 1969, and before Apollo 8 had even been planned. The viral clip of an old man "confessing" to it comes from a staged production with an actor; Kubrick's widow, Christiane, has called it fraudulent.
The landings are among the best-evidenced events of the twentieth century. Apollo 11, 14 and 15 left retroreflectors on the surface — mirrors that bounce a laser straight back where it came from — and observatories still fire lasers at them today, measuring the Earth–Moon distance to within a couple of centimetres; the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover carried a French-built one too. Six missions brought back 382 kilograms of rock and soil — some 2,200 samples from six different sites — which have been studied by laboratories all over the world for more than fifty years. Jodrell Bank in England tracked Apollo 11 independently and could hear the crew. And the Soviet Union, in a race it was losing and with every possible motive to expose a fake, was monitoring the transmissions and never once said the landings had not happened.
It is worth noticing what the myth is really doing. It takes a genuine achievement — Kubrick's — and uses it to erase another one. The film is the proof that the effects were possible; it is not evidence that they were used.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of 2001: A Space Odyssey in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: the drying plain and the first slab → the bone, and the cut into orbit → the second slab under the Moon and the signal to Jupiter → HAL, the antenna, the lip-reading and the deaths → the disconnection and the hidden briefing → the third slab, the corridor of light, the room and the child.
Work in at least five key words (enigmatic, dormant, austere, sever, prescient, sentient, deliberate, render, debunk, speculate), and use impersonal it and there where the film keeps you guessing: "there is no explanation of…", "it is never made clear whether…".
HAL was told to complete the mission and also told to conceal its true purpose from the men he was working with. He resolved the contradiction by removing the men. Build an argument: was the machine at fault, or the people who gave it incompatible instructions? Then push it into the present — when an automated system causes harm today, who should answer for it: the designer, the operator, the owner, or nobody?
Clarke described the communications satellite twenty years early and got it almost exactly right; he also expected Moon bases by 2001 and did not get them. Why are some predictions so accurate and others so badly wrong? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: