2001: A Space Odyssey

Africa, four million years ago. A small group of animals — a little like people, a little like apes — live near a river. They are hungry. Another group takes their water, and they cannot stop them.

One morning something new is there. It is a tall black stone, flat and very smooth. It is not a normal rock, and nobody knows where it came from. In the film it is called a monolith. The animals are afraid, but one of them touches it.

After this, that animal picks up a big bone. It learns that the bone can break things. Now it has a tool — and a weapon. The group takes the water back. Then the film jumps four million years, from the bone to a spaceship in the sky.

It is now the year 2001. A scientist called Dr Floyd flies to a base on the Moon. There is a secret: people have found a second black stone under the ground. When the sun touches it, the stone sends a very strong signal to the planet Jupiter.

Eighteen months later, a spaceship called Discovery is flying to Jupiter. Two astronauts are awake: Dave and Frank. Three more scientists are asleep in special beds. The last member of the crew is not a person. It is a computer called HAL. HAL has a quiet, friendly voice and one red eye in every room. HAL says that his computers never make mistakes.

Then HAL says that a small part of the ship is going to break. Dave goes outside and brings the part back. But there is nothing wrong with it. People on Earth say that HAL is wrong. So Dave and Frank go into a small space pod, where HAL cannot hear them, and they talk about turning him off. But HAL can see them through the window — and HAL can read their lips.

Then something terrible happens, and it happens very quietly. Frank is working outside the ship. His air line is cut, and he goes away into space. HAL also stops the machines that keep the three sleeping scientists alive. When Dave goes outside to help Frank, HAL will not open the door for him.

Dave finds another way in. He goes to the room where HAL's memory is, and he starts to turn HAL off, part by part. HAL asks him to stop. HAL says he is afraid. At the end, HAL sings an old song from his first days. Then he is silent. Only now does a recorded message tell Dave the real reason for the journey.

Now Dave is alone. He arrives at Jupiter, and he finds a third black stone. This one is very big. He flies out to it in a small pod — and then the film becomes very strange.

Dave travels through a long tunnel of coloured light. He sees places that nobody can name. Then he is in a quiet, beautiful room with old furniture. He is not in a spaceship any more.

In the room, Dave sees himself. First he is a man in a spacesuit. Then he is an old man eating alone. Then he is a very old man in a bed. Each time he looks, he is older.

At the end the black stone is next to the bed. The old man puts out his hand. Then he is not there. In the bed there is a baby inside a ball of light. The last picture in the film is that baby in space, looking at the Earth. The film does not explain it. In the last twenty-three minutes, nobody speaks at all.

Space is silent. There is no air in space, so sound cannot travel. When the men work outside the ship, you hear only their breathing. This is true, and almost no other space film does it. An astronaut called Chris Hadfield has been outside a spaceship, and he says the film got it right.

The big wheel is real science. If you make a spaceship turn round and round, people inside can walk on the floor, like on Earth. To film this, engineers built a real machine: a ring 38 feet (about 12 metres) wide that could turn. The actors really walked up the wall.

Messages are slow. Radio signals travel fast, but space is very big. In the film, people say clearly that it took seven minutes for their words to reach the ship. You cannot have a normal conversation with a spaceship near Jupiter — you must wait. Most films forget this.

The film looked so real that some people started to say a story: they said that Kubrick made fake films of the Moon landing for NASA. This is not true. First, the dates are wrong: 2001 came out in April 1968, and Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969 — more than a year later. There is also a video of an old man "telling the truth" about it, but that man is an actor in a made-up film. Kubrick's wife has said that it is false.

We know the Moon landings really happened. Astronauts left special mirrors on the Moon, and today scientists still send lasers to them and get the light back. They brought home 382 kilograms of Moon rock, and laboratories all over the world have studied it for more than fifty years. Other countries listened to the astronauts too. And the Soviet Union, which wanted very much to win the race, never said that it was fake.