2001 opens with György Ligeti's opening cluster (which spans five octaves) from Atmosphères, unaccompanied by any on-screen image (in a theater presentation the curtains would remain drawn for this duration). The following introductory sequence depicts a perfectly aligned Sun rising behind the Earth and the Moon accompanied by the first movement of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. The rest of the film can be divided into three chapters, each preceded by on-screen title cards.

The first chapter of 2001, entitled "The Dawn of Man", begins in the late Pliocene epoch, showing a tribe of prehistoric apes in their regular life activities: avoiding a predatory leopard and fighting with another tribe over a waterhole. A mysterious black rectangular monolith appears near their habitation, and is nervously examined by the apes.

Following this encounter, a lone ape (called "Moon Watcher" in Arthur C. Clarke's novel) is shown scavenging through a pile of bones. The man-ape picks up a bone and plays with it, becoming increasingly agitated, ending up crushing the other bones as with a club. The man-apes are next shown eating meat — presumably that of a freshly killed tapir, many of which are depicted throughout the chapter. With their newfound weapon, this tribe now recapture the waterhole, beating an enemy ape to death.

In the famous match cut that follows, the victorious "Moon Watcher" throws his bone weapon into the air, at which point the film jumps forward to the modern era, matching the image of the bone to that of a man-made satellite. Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube" waltz accompanies the following scenes of space transport.

The remainder of the first chapter takes place in what was to be the near future, the year 1999. It first depicts a transport shuttle docking to an Earth-orbital space station, several shots of the interior of which show it carries only one passenger: Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester), a scientist bound for the Moon. Floyd arrives at the station (and the waltz has its final cadence). Then, after disembarking, a monotone stewardess announces the first spoken lines of the film: "Here you are, sir. Main Level, please." Floyd meets Mr. Miller of Station Security, and the two walk through the sterile station to a restaurant, but Floyd stops to make a videophone call as Miller goes on ahead.

In the first narrative exposition, Floyd meets a group of Russian scientists including an "old friend," Elena, and sits down for a brief chat. After Floyd reveals that he is going to the Moon base Clavius, Dr. Andrei Smyslov (Leonard Rossiter) inquires as to why nobody had been able to establish contact there, and Elena mentions that the base recently denied emergency landing to one of their shuttles. Floyd expresses a blank surprise, but when Smyslov brings up a rumor that an epidemic has broken out at the base, Floyd firmly refuses to comment on the situation, citing security restrictions.

The next scene depicts a lunar landing craft Aries heading towards the Moon base Clavius. It lands and is lowered on an elevated platform into the base. In a meeting room here, Floyd lectures to a small room of scientists and/or officials on the importance of hiding the true reason for Clavius' suspicious activities: that they have discovered a monolith buried on the Moon (dubbed Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1 or TMA-1 for short). The scene cuts to a transport shuttle on the Moon (accompanied by Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna"), where Floyd and two other scientists debate the nature of the monolith, and assert that it had been "deliberately buried." The shuttle lands at the dig site, and the scientists warily approach the monolith. They gather around it for a group photo (to accompaniment by the returning Kyrie from the Ligeti Requiem), but are interrupted when an earsplitting, continuous high-pitched tone is picked up by their radio receivers.



With no explanation, the film jumps forward once again to its second chapter entitled "Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later." It takes place on the spaceship Discovery One, which has been sent to the planet Jupiter. Accompanying the pilots, astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), are three scientists in cryogenic hibernation and the HAL 9000 supercomputer (Douglas Rain). Various scenes are shown depicting life onboard the ship: exercising, eating, watching television, sleeping, sunbathing, playing chess, and drawing. The main music at the beginning is Gayane's Adagio from Aram Khatchaturian's Gayane ballet. During a conversation with Bowman, HAL expresses anxiety about the mission, and immediately predicts with full confidence an impending failure of the ship's Earth communications system. Bowman exits the Discovery in an EVA pod to retrieve and repair the part, but upon manual examination no fault can be found. HAL suggests restoring the part and waiting for it to fail to determine the problem. Bowman and Poole retreat to an EVA pod to discuss HAL's extremely unusual turn, finally deciding to "disconnect" him. Unbeknownst to them, HAL is reading their lips. An intermission follows.

Poole now exits the Discovery in an EVA pod to restore the part while Bowman watches from inside the ship. As Poole exits the EVA pod to restore the part, HAL uses the empty pod to murder Poole, who is next shown frantically attempting to reattach his air hose, then floating lifelessly into space. Bowman exits the ship in another EVA pod to rescue him (forgetting to bring his space helmet). While Bowman is outside, HAL kills the three hibernating scientists by disabling their life support systems.

Bowman manages to retrieve Poole's body, and upon returning, commands HAL to "open the pod bay doors." (creating an often quoted line). HAL refuses, and reveals that he knows of Bowman's plan to disconnect him as discussed with Poole in the EVA pod earlier. He also informs Bowman that without his helmet it would be fatal to enter the emergency air lock. He decides to do it anyway, and by using the EVA pod's ejection system propels himself into the airlock, seals the chamber, and fills it with air.

Bowman next enters HAL's 'brain room' with the intention to disable him. With HAL pleading for him to stop, Bowman proceeds to dismantle and disconnect him. Gradually HAL reverts back to his earliest programming, loses his memory, and sings the song Daisy Bell as he slowly deteriorates. HAL's shut-down appears to trigger a pre-recorded video briefing by Heywood Floyd, explaining to the crew (although Bowman is now the only survivor) the true nature of the mission, which is to investigate the signal sent from the strange monolith on the Moon.



The third chapter, entitled "Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite" begins with a view of a third monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and of the Discovery One entering the Jupiter system. As the planet and its moons and the monolith appear to align, Bowman again exits the Discovery One in an EVA pod, and flies towards the phenomenon — again accompanied by the Ligeti Kyrie.

Bowman, in the EVA pod, now appears to travel across vast distances of space and time through a tunnel of colorful light and sound, in what is often labeled the "Star Gate sequence," in the midst of which the Kyrie segues to Ligeti’s colossal orchestral essay Atmosphéres. He arrives alone in a Louis XVI-style hotel room (the alien-sounding music of Ligeti's Aventures is heard through an echo chamber). He is depicted through various phases of ageing, until finally shown lying on what appears to be his deathbed, at the foot of which appears a fourth and final monolith. Bowman slowly reaches out to it and is seemingly transformed into a fetus-like being surrounded by a transparent orb of light, commonly referred to as the "Star Child", looking across to Earth—the film's final scene, as Sprach Zarathustra climaxes once more.

Insofar as current known laws of physics are concerned, 2001 is highly realistic compared to some other science fiction films: it is among the few to accurately present outer space as transmitting no sound. The film is also notable for its portrayal of weightlessness in spaceships and outer space. Tracking shots inside the rotating "wheel" which provides artificial gravity is contrasted in the film with the weightlessness outside the wheel during the repair and the scenes of HAL's disconnection. The scenes in the pod bay where the astronauts are walking may be explained by an earlier shot, during which a stewardess walks in Zero-G while wearing shoes labeled "Grip Shoes". This also explains the slow pace of the walk.

Much was made by MGM of this aspect of the film in its promotion, claiming in a 1968 publicity brochure that "Everything in 2001: A Space Odyssey can happen within the next three decades, and... most of the picture will happen by the beginning of the next millennium.". This has proved to be wrong, although some of the film's predictions (see below) have been realized.

The film fails to be scientifically accurate in other minor details, many of which could be explained by the technical difficulty of producing a realistic effect:

The gravitational force inside the Clavius base appears to be that of Earth rather than the Moon.

The dust blown up by the exhaust of the lunar shuttle is seen to billow up from the landing pad instead of radiating out in straight lines, as would happen in the near-vacuum of the lunar atmosphere.

The height of lunar mountains and the extent of meteoric erosion were overestimated, as the film was made before the lunar expeditions of the Apollo program.

The Earth is shown in different phases during the landing maneuvers of the Aries 1B moon ship (an error of continuity as well as science).

In the sequence where David Bowman blows the hatch on his space pod to make an unprotected entry to Discovery's airlock, there is a shot with Dave rebounding in the airlock chamber, while his space pod is still sitting just outside the airlock door. Since the pod is not fixed to Discovery, the blowing of the pod's hatch should have caused the pod to move away on the thrust of its escaping atmosphere—though rather slowly, given a rough estimation of the mass and speed of ejected air (and Bowman) in relation to the mass of the pod.

In the above scene, David Bowman is clearly seen holding his breath before being ejected from his capsule. Before being exposed to a vacuum, NASA states a man should exhale, as holding one's breath in vacuum will rupture a person's lungs.* (See also vacuum.)

When Heywood Floyd is flying to the moon (supposedly in a weightless state), he sips through a straw. But when he lets go of it, the fluid slides back into the container. This shows that the fluid inside the straw is in fact not weightless.

During the approach of the Pan Am shuttle to the space station, two cinematographic errors occur. First, the spin of the space station switches back and forth between clockwise and anticlockwise. Second, a shot of the shuttle cockpit shows the shuttle synchronizing its spin with that of the space station, but the rendezvous monitor on the control panel shows the space station still rotating relative to the shuttle.

Though the crew quarters in the spaceship Discovery are arranged in a rotating wheel to simulate gravity, which is often overlooked in science fiction, the wheel's small radius would require a fairly rapid RPM (five to ten RPM depending on the actual radius) to produce tellurian gravity. It is suggested that humans become dizzy, nauseated and disoriented under significant Coriolis forces, and few if any humans could become accustomed to fast rotation. Also, the less the radius of rotation, the more the force of gravity exerted on the human body would vary between the feet, waist and head.

In one scene, a flight attendant grabs the pen of a sleeping Heywood Floyd as it floats in zero gravity inside a spaceship cabin. The pen is rotating, but it is not rotating about its own center of mass; instead, it is rotating about a center that is significantly external to the pen. This happens because, in reality, the pen was mounted on a large, transparent, rotating disk from which the actress playing the flight attendant plucked it, and it was not mounted at the center of the disk. In an actual zero-gravity environment, some force would have to be acting upon the pen in order to compel it to rotate around anything other than its own center of mass.

In many scenes of the film, the stars appear to be moving past the various spaceships. This would not be possible unless the ships were going extremely fast (which would be impossible as a ship cannot travel that fast), or they were turning (which is clearly not the case in some scenes).

The film makes a number of explicit and implicit predictions.

Some of these were correct:

Routine space flight.

Flat-screen computer monitors (simulated by rear projection in the film).

Small, portable, flat-screen television sets.

In-flight television screens with a wide aspect.

Glass cockpits in spacecraft.

The proliferation of TV stations (the BBC's channels numbering at least 12).

Telephone numbers with more digits than in the 1960s.

The endurance of corporations like IBM, Aeroflot, and Hilton Hotels to the year 2001.

The use of credit cards with data stripes. (The card Heywood Floyd inserts into the telephone is of American Express; a close-up photo of the prop reveals that it contained a barcode rather than a magnetic strip, but the principle is the same.)

Biometric identification. The film shows voice print identification on arrival at the space station.

The basic design of the 213 ft Orion III Pan Am Orbital Clipper can be seen in the form of the smaller Orbital Sciences X-34, which is being prepared as a plane-launched test orbiter.

Good-quality, high-resolution visiophones are common.

Space travel is commonplace by 2000. In the film,

colonies (at least 2) have been established on the moon,

manned missions to Jupiter are feasible,

hotels in orbit, part of a revolving 2000ft Space Station,

commercial space flight is routine,

Technology is available to put humans in suspended animation.

HAL's artificial intelligence exceeds even modern state of the art by orders of magnitude.

The survival of Pan American Airlines and the Bell System to the year 2000.

The survival of the Soviet Union to the year 2000.

Kubrick's unique treatment of narrative in 2001 is perhaps best exemplified by the scene in which the HAL-9000 computer murders the three hibernating astronauts while Bowman is outside the ship trying to rescue Poole. The inhuman nature of the murders is conveyed with chilling simplicity, in a scene that contains only three elements.



When HAL disconnects the life support systems, we see a flashing warning sign, "COMPUTER MALFUNCTION", shown full-screen and accompanied only by the sound of a shrill alarm beep; this is intercut with static shots of the hibernating astronauts, encased in their sarcophagus-like pods, and close-up full-screen shots of the life-signs monitor of each astronaut. As the astronauts begin to die, the warning changes to "LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL" and we see the vital signs on the monitors beginning to level out. Finally, when the three sleeping astronauts are dead, there is only silence and the ominously banal flashing sign, "LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED".

"The film combines eerie contemporary music with classical waltzes and ballet suites, grunts and snarls with pneumatic hisses and synthesized beeps. One character has a rough, throaty voice but a computer talks with a soft, mellifluous tone (the classic characterization of a smooth-talking villain). Space is accurately depicted as a truly silent vacuum, but Technological Man fills this world with the sound of circulating air systems, humming computers and hissing doors. 2001 is alive with sound, and most of it is environmental - that is, most of it is ambient.

"The legacy of 2001's Ambient music sound design is clear in later films such as George Lucas's THX 1138, Carroll Ballard's Never Cry Wolf, David Lynch's Eraserhead, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Filmmakers became far more conscious of the revolutionary possibilities that effective sound editing offered. Noise, quiet, eclectic effects, all contribute to a scene's power, but treating a film as an extended sonic performance, as well as visual, expanded the art." -- D.B. Spalding *