2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

The script by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick recounted a definitive step in human evolution. In the imagined future of 2001, Pan Am makes routine flights to an orbital station inhabited by an American and Soviet scientific population (one): Space Station V (two), still under construction and conceived as a transshipment base to the Moon and other planets, equipped with reception rooms, video conference booths, a Howard Johnson restaurant and a Hilton hotel. The initial episode of 2001 recounts the first spark of rationality in a tribe of African hominids, caused thanks to the intervention of a mysterious monolith (three). 

Skipping millennia in time, the film's second segment features Dr. Heywood Floyd, a member of the National Council of Astronautics, as he travels in a streamlined shuttle to the orbital station. From there he heads to the Moon in Aries 1B, an almost spherical spacecraft that has a landing mechanism similar to that of an LEM module from the Apollo project (four). Floyd lands on the base North American Clavius, in the Tycho crater, in the vicinity of which the mysterious monolith has been found. Suddenly, the monolith begins to emit powerful radiation into space (five). The third segment of the script focuses on astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, who are traveling aboard the gigantic ship Discovery on a mission to the moons of Jupiter. The mission will be dramatically altered by the mutiny of HAL 9000 (six), the artificial brain that controls the navigation, maintenance and communications systems.

 After becoming aware of itself, the computer tries to eliminate the crew to continue the expedition alone, headed in the same direction as the radiation released by the monolith in Clavius. Dave, the final survivor of a highly symbolized fight between machine and man (seven), continues his journey towards "Jupiter and beyond infinity" - the title of the climactic segment of the script – to enter an alternate spatiotemporal dimension (eight). There, after a new encounter with the monolith, the astronaut is elevated to a superhuman condition (nine). While the theme "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" resounds, the last shot of the film shows two discs of identical size: the Earth and the amniotic sphere where Dave is found in a fetal state, a new superman of planetary proportions and Nietzschean evocations.

A decisive factor in the verisimilitude of 2001 is given by its sophisticated production design, conceived in detail from the scientific possibility. Kubrick's film had received the advice of American and Soviet scientists and, furthermore, the film project had been developed in parallel with space exploration: for the first time, a believable science fiction movie had a prior base of space projects in development. The first milestone in 2001 was the recreation of a space shuttle, four years before Nixon approved its construction. The second aspect of space exploration in the film is marked by the existence of an orbital station (ten), a project that would be discarded by Nixon at the beginning of the 70s and that the Reagan administration took up again ten years later. The station The International Space Agency, advocated by Kubrick and Clarke, would not become a reality until its first two pieces were placed in Earth orbit between November and December 1998. 

The establishment of lunar bases is, without a doubt, one of the most evocative anticipations of the film, despite lacking the spectacularity of the great orbital wheel. The existence of a lunar base was already present in the imagination spread in the 1950s by Collier's and the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland, although it had been ignored by George Pal in The Conquest of Space (eleven). According to Clarke's script, the US Clavius ​​base on Tycho is home to a colony of 1,800 lunar colonists, capable of self-sufficiency thanks to the treatment of lunar rocks that provide the necessary hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. In addition, food is generated thanks to an artificial biosphere that, on the other hand, allows air purification.

Indeed, the presence of Pan Am in space in 2001 reissues an aeronautical feat present in the national imagination, and the expedition to Jupiter of the USSC Discovery One, carried out in secret before the other power, shows the North American pre-eminence in the exploration of space (twelve). However, the film also shows a mitigation of the tension between the two nations at the end of the decade and even an inclination towards collaboration, as can be seen from the tense but cordial conversation between Dr. Floyd and his Soviet colleagues aboard Space Station V. Regarding this meeting between scientists of both powers, Hollings writes: Just as the two tribes of hominids fight brutally to dispute a puddle of dirty water at the beginning from Kubrick's film, these cold war adversaries face off over clean plastic cups, seated around a gleaming table, all of them breathing the same air.

The facilities of the lunar base are restricted to the port where Floyd's ship docks or to the conference room presided over by a stars and stripes flag. In this sense, the patriotic symbology is more explicit than in The conquest of space, since the Martian mission is not carried out under any flag. Life aboard the pioneers of Discovery also does not offer signs that evoke domestic signs of the abandoned home on Earth, with two symptomatic exceptions. The first takes place when astronaut Frank Poole listens to the birthday greeting that his parents send him by videoconference, an allegory of the reflection on rebirth developed in the film (thirteen).