![]() (I’m reminded of those silver monoliths that mysteriously showed up in Utah and a few other places in 2020, but those were definitely not otherworldly.) After a fight with the rival troop, an ape hurls the bone into the sky and, in a smooth split-second transition, the object becomes a satellite floating in space. ![]() Ah, yes, these are hominids, early humans, and this must be a milestone in their evolution, brought on by the arrival of the otherworldly monolith. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” starts up again. So much jumping, so much crouching are these actors’ knees okay? Later, one of the apes plays lazily with an animal bone, but then something clicks and he starts furiously bashing the skeleton in front of him. Looks kind of like a giant remote control without the buttons. It’s morning again on what feels like the 17th day on the prairie, and a tall, black monolith is sticking out of the ground. Read: Why the Mars movie is the space-age Western As we move through these vignettes of ape life, I’m half-expecting David Attenborough to chime in. Later, the animals huddle together in a cave to sleep. There’s a lot of hooting and bouncing around until the rival troop leaves. Another group of apes arrives, apparently eager to take over our protagonists’ watering hole. Well, a bunch of actors dressed up in furry costumes and prosthetics. We’re a few minutes in when my partner, sitting next to me on the couch, asks if we can watch this at 2x speed. Some people had warned me that 2001 is pretty slow-moving, but it is slooow-moooving. We slink from shot to shot of the landscape. (It’s “ Also Sprach Zarathustra,” by the German composer Richard Strauss.) The sun rises over a flat, grassy plain. The movie kicks off with orchestral music that you’ve probably heard whether or not you’ve seen 2001, a heart-thumping and foreboding melody, with that dramatic bum … bum … BA-BUM. (If you’re suddenly compelled to watch 2001 first, you can rent it for $3.99 on YouTube.) ![]() Even though the movie has been out for 54 years, I feel a duty to warn you that there are major spoilers ahead. What follows is my real-time reaction to watching 2001 on a recent evening, edited for length and clarity. Surely a space reporter should see it-and surely a reporter should take notes. The 1968 film is considered one of the greatest in history and its director, Stanley Kubrick, a cinematic genius. This is an enormous oversight, apparently. But I have never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve seen people blast off on rockets with my own eyes. I’ve watched a livestream of NASA smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. I’ve watched footage of a helicopter flying on Mars. ![]() As the outer-space correspondent at The Atlantic, I spend a lot of time looking beyond Earth’s atmosphere. ![]()
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