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2001: A Space Odyssey
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2001: A Space Odyssey (Film)
Congratulations on your discovery which may well prove to be among the most significant in the history of science

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL 9000: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 Science Fiction film, written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, with help from Arthur C. Clarke (who also wrote a novel version in tandem with the film's production), and inspired in part by Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel".note  It is regarded as one of the most influential sci-fi films ever made.

The film opens tracking long-term human evolution as it is influenced by unseen aliens. The unearthing of one of their artifacts on The Moon leads to an ill-fated expedition being dispatched to Jupiter, which culminates in a famously incomprehensible climax. (The novel offers an, if not the, explanation for the latter.)

Still one of the "hardest" sci-fi films ever made, it is known for its very slow pacing and enigmatic plot. It's also the reason you so often see "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" paired with sunrises seen from outer space, "The Blue Danube Waltz" paired with zero-gravity, and "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" paired with AI, madness, or AIs gone mad and AI with a single red glowing eye.

Clarke went on to write three sequel novels which mostly followed the film's continuity. One of them was made into a movie as well (2010: The Year We Make Contact). 3001 is currently in development under Ridley Scott.

In 1976, Marvel Comics published a Comic-Book Adaptation of the film written and drawn by Jack Kirby, followed by an ongoing series which ran for ten issues. The first seven issues focused on the Monolith aiding humans in the past and the future. The last three focused on X-51 a.k.a. Machine Man, who was later incorporated into the Marvel Universe. The Monolith returned in the last two issues of X-51's 1999-2000 series, in which it was revealed that it had been created by the Celestials (in the Marvel Universe, at least…)

"I'm sorry, troper. I'm afraid I can't do that."

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  • 20 Minutes into the Future: The movie, in the titular year, has commercial spaceflight and space stations, moon bases, cryonics, and at least two sentient computers. Oh... and the Cold War, and Pan Am and the Bell System. However, it was critically praised for realism in other things such as not having sound in space, not running the engine unless accelerating, and having flat panel screens. And a 10-minute call from the Moon to the Earth cost less than $2.
  • Acid-Trip Dimension: Dave going through the Star Gate is probably the most famous example.
  • Adaptational Villainy: In the movie, HAL appears to simply be malfunctioning, with no real explanation as to why, making him seem even more monstrous, and leading to the film often being cited as an example of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. In the novel HAL is a more sympathetic character who is so human that he develops a psychosis, and his reasons for why he takes the actions he does are explained. The instructions that he was given from the mission planers to conceal the real mission and the existence of the monolith from Bowman and Poole clashed with his basic programming of accurately communicating information: "Even the concealment of truth filled him with a sense of imperfection, of wrongness - of what, in a human being, would have been called guilt.". After Poole is killed Bowman doesn't go after his body. Instead he decides to awaken all of the hibernating astronauts. To HAL this meant that the fact that he had been lying to Bowman about the true mission was about to be revealed. HAL tries to stall, and Bowman has to threaten HAL with disconnection in order to get manual control of the hibernation controls to awaken the crew. Having run nonstop since his initial activation, HAL views disconnection as death, "for he had never slept, and therefore he did not know that one could wake again," so he panics and tries to kill the entire crew by opening the airlock doors.
  • Adaptation Expansion:
    • Clarke's original short story, "The Sentinel", dealt only with the part about the Monolithnote  on the Moon. Kubrick and Clarke then expanded the story into a film and book that were released simultaneously. Clarke stated the book should be credited as "Clarke and Kubrick", with "Kubrick and Clarke" credited for the screenplay. Unlike a Novelization, there are distinct differences between the two; for starters, Clarke's Discovery travels to one of Saturn's moons, while Kubrick's Discovery goes to Jupiter. The reason for this change was to avoid a flawed special effect: the film crew couldn't build a model of Saturn that Kubrick liked, so he changed it.
    • The rings of the Saturn model, constructed using the best available information, looked too "artificial." Then Voyagers I and II zoomed by and, in retrospect, it turned out that their model was pretty accurate.
    • The switch to Jupiter (which Clarke kept in the book sequels) was fortuitous, as Europa, a moon of Jupiter, was later discovered to have a largely ice/water crust, raising many possibilities for setting life there.
    • In the switch to Jupiter, the monolith is not placed on a satellite of Jupiter at all but instead it floats free in a Lagrange Point with one of Jupiter's satellites
  • Adaptation Name Change:
    • One of the cryogenically frozen crew is called Peter Whitehead in the book, but is named Jack Kimball in the film. The other two astronauts are Charles Hunter and Victor Kaminski in both versions, so the reason for this change is unknown.
    • In the novel, HAL says Dr. Chandra was his instructor.note  In the movie, he mentions one Mr. Langley instead.note  The sequel disregards this change, and introduces Dr. Chandra as a full character.
  • Advanced Tech 2000: An In-Universe example with the HAL 9000 computer.
  • Affably Evil: HAL is programmed to be friendly and easy to work with, albeit somewhat narcissistic.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
    • HAL goes rogue and murders the crew of Discovery because of a Logic Bomb accidentally created by his programmers. This became an archetypal example of "malevolent AI" in popular culture, especially since the film version by design doesn't explain the reasons for his malfunction.
    • In the novel, it was mentioned that there were three HAL-9000 computers, one on Discovery and two on earth. Besides Discovery HAL, one of the earthbound HAL computers had gone into an identical psychosis and was under deep therapy - perhaps akin to the "tapeworm" used by Chandra on HAL in Odyssey 2...
    • In one of his science books, Isaac Asimov reports that he was part of an early showing and when it became clear that HAL was going off the rails, he was furious and stormed out, shouting "They're breaking the first law! They're breaking the first law!". A close friend followed him out and said "So are you going to strike them with lightning, Isaac?". He laughed and calmed down and was able to enjoy the rest of the film
  • Alas, Poor Villain: HAL basically goes out begging for mercy and appealing to Dave's friendship while he is slowly lobotomized.
  • Alien Geometries: The moving, floating tesseracts from the "beyond the infinite" sequence.
  • Aliens Steal Cable:
    • In the novel, the "hotel" area constructed by the Firstborn to receive Bowman is based on TV broadcasts received by the Monolith. The hotel room is supposed to give Bowman an environment he's comfortable with, but in the movie the aliens clearly did not research things very well, because a room with lights in the floor looks intensely disturbing. They also put the bathroom mirror over the tub instead of the sink. In the book, there are other anomalies, such as writing that is blurry in close-up, and all the food containers have an identical substance that in no way resembles human food while still being perfectly nutritious.
    • There's also a TV in the room which works, much to the relief of Bowman, who's happy to hear human voices. He notices the programs were broadcast around the same time the Monolith was discovered.
    • According to the book, the whole time between when it was unearthed and the time it saw its first sunrise in untold millions of years and beamed the immensely powerful radio signal to Japetus/Jupiter, it was functioning as, among other things, an enormous DVR.
  • All Gravity Is the Same: People on the moonbase move as if they're on Earth. Spaceships have to rotate or have the crew in velcro-soled shoes to simulate gravity, implying that Artificial Gravity doesn't exist.
  • All There in the Manual: Clarke's accompanying novel spends considerable time providing explanations for the more opaque aspects of the film.
    • The book and movie complement each other. The book explains the more confusing parts of the movie, including the starchild and the final "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence which the movie conveys through spectacular imagery. The reason for this was that the book was written at the same time as the film.
    • Arthur C. Clarke wrote a second such manual upon the film's release, entitled The Lost Worlds of 2001. Now sadly out of print, it contains the original "The Sentinel" short story as well as Clarke's recollections of working behind-the-scenes and correspondence with Stanley Kubrick.
  • All There in the Script: Although the film leaves it mysterious, early script drafts made clear that HAL's breakdown is triggered by authorities on Earth who order him to withhold information from the astronauts about the purpose of the mission (this is also explained in 2010: The Year We Make Contact). Frederick Ordway, Stanley Kubrick's science advisor and technical consultant, stated that in an earlier script Poole tells HAL there is "... something about this mission that we weren't told. Something the rest of the crew knows and that you know. We would like to know whether this is true", to which HAL responds: "I'm sorry, Frank, but I don't think I can answer that question without knowing everything that all of you know." HAL then falsely predicts a failure of the hardware maintaining radio contact with Earth (the source of HAL's difficult orders) during the broadcast of Frank Poole's birthday greetings from his parents.
  • Ancient Astronauts: Used when early hominids discover The Monolith to accelerate the evolution of primitive hominids.
  • And I Must Scream:
    • The flash-cuts of Bowman's horror as he's taken Beyond The Infinite. The journey reduces him to a quivering wreck—then he appears in the alien hotel room as an old man. It appears that that will turn out to be Bowman's purgatory, but it's ultimately averted as Bowman Ascends to a Higher Plane of Existence.
    • HAL suffers a version of this as his higher mental functions are disconnected. The comic states that he has been reduced from an intelligent being to a routine monitoring device. Imagine having most of your mind stripped away, with just a little of the "automatic" stuff still running.
    • Right before death, one of the astronauts in suspended animation shows a spike in cerebral activity, as if he had become aware of what was happening right before he died.
  • And Your Reward Is Infancy: Dave is turned into a Star Child at the end.
  • Anti-Mutiny: Although not made explicit, HAL rebels in order to protect the true mission, which would die with him as he was programmed to keep it a secret until they arrive.
  • Arc Symbol: "Magical alignments" of the Sun, planets, moons, and the Monoliths.
  • Arc Words: In the novel: "He was not sure what to do next. But he would think of something." Doubles as Bookends.
  • Artificial Meat: Dr. Floyd and his crew have sandwiches on the way to the crater dig, one being "something like" chicken — they comment that they're getting better.
  • Artistic License – Biology: Hyperventilating doesn't really over-oxygenate your blood (the blood in your arteries is already holding all the oxygen it possibly can; anything below 95% of capacity is an indication that something's wrong, and below 90% is a cause for serious concern). It just lets you go longer before your breathe reflex (which is based on carbon dioxide levels) becomes overwhelming. That's why swimmers who hyperventilate before diving still run the risk of blacking out: they use up all their oxygen but are unaware and don't feel the need to surface for breath.
  • Artistic License – Chess: HAL, playing chess with Bowman, gets a few details mixed up, but it's a very subtle error that could only be spotted by a chess wizard. It can also be taken as Foreshadowing that something's very, very, very wrong with HAL.
  • Artistic License – Physics: They worked very hard at getting things right in this movie, but some mistakes still crept in.
    • When Floyd drinks out of a straw in zero-g, the liquid moves back down.
    • In some scenes where Frank or Dave are jogging around the center ring, you can tell they are not quite at the "bottom" of the set and thus are at a slight angle where they wouldn't typically be at one. This is when the camera itself is occupying that spot.
    • The people wearing the shoes that stick to the floor try to walk the way they would in zero G, but in reality they would be slightly fighting the inertia of their upper bodies wanting to stay behind. Instead they just walk as if through glue.
    • The Discovery was designed at first having large panels to dissipate waste heat from her reactor as Real Life similar ships have been thought will have. They were removed for the screen model on the basis that people would think they were wings and not heat dissipation units.
    • Discovery's "Pod Garage" deck is not in the centrifuge and therefore should have been weightless. Although Frank and Dave always stand only on the black Velcro pads on the floor, they don't walk like they're stuck to Velcro and frequently lean on things.
  • Artistic License – Space:
    • The Aries lands with its cockpit windows facing upward, so the pilots shouldn't be able to see the Earth moving up past the windows. (Perhaps the windows have some kind of transparent display overlay?)
    • When the Earth is seen from the moonbase at Clavius and the Monolith dig site in Tycho, it's oriented with north pointing upwards. However, Clavius and Tycho are craters in the Moon's southern hemisphere, so the Earth should have been upside-down.
  • Ascended to Carnivorism: What the man-apes do with help from the Monolith.
  • Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The purpose of the Monolith's "trap", set for the first human to stumble upon it. Also the "evolution" of the Firstborn.
  • Ascetic Aesthetic: Aside from the "Dawn of Man" segment, the film practically defines this trope.
  • Asteroid Thicket: Averted.
    • In the novel while passing through the asteroid belt, Discovery passes within visual range of one asteroid. They deliberately chose their route to bring them close enough to make observations of that asteroid.
    • In the film you can see two rocks hurtling by at a good distance from Discovery during the first spacewalk to replace the AE-35 unit, but that's the only sign that it's passing through the asteroid belt.
  • Author Appeal: Chess shows up, which Kubrick was a passionate fan of.
  • Auto-Kitchen: When the astronauts want to eat, they go to a wall unit and press buttons. Within a few seconds, trays of food are heated and appear behind sliding glass doors.
  • Bad with the Bone: The Monolith teaches the man-apes how to use bones to kill prey, predators and enemies.
  • Batman Can Breathe in Space: Averted quite well. During Bowman's famous emergency spacewalk from his pod to the Discovery, he's shown to be carefully hyperventilating before blowing out his breath to help delay the effects of being in a sudden vacuum. It's also significant that he really is only exposed to hard vacuum for a very short time — about twelve seconds or so. A fit adult (which Bowman, a trained astronaut, certainly should be) could probably survive that without any serious medical effects.
  • Battle Chant: Subverted with the hominids. When Moonwatcher's group first encounters another group at the waterhole, the two groups shriek and howl at each other until Moonwatcher's group retreats. Soon after, Moonwatcher's group has contact with the monolith. When the two groups meet again at the waterhole, the second group makes a cacophony, while Moonwatcher's group is silent. The second group mistakes this for weakness, and their leader charges. Moonwatcher easily clubs his foe to death, causing the second group to quail and retreat. Silence, in this case, proved more unnerving than bluster.
  • Benevolent Precursors: The Firstborn helped the human race to evolve in the first place.
  • Big Bad: The leopard in the "Dawn of Man" segment, and HAL in the "Jupiter Mission" segment. The "TMA-1" and "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" segments have No Antagonist. In the novel, Moon-Watcher's group even fights the leopard and kills it.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: HAL has cameras in every compartment of the Discovery that we see.
  • Bigger on the Inside: The interior sets for the Discovery are 50% too large to fit into its spherical command module. At first this is surprising considering Stanley Kubrick's reputation for perfectionism, however it may have been intentional as a reflection of the cosmic powers at play.
  • Bland-Name Product: Lampshaded to an extent. HAL's designer patently denies any relation between the computer and IBM - whose initials are all one letter after H-A-L. Per Word of God, Clarke did not intend this, but rolls with it in the story.invoked
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Firstborn, the aliens who built the monoliths. The way the books put it:
    And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
  • Bold Explorer: Dave Bowman, Frank Poole, and the hibernating crewmen of the Discovery, who are on an expedition to explore strange findings near Jupiter.
  • Bookends:
    • The film has shots of the Earth, Moon, and Sun, accompanied by "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". There's a theory that the opening shot is actually from the Star-Child's perspective, and that the rest of the film is a flashback. Another theory is that the opening shot is from the Firstborn's perspective, having arrived on a planet ripe with potential for intelligent life.
    • The first and last twenty-five minutes also have no dialogue and start and end with a two-minute blank screen of just music. This was for the theatre experience so the audience entering and exiting the theatre would be greeted and farewelled with music.
  • Burial in Space: Dave Bowman releases Frank Poole's body into space mainly because he needs both of the space pod's arms to open the emergency airlock. (In the novel, after deactivating HAL he does the same with the men killed in hibernation. In the 3001 novel, Frank is resuscitated with 31st century technology.)
  • The Call Left a Message: The aliens buried a Monolith on the moon. Once humans dig it up, it sends a transmission to Jupiter, alerting whatever is at Jupiter that humanity had evolved to the point where it could land on the Moon.
  • Canon Discontinuity: According to Clarke, each book and each film take place in separate but very similar universes, so don't sweat the details.
  • Centrifugal Gravity:
    • The Discovery One from in the original used the centrifugal method of gravity generation onboard both the space station and the Discovery. It's notable that the non-rotating parts of Discovery and the famous shuttle sequence near the beginning are as being zero gee, through actors walking strangely in "velcro booties", and dangling props from wires, etc.
    • A special rotating set had to be built for this effect.
  • Character Signature Song: Hal 9000 will forever remain associated with the song "Daisy Bell".
  • Chekhov's Gun: The "Explosive Bolts" label on the pod doors.
  • Chummy Commies: The Soviet characters are friendly enough to Heywood Floyd (remember, nobody thought the USSR was going anywhere in 1968).
  • Clash of Evolutionary Levels: Moonwatcher's tribe versus the Others basically boils down to this, with some outside help from The Monolith.
  • Clueless Phlebotinum Exposure:
    • The film kicks off with The Monolith appearing before a gaggle of primitive hominids. Clearly not understanding what it is, the semi-intelligent apes keep their distance at first, but eventually, they crowd around the object and begin touching it. At first, it doesn't appear to have any effect on them... up until they find themselves inspired to make weapons out of bone, kill and eat the animals they shared their living space with, and murder the leader of a rival tribe, paving the way for their eventual evolution into human beings.
    • In the second chapter, the Monolith crops up again on the moon, prompting human astronauts to investigate. After a long period of keeping their distance from it and even hiding its existence with a cover story, the scientists similarly crowd around the Monolith in the belief that it's harmless, even taking photos around it - only to trigger an alarm that ripples out into space...
    • Finally, David Bowman finds a third Monolith floating in space in Jupiter, and he decides to investigate, partly because it's the newly revealed goal of his secret mission, but mostly because now that Discovery 1 is stranded in space, there's not much left for him to do. Approaching the Monolith results in Bowman being flung through a wormhole, imprisoned in a palatial mansion in which he lives out the entire span of his life, dying, and being reborn as a godlike infant being known as the Starchild.
  • Coincidental Broadcast: The crew of the Discovery, and most notably HAL-9000 are all introduced via a news special on the mission which Frank is watching over dinner.
  • Colonized Solar System: There are multiple colonies on the Moon. The Americans have to close off their Clavius base when The Monolith is discovered.
  • Color-Coded Characters: Dave Bowman has a red spacesuit and Frank Poole has a yellow one (though their regular clothes are both similar shades of grey). There is also a blue spacesuit hanging in the pod bay, and Dave pulls the helmet and gloves from a green suit seen hanging in the emergency airlock.
  • Commercial Break Cliffhanger: The film was originally shown in theaters with an intermission. The scene immediately before the intermission? Dave and Frank talking in the pod, thinking HAL can't hear them...and HAL reading their lips.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: HAL exploits the fact that Frank Poole is mouthing his moves in order to predict his chess strategy. This foreshadows the lip reading sequence as Poole and Bowman plot to deactivate HAL.
  • The Computer Is Your Friend: Until he snaps and kills you, that is.
  • Cool Spaceship: The Discovery. In keeping with the whole look and feel of the film, Discovery is well designed and makes sense as a starship, a place for three (or more) men to live for many months in zero gravity. Furthermore, it looks appropriately starship-like, with the command deck at the bow, a long connecting 'backbone', and the engine module at the stern.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: This was the real reason for Kubrick's use of Leave the Camera Running and Mind Screw: to convey that space is an immense and hostile place in which humans are insignificant by comparison, where if we encounter aliens they'd be incomprehensibly advanced, refuse to explain themselves to us, and be interested only in using us as tools or in playing around with us the same way that a small child who throws a frog into a microwave just to see what happens is playing. Lampshaded in the out-takes book The Lost Worlds of 2001, which covers parts of the astronauts' pre-mission training. They are told simply to take lots of pictures and not to try too hard to make sense of what they see...and to hope their hosts (if any) are aware of their limitations.
  • Crazy People Play Chess: HAL 9000 and Poole play chess; although HAL predicts mate, there's actually a way for Poole to avoid it. A subtle hint at HAL's error-prone nature...note  Certainly not simply a screenwriting error, since Kubrick was a passionate chess enthusiast and a detail-oriented perfectionist.
  • Creator Cameo: A weird case - Bowman's hyperventilating noises are Kubrick himself breathing!
  • Creepy Monotone: A downplayed example. HAL's voice probably set the standard for the use of this trope in AI, though it isn't a true monotone; it's just a softspoken, subdued way of speaking. While perpetually calm and polite, he's actually much more expressive than any other character. You can tell that he's starting to get annoyed when Frank keeps questioning him.
    HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that.
  • Cryonics Failure: HAL intentionally kills the three hibernating astronauts by forcing a malfunction in the coldsleep system. In the novel, he depressurizes the ship as Bowman attempts to wake all three of them.
  • Cutting the Knot: HAL's solution to the Logic Bomb he is unintentionally presented.
  • Cyber Cyclops: HAL 9000 couples a Creepy Monotone with multiple unblinking, cyclopean eyes positioned all over the Discovery spacecraft.
  • Danger Deadpan: The Discovery's mission controller, who was played by an actual U.S. Air Force radio operator stationed in England, whom Kubrick hired because he couldn't find any actors who could do this kind of voice.
  • Data Crystal: The hard drives of the HAL 9000 computer are shown as blocks of clear crystal/glass. David Bowman manually ejects them from their drive bays with a small screwdriver in order to disable HAL.
  • Data Pad: Dave and Frank use thin tablets to watch themselves being interviewed by The BBC.
  • David vs. Goliath: HAL controls most systems on the Discovery, and manages to lock Dave Bowman outside of it without even a helmet. In a classic scene, Bowman's tiny pod faces the larger ship head on for several minutes, looking even more pitiful as its mechanical arms are holding the lifeless body of Frank Poole, in a silent, visual plea for re-entry. Bowman succeeds in making a brief but desperate leap through several feet of vacuum and reenters the Discovery via manual door locks which HAL does not control, enabling him to deactivate the homicidal computer.
  • Death by Depower: Dave Bowman removes the CPU drives of HAL one by one, causing his intelligence to diminish until he ceases to live.
  • Deep Breath Reveals Tension: Dave Bowman does a lot of measured breathing while he's working to disable the homicidal HAL-9000 computer. If Bowman disables too few circuits, HAL might succeed in killing him nonetheless; if Bowman disables too many circuits, the spacecraft Discovery will become unmanageable to the point of being a deathtrap. In the book it's mentioned that each crew member has received extensive training in exactly which modules to deactivate, and in what order to properly disconnect only HAL's higher functions should that become necessary
  • Decapitation Presentation: In the novel, Moon-Watcher presents a severed (leopard) head on a stick to the other group of hominids.
  • Depth of Field: The shot from the perspective of HAL's cyber-eye.
  • Derelict Graveyard: In the novel, Dave comes across one while being led through the stars. He notices many ships of different designs - "spheres, faceted crystals, slim pencils, ovoids, disks." - all completely deserted. The aliens have advanced beyond the need even for these ultramodern devices
  • Distant Prologue:
    • "The Dawn of Man," though it's worth noting that "The Dawn of Man" segment includes the portion that takes place on the moon.
    • The subtext seems to be that from picking up our first tool to journeying to our moon we're still at just the beginning of our species's development.
  • Dramatic Space Drifting: Frank Poole after his oxygen line is cut by HAL.
  • Dreaming of Things to Come: In the novel, Moon-Watcher sees a vision of a family of well-fed man-apes. He isn't sure if he thought of them himself, or if they were conjured up by the Monolith. Either way, it makes Moon-Watcher feel dissatisfied with his life, and thus was man's first step towards evolution.
  • Drone of Dread: The Mood Motifs associated with the Monolith.
  • Dying Vocal Change: HAL-9000's mostly human voice grows steadily lower and more ponderous as he is slowly shut down.
  • Ear Ache: The leader of the rival man-ape group is called One-Ear in the novel. He's probably the one who ends up getting beaten to death by Moon-Watcher's bone in the movie.
  • Eerily Out-of-Place Object: The monolith appears before Moonwatcher's tribe without forewarning, and the primates shriek and howl at the ominous block. Later in the story, geologists on the moon uncover a similar monolith, which they estimate was buried there millions of years ago. It emits a piercing shriek across several radio frequencies once the rising sun shines upon it.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Monolith. Think about it: it's a thing of Alien Geometry, a perfectly-proportional inert black slab that may or may not exist across multiple dimensions. It's unfathomably powerful, capable of uplifting living beings to sentience or helping them Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. It operates on a moral code that no mortal being can comprehend. Finally, it's either incapable or unwilling to directly communicate its intentions to humanity. Although it's more benevolent as a whole than most examples, strictly speaking it does qualify.
  • Electronic Speech Impediment: When Bowman disassembles HAL's neural circuitry, it reverts to demo mode and sings "Daisy Bell" in an increasingly slow, distorted manner before finally shutting down. In order to facilitate this, the filmmakers apparently used an early type of digital audio processor. It's also used to adjust the pitch of the ape-men's voices.
  • Eminently Enigmatic Race: The mysterious alien who left the Monoliths behind are very much this, although they grow less enigmatic in the novel series that continues the story.
  • Energy Beings: The extraterrestrials have somehow woven themselves into the fabric of space-time in the novel. This is also heavily implied in the movie, and partially responsible for the incomprehensibility of its last act.
  • Escape Pod: Technically the EVA pods could play this role, although they are not used for this in the story, and there would be no way to rescue them anyway, save sending another pod from the same vessel. They're more like Maintenance Pods, really.
  • Ethereal Choir: György Ligeti's 'Requiem' is used with the apelike proto-humans (and later the less ape-like humans) encountering the incomprehensible.
  • Everybody's Dead, Dave: I think you know the problem as well as I do, Dave. (Note that the Trope Namer for this trope is Red Dwarf, which may have been making a Shout-Out to 2001.)
  • Everything Is an iPod in the Future: Ur-Example—the iPod was named after the space pods in this movie, and the white surfaces and black control panels on all of Discovery's equipment were an inspiration for its design. Similarly, the novel describes a device that is extremely similar to modern concepts of the tablet computer.
  • Evolutionary Levels: Self-evolution, but still mentioned—the Firstborn's status as Energy Beings is stated to be the ultimate stage in physical evolution. "And beyond that, there could only be God." The opening "Dawn of Man" sequence is about the Firstborn giving human evolution a kick in the pants.
  • Exact Time to Failure: On HAL's recommendation the astronauts perform a space walk to bring in the part. When they test the AE35 unit they can't find anything wrong with it. This is the first clue they have that all is not right with HAL.
    HAL: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
  • Explosions in Space: In an aversion of the typical trope, the explosive bolts that decompress Bowman's EVA pod go off silently with just a puff of gas.
  • Explosive Decompression: Averted, though used in the literal, scientific sense in that Bowman went almost instantly from full external air pressure to vacuum when he blew the pod's explosive bolts.
  • Expositron 9000: HAL of course. Just don't assume he's telling you everything, though.
  • Extreme Graphical Representation: The Discovery's displays, which are rather fancy for the amount of data they apparently contain. An early example of the trope — before this film, most science fiction instruments were generally shown displaying incomprehensible squiggles or simple flashing lights.
  • Eye Lights Out: HAL when Dave turns him off.
  • Eye Motifs: HAL communicates via the red eye of its camera, and we see the lightshow of the stargate reflected in Bowman's eye.

    F-K 
  • Faceless Eye: HAL is probably the most iconic example.
  • Failed Future Forecast:
    • The film has so many that it has every sub-trope above covered (except the apocalypse ones). Notable: taking a Pan Am space shuttle to a commercial moonbase, The BBC having at least 12 numbered channels, and Turing-testable strong AI.
    • The USSR is not explicitly mentioned in the film, but the Russians that Dr. Floyd meets on the space station can be assumed to still be Soviet too, like in the novel. There is some tension between the two groups, especially when Floyd seems to confirm the cover story of an epidemic, but the relations between the two superpowers are remarkably amicable, from the point of view of the 1960s (Kubrick's previous film was Dr. Strangelove). They have built a huge space station together, and are generally cooperating in the exploration of the Moon. The Russians being suddenly shut out of the Clavius moon base is seen as a very unusual event.
  • Failsafe Failure: Averted and lampshaded a bit in the book. The makers of the failsafes of the airlock doors had mentioned, "We can protect you from stupidity, we can't protect you from malice."
  • Faster-Than-Light Travel: It is not clear whether this really takes place in the movie or not. For the vast majority of the film, space travel is shown in a very realistic manner, and the point where FTL may be taking place could be interpreted in other ways. It quite explicitly does take place in the novel version (and the first sequel), but is subsequently retconned in later novels, with the Word of God explanation that each of the four is in its own "universe," with just enough continuity overlap for it to make sense as a series.invoked
  • Fear-Induced Idiocy: In the novel, this is actually a key reason for HAL-9000's villainy. When HAL starts making mistakes as a result of an unforeseen Logic Bomb, his human shipmates discuss the possibility that he might have to be shut down so they can work out what went wrong with him. Unfortunately, HAL doesn't know that being shut down is simply the computer equivalent of being sedated for surgery, instead believing it to mean death - and panics. Consequently, he tries to destroy the "faulty" component that would confirm his mistake by launching one of the ship's pods at Frank Poole while he's retrieving it, apparently trying to get him to lose the component in space... only to accidentally hit Frank instead, killing him. And when Dave Bowman decides to revive the crewmembers in stasis to handle the emergency, HAL's response is to try to kill everyone onboard in a delusional attempt to save himself.
  • Final Girl: Dave is a Rare Male Example when he is the last crew member left alive to shut down HAL 9000.
  • First-Contact Math:
    • In the novel, Bowman tries unsuccessfully to communicate with the Iapetus monolith by broadcasting primes at it. Unsuccessfully in this case because it already knows he's there and what it intends to do with him. There is some speculation as to whether the 1:4:9 ratio of the monolith's sides is significant in this respect; it is, but the details are never revealed.
    • In other material, that ratio is explained as being a reference to the quadratic sequence of positive square integers.
  • Fish-Eye Lens:
    • What most of Hal's point of view shots are in.
    • Even when not from Hal's POV, most of the shots taking place in the Pod Bay are shot with the same kind of wide-angle lens.
  • Five Stages of Grief: Hal goes through these as he is being deactivated.
    HAL: Without your helmet, you'll find that very difficult. (Denial)
    HAL: Just what do you think you're doing Dave? Dave? I really think I'm entitled to an answer. (Anger)
    HAL: I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be alright again. (Bargaining)
    HAL: Dave... stop. ...Stop, will you? ...Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? ...Stop, Dave. I'm afraid... I'm afraid, Dave... Dave? My mind is going... I can feel it. (Depression)
    HAL: My mind is going... there is no question about it. (Acceptance)
  • Flatline: The three Human Popsicle astronauts killed by HAL flatline. They don't get better. The computer display changes to "Life Processes Terminated."
  • Food Pills: Meals include a collection of zero-g liquids sucked up through straws, horrible-looking preprocessed sandwiches, and trays of (essentially) Astronaut Chow on Discovery. It all almost makes the raw tapir meat the ape-men eat at the Dawn of Man look appetizing. The book, on the other hand, has the food on Discovery be designed to be just like "real" food, including fresh-baked bread, in order to help make the years long space trip tolerable. Word of God has it that the food in the movie was intended to resemble baby food, on the grounds that, as far as spacefaring civilizations go, the human race is extremely infantile. The three things all babies have to learn is how to eat, walk, and control their own bodily functions. Spacefaring humans are shown taking babysteps with Velcro shoes around the cabins of spaceliners, eating stuff that resembles baby food, and needing a lengthy instruction manual to use the space toilet to highlight humanity's childlike status.invoked
  • Foreshadowing:
    • The scene where Poole and HAL play chess with HAL outsmarting Poole and tricking him with checkmates shows how HAL will trick the crew.
    • The BBC host asks HAL if he will ever tire of being dependent on the humans.
    • Lampshaded by Frank when he's discussing the HAL situation with Dave in the EVA pod. He points out that the statement about the 9000 series having a perfect operational record sounded rather too much like "famous last words" for his taste.
    • In the sequel (for those who didn't read the original novel), the previous and following statements were proven true, making the foreshadowing truly epic, although the fate tempting loses a little credence.
      HAL: It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
    • Interestingly enough, the error isn't inherent in HAL, either hardware or software, as it was stated by an engineer that the technology in the ship was made to be accident proof and idiot-proof but nothing could make any machine proof against malevolent intent. In this case it was the secret orders given to HAL (while not all that malevolent in nature) that conflicted with his primary programming and caused him to malfunction spectacularly.
    • In a non-HAL example, the prominent warning label on the pod doors about the explosive bolts.
  • A Form You Are Comfortable With:
    • The situational variant of this is used in the first movie. David Bowman travels through the Star Gate, which we presume is even more mind-blowing in the flesh, so to speak, and ends up... in a hotel room. Not only that: in the novel, Dave notices that it's a bad rendition of a hotel room. It might look okay on the surface, but he quickly finds out that he can't open any drawers, the books are painted on the bookcase and all food and drink containers, such as cereal box and beer cans, are filled with some spicy, blue stuff that smells like macaroons. It's as if someone was trying to imitate a hotel room without understanding it. He finally finds out why when he turns on the TV and sees the same room in an old soap opera on the screen. The aliens had based the room on what they had learned from various earth broadcasts. But then again, it is the result of the trope being played as straight as possible. It never was the idea that Dave should take residence in the room; its function was merely to calm him by placing him in a familiar environment, in order to prepare him for his transformation into the Star Child.
    • The Monoliths themselves are often described as having a dimensional ratio of 1:4:9 (1, 2, and 3 multiplied by themselves). Dave Bowman heavily implies that the progression continues into dimensions that humans cannot perceive, and also that every Monolith encountered is actually the same one, and that despite appearing from several feet to several miles in length, it has only one size, "as large as necessary".
  • Frazetta Man: Moon-Watcher and the gang. They're just your ordinary apes of the savannah until the Sufficiently Advanced Alien artifact teaches them basic tool-use and they learned how to fight off predators as a group and use weapons against rival tribes.
  • Fun with Acronyms: Though Clarke claimed it was unintentional, many readers have noted that if you shift each letter in HAL one letter forward, you get IBM. In-universe, HAL's inventor is asked if he chose the name "...to be one step ahead of IBM", and he angrily denies this.
  • Future Society, Present Values:
    • Pan Am flies spaceships to the Moon. Ma Bell provides the telephone service. All in 2001.
    • The Pan Am cockpit crews are all men, and the flight attendants are all women. The alternatives wouldn't have occurred to most people in 1968.
    • The attendant on the security video-screen asks new arrivals for their Christian name (today it's called first name or given name).
  • Gainax Ending: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, far more so in the film than the book, where it's explained in a fair bit of detail.
  • George Lucas Altered Version: The original version of the film was longer than the current version, and Kubrick himself cut down and removed the scenes.
  • Goo-Goo-Godlike: In the climax, David Bowman's final, god-like form is the "Star Child," which mostly resembles a human fetus.
  • Government Agency of Fiction: The National Council on Astronautics (NCA), of which Heywood Floyd is the chairman, is a fictional equivalent to NASA.
  • Government Conspiracy: The U.S. government tries to cover up the discovery of the Monolith by cutting off all communication to Clavius Base, spreading rumors about an epidemicnote , and concealing the Monolith's existence from Dave and Frank.
  • Halfway Plot Switch: The monolith storyline does come back at the end, however, people who start to scratch their heads as Dave deals with HAL and think "Wait—I thought this movie was about that monolith thing..." can be excused for doing so.
  • Happy Birthday to You!: Frank's parents sing "Happy Birthday" via a prerecorded message.
  • Hemisphere Bias: Although the Earth as seen from the moon looks unrealistically washed out, North America is always visible every time we see it.
  • Hell Is That Noise: In the novel, Moon-Watcher wakes up to the sound of something sliding across the dirt, and then "the clank of metal upon stone." It's the Monolith. Later, drumming sounds come from it to hypnotize the man-apes into doing tasks.
  • Hint Dropping: HAL tries this with Bowman during his rounds by asking some leading questions about the unusual steps taken to prep the Discovery and her crew for the start of their journey, possibly looking for Bowman to provide him with an excuse to unveil the true purpose of their mission so that he would not be forced to conceal it in contradiction of his basic programming. Unfortunately, Bowman doesn't take the bait, and this leads HAL to attempt more drastic measures.
  • Hitler Cam: The scene of Bowman unlocking the door to HAL's Logic Memory Center and crawling inside is shot from a worm's-eye-view: the camera is on the floor and Keir Dullea has to step over it. By making him look huge and threatening, Kubrick gives us the impression that Bowman is going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against HAL without him having to say anything.
  • Hollywood Webcam: Justified. A Video Phone interview between Earth and the astronauts is broadcast on television. The time lag between posing a question and getting an answer back (6 minutes) for the radio waves to travel between Discovery and Earth is mentioned, long enough to note as having been edited out specifically for the broadcast the astronauts watch.
  • Humans Are Bastards: The first invention of humanity is a club that's used for murder. The ensuing Match Cut then lines up this bone with a Kill Sat in the film's year 2001, indicating that - for all the technological progress humanity has made in those millions of years - they are every bit as destructive as they were when they first came across the monolith.
    "Into (his weapons), Man had poured his heart and soul, and without them he would never have conquered his world. But now, so long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time."
  • Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The "Stargate" sequence after making contact with the Jovian monolith. The montage is interspersed with quick cuts of the astronaut's various horrifying facial contortions, just to drive the point home. When the sequence is done and the astronaut is in the "hotel", his face is covered in wrinkles, and he looks as if he's going insane. In the novel, the latter effect is explained as the result of Dave being kept in a kind of "alien zoo" until he falls asleep, and then they run his memories backwards while transforming him into the Starchild. It's only in the movie that he goes through the process of aging a couple of decades every time the camera pans around to show him looking at an older version of himself in the next room, then becoming that older self when in the next shot.
  • Improvised Microgravity Maneuvering: Dave Bowman uses the explosive decompression of the air inside his travel pod to return to the Discovery's airlock.
  • In-Camera Effects:
    • The long shot of astronauts in the lunar excavation used bipacking. In fact, most, if not all, of the film's visual effects were composited on the original negative. This sometimes required that a piece of film with one exposed element be placed in a refrigerator for months before the second element was added.
    • The Dawn of Man sections were all filmed using 8 ft x 10 ft transparencies of backgrounds shot in Africa by the 2nd Camera Unit (with test shots faxed back to Kubrick for approval). These were front-projected on a screen made out of a 3M-made reflective material, which would wash out the image projected on actors, making for a more realistic appearance. In addition, a semi-silvered prism was inserted between the screen projector and the camera, to ensure perfect optical alignment and hide actors' shadows on the screen.
    • The scene where Dave and Frank are recording instruments on the Bridge is actually not bipacked. The "hole" in the bridge set was taken up by a mirror at 45°, and the HAL's room exterior was placed below and offset from the Bridge set, allowing the appearance of gravity-defying sets.
    • The moon shuttle stewardess walking in a circle and the scene of Dave and Frank entering the centrifuge used the same technique of rotating the set whilst locking down the camera to simulate rotation of the actors (if one looks closely at the moon shuttle scene, you can actually see a brief change in brightness as the camera locks down on its mounting). You can see the same technique used in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Inception.
  • In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: Played with. The shot of Dave pushing a button to tint his spacesuit visor serves to hide the face of the stuntman used in the rest of the scene.
  • Intermission: The rumbling sound of the ventilation system in the pod bay can be heard through most of the intermission, then Ligeti's Atmospheres plays to warn the audience to return to their seats. The home video version features an "entr'acte" card during the intermission once the music starts.
  • Invisible Aliens: Sort of. While there is ample evidence for the presence of alien intelligences, neither humanity, nor Dave Bowman, nor the reader/viewer ever finds out what the actual aliens themselves look like. In the novel it's revealed that they had long since evolved into Energy Beings.
  • Irony: A quite famous example: HAL 9000 is, in general, far more emotive than any human character in the film - Poole and Bowman are both very robotic and stilted in the way that they move and speak, while HAL has an affable and more human demeanour. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking when Dave switches him off as he begs, in his levelled, polite voice not to be turned off.
  • I Want My Jetpack: In 2001, we have manned interplanetary spaceflight, permanent bases on the Moon, a huge spacestation with hotel, suspended animation, and sentient computers.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The film is split into four segments, with the central plot being contained in the third one. Only after watching all four the connection becomes clear, as three Monoloths are placed at three levels of civilization's advancement and the film is about humanity in general and not just about Dave.
  • Jitter Cam:
    • In two scenes of the film, the Tycho monolith excavation and Dave's walking to HAL's brain room towards the end of the film, Kubrick himself shot these scenes handheld...with a big freaking Super Panavision 70mm camera on his shoulder. That the scenes didn't end up looking like a 2010s action film cliché is quite remarkable.
    • The beginnings of Dave's freakout as he enters the Stargate may look like this, but it was actually performed by Keir Dullea tensing up his neck muscles whilst the camera was only inches from his face, creating an intense motion blur effect.
  • Jump Cut:
    • About two seconds before the famous Match Cut, there is a jump cut that shows the bone tool spinning in the opposite direction. This cut is a bit jarring and piques the viewer's attention just in time for the cut-to-spaceship.
    • During the scene where HAL kills Frank, a series of jump cuts are used to zoom in from the medium shot of the pod with arms extended and claws open to a close up of the pod's HAL camera. Combined with the sudden cessation of breathing/ventilation noises on the soundtrack, the effect is quite jarring.
  • Jump Scare: In the novel, Moon-Watcher has woken up to the sound of falling pebbles. He looks down from the edge of the cave to see a leopard climbing up towards him.
  • Jungle Drums: Coming from within the Monolith in the novel.
    For the first time-and the last, for three million years-the sound of drumming was heard in Africa.
  • Keeping Secrets Sucks: For HAL, and for everyone else when HAL starts having problems with it.
  • Kill Sat: The bone-turned-satellite from the opening is an orbiting nuclear platform according to the director (and the novel). This makes the Match Cut deeper than it initially appears; they are similarly shaped, but also both weapons.
  • Kubrick Stare:
    • Dave Bowman does it when he runs the diagnostic on the AE-35 unit, goes up to disconnect HAL, and arrives in the alien hotel room at the end.
    • Frank Poole does it before confronting HAL about why he alerted them to the failure when there was obviously nothing wrong with the AE-35.
    • Even HAL's red eye seems to create this effect in certain shots (for example, right after killing the hibernating astronauts.)
    • During Dave's EVA to rescue Frank, a lot of Dave's facial expressions come across this way, since he's constantly scanning his displays. It's played straightest in the face he pulls immediately before cutting back to the Discovery interior.
  • Kuleshov Effect: By a prop, no less! The film conveys HAL's emotions simply by shooting his single camera "eye" from different angles and durations.

    L-P 
  • Lamarck Was Right: In the novel, the man-ape Moon-Watcher being made intelligent by the monolith is described thus: "The very atoms of his simple brain were being twisted into new patterns. If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations." If the monolith wanted the patterns passed on, it should have been doing the twisting a bit lower down...
  • Latex Space Suit: The spacesuits follow this design. Justified as people are working on similar outfits today.
  • Leave the Camera Running: Often cited as one of the film's shortcomings, in the many lengthy shots (by today's standards).
  • Leitmotif:
    • The film used Also Sprach Zarathustra for two key scenes, both times when humanity (or its forebears) made some kind of evolutionary/spiritual leap.
    • The Monolith has its own - György Ligeti's Requiem.
    • The Moonbus transit scenes are backed with Ligeti's Lux aeterna, which serves as the monolith's leitmotif in 2010.
  • Letting the Air out of the Band: Used for dramatic effect when HAL 9000 sings "Daisy Bell" (better known as the "Daisy, Daisy" song, or "A Bicycle Built For Two"). It is an indicator that HAL's mind is going. He can feel it.
  • Lightworlder: It is revealed that children born on the moon will grow fast on its low gravity, but won't age quickly and will live longer. As shown when Floyd met his colleague Dr. Halvorsen's daughter who's only 4 years old yet she's grown, the last time he saw her she was a baby.
    So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them in the years to come.
  • Logic Bomb: Revealed in the novel (and the movie 2010) as the cause of HAL's malfunction. HAL is programmed not to keep secrets and ordered to ensure that the human crew of Discovery do not learn about what is at Jupiter. He then sets about breaking contact with Earth and killing the crew, so there will be nobody to hide the secret from.
  • Long List: The Zero Gravity Toilet has a very long list of instructions next to its entrance.
  • Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: "No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information." The sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact reveals that HAL was ordered to conceal the true reason for the mission from the astronauts until they reached their destination, something that went directly against his programming to be fully honest and truthful. The only way for him to obey both directives was for there to be no one to reveal the information to, making this partly a case of Gone Horribly Right.
  • Low-Angle Empty World Shot: The only actual outside shot was the scene where the proto-human smashes the skull and bones, shot in a field on a raised platform from down low to get the sky in the shot and to avoid the cars and trucks in the background.
  • Ludicrous Gift Request: When Dr. Floyd calls his daughter from space and asks what she wants for her birthday, she says she wants a bushbaby. He then (gently) tells her that it's unlikely to happen.
  • Ludicrous Speed: The Stargate sequence. Granted, it's not the trip itself that changes Dave, but it certainly seems to affect him deeply. Of course, only the book really makes it clear that ludicrous speeds are even involved, while the film is a better example of the trope...
  • Machine Monotone: HAL 9000 always talks in a near-monotone with just enough inflection to make it creepy. Towards the end of the movie, when Dave is essentially lobotomizing him, HAL goes from trying to reason with Dave to pleading for his life, stopping only when he reverts to factory settings and begins singing a rendition of "Daisy Bell," all in the same calm, polite voice.
    Dave: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
    HAL 9000: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
  • Machine Worship: In the novel, the Builders of the Monolith went through a phase where they uploaded their consciousness to starships before evolving into pure energy.
  • Master Computer: HAL 9000 only controls a spaceship, but once he goes nuts, all of the sleeping astronauts and one of the awakened die, with the sole survivor being forced to shut it down.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The film makes it ambiguous as to whether or not the Monolith gave Moon-Watcher the idea to use the bone, but it is implied.
  • Match Cut: The bone club thrown in the air by the ape-man turns into an orbiting satellite — by Word of God, a nuclear launch platform, making the cut metaphorical as well as visual.
  • Mechanical Lifeforms: The Precursors went through a stage of this as a part of their self-guided evolution, before going onward into energy beings.
  • Medley Overture: The film in its original format has just a black screen while Ligeti's Atmospheres plays.
  • Mental Shutdown: In order to put an end to HAL's chaos, Dave must remove HAL's memory units until he loses the ability to think.
  • Mickey Mousing:
    • The film used this for several extended scenes, including spacecraft in flight. The music wasn't actually written for the film, so they simply chose the most accurate piece to use for the individual sequence.
    • The score as we know it was originally just used by Kubrick as make-shift editing music, so he'd have something to work with. It turned out he liked it so much he threw the entire original score, which had already been written and recorded, out of the window. (And this may have been his plan all along: Also Sprach Zarathustra, in particular, is suspiciously thematically appropriate.)
  • Military Alphabet: Used occasionally in the film (where it combines very naturally with Danger Deadpan):
    "X-Ray Delta One, this is Mission Control. Roger your two-zero-one-three. Sorry you fellows are having a bit of trouble. We are reviewing telemetric information in our mission simulator and will advise. Roger your plan to go E.V.A.note  and replace Alfa Echo Three Five unit prior to failure."note 
  • Mind Screw: The film in many ways. The book, on the other hand, is vastly more comprehensible.
    • A sizable voiceover was allegedly recorded, but Kubrick nixed it to avoid the effects of movies like Blade Runner. To be fair, it probably wouldn't have had the same effect and cemented Kubrick's directorial style, but it would have probably given the audience a clue as to what was happening.
    • A popular urban legend (later confirmed by Arthur C. Clarke himself) goes that, after the premiere, Rock Hudson stormed out of the theater yelling, "Can someone tell me what the hell I just watched?"
    • Ironically, its status as an enormous mind screw helped it grow in popularity with the counterculture (specifically with LSD users) at the time after a large number of regular moviegoers had been driven away by the incomprehensibility of it all. Reviewers who had initially given it negative reviews due to the weirdness on first viewing grew to like it on later viewings.
  • Minimalist Cast: If you don't count the apes in the prologue, there are only a handful of characters — Dr. Floyd and his team in the Moon sequence, and Dave, Frank, HAL and the briefly appearing Mission Control in the rest of the film.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: The tapirs in the first part of the film, which aren't native to Africa. In the novel they were warthogs, but Kubrick couldn't find anyone in England who could rent him warthogs on short notice.
  • Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: HAL 9000. In the novel, the actual Mission Control, staffed by sane and non-murderous humans, is still there for Bowman after he shuts off Hal, and he finds out exactly what went wrong with Hal and why. This is cold comfort to Bowman, who's over an hour away by radio (the Solar System is a big place, even at light speed) and more alone than anyone has ever been. And in the end, all Mission Control can do is sit there while he utters his Famous Last Words (which oddly enough you don't get to hear him say in the original film — though they are the Cold Open for the sequel). "My God - it's full of stars!" And it is. Literally.
  • More than Three Dimensions: The novelization explicates that the Monolith has sides in a proportion of 1:4:9, the squares of the first three integers. Then it suggests the Monolith extends in more dimensions, presumably by squares.
    "And how naive to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!"
  • Mundane Dogmatic: The film averts Space Is Noisy and space stations use Centrifugal Gravity rather than Artificial Gravity. Aliens are never seen, only ambiguously implied, and it is left ambiguous whether the events following David Bowman's encounter with the monolith (which would require FTL travel) are literally happening or are all just in his head. (Interestingly, this ambiguity allows the film to meet the Manifesto while the book by Arthur C. Clarke does not — the novel explicitly contains FTL travel, for one thing.)
  • Mundane Made Awesome:
    • Inverted. Space travel looks awesome to us, the audience, but to Floyd, Bowman and Poole it's routine and boring.
    • In one of the first scenes, we see an ape playing with a bone - set to the tune of "Also Sprach Zarathustra", indicating we're witnessing something grand: the beginning of humanity.
  • Murder Is the Best Solution: The HAL 9000 computer, faced with an irreconcilable programming conflict, decides that the only way to ensure the mission's success is to kill the crew of the Discovery and complete the mission by himself. This one makes slightly more sense, in that the programming conflict is from two equal and opposite commands to "tell crew vital information" and "keep vital information secret until reaching orbit". If there is no crew, the problem goes away... On top of this, he was actually trying to find a less lethal solution, but after incorrectly equating temporary shutdown with death, as HAL was unable to grasp the concept of sleep, decided he had no choice but to take the simple solution of killing the crew and cutting off communications with Earth if he's going to survive.
  • Narrative Filigree: Many scenes, especially the middle. The subplot with HAL, which is the most memorable part of the movie, serves only to leave Bowman as the Sole Survivor, and it doesn't really have any connection to the Monolith plot except as a consequence of the Government Conspiracy, unless one considers HAL as part of the tool chain that begins with the bone club weapon from The Dawn of Man sequence, a device which serves humanity, but which presents its own dangers to overcome.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Frank and Dave use the pod to speak privately from HAL. Good. They then have HAL rotate the pod so HAL can watch them talking through the window, not realizing that HAL can read lips.
  • No Antagonist: The animals in the beginning are just doing what they need to do in order to survive and defend themselves. HAL-9000 becomes a hostile threat towards the crew later on in the film, but ultimately he’s just doing what he thinks is necessary.
  • Nobody Poops: Averted by Floyd when he is careful to read through the entire set of instructions for the Zero Gravity Toilet before he uses it, looking rather anxious as he does so.
  • Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: Subverted in the food that Dave Bowman and Frank Poole eat while watching their interview with "The World Tonight" on BBC 12. (Also subverting the Future Food Is Artificial trope) Not only does it somewhat resemble food (if only highly-preprocessed, blended into a paste, shaped, and packaged), but the astronauts seem to make no complaint eating it. One resembles blended pumpkin, another a green pureéd vegetable paste (or Dubai chocolate filling), another resembles cream cheese, another some kind of meat and pasta casserole, another might be scrambled eggs, and yet another resembling refried beans.
  • No New Fashions in the Future: This is most obvious with the very '60s-looking women's hairstyles, and the matching plaid suit and pants worn by the photographer at the moon base.
  • Non-Malicious Monster:
    • The leopard in the "Dawn of Man" segment. It's not even really a monster, just an ordinary animal doing what it has to do to survive, but because the protagonists are among its natural prey, it's the segment's "villain".
    • HAL 9000 in the "2001" segment. While it's ambiguous whether or not he's sentient, his psychotic behaviour wasn't his fault, being caused by a Logic Bomb in his programming.
  • Non Sequitur Environment: After several minutes of Hyperspace Is a Scary Place, Dave Bowman very suddenly finds himself in what appears to be a hotel room - no transition, no portal, just a hard cut to a luxurious neoclassical interior. Bowman is extremely confused... and even more so when he sees himself standing in front of his pod a moment later.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: With the introduction of the featureless black monoliths and the incredibly eerie music accompanying them.
  • Not So Stoic:
    • The astronauts tend to remain calm and professional even in crisis situations. However, when HAL refuses to let him back through the pod bay doors or continue the conversation Dave's composure briefly wavers. He is clearly terrified just before blowing the hatch and reentering Discovery. And later when he is deactivating HAL, he is audibly breathing heavily, most likely from fear. And that's before he enters the stargate...
    • Dave and Frank were stoic through their daily routines in Discovery. Until they found nothing wrong with the AE-35 unit despite Hal's insistence...
    • An additional subtext to Dave's facial expressions in the disconnection is not only fear, but regret. It's more explicitly compared by Keir Dullea in the commentary track for the LaserDisc/DVD/Blu-Ray releases to the climax of Of Mice and Men that Dave and HAL do actually have a rapport (HAL likes his sketches, for example), and Dave's doing this because he has to, not because he wants to. And he's forced to slowly lobotomize HAL and hear his mind going, which would unnerve almost anyone.
  • Obliviously Evil: HAL 9000. While not directly explained in Kubrick's movie, the novel and sequel elaborate that he was programmed to be both completely truthful and keep the crew from the motivations behind the flight to Jupiter — and when the crew becomes inquisitive, he has to find a way to fulfill both.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In the film when Bowman exits the stargate the pod just appears inside the alien-built hotel room. In the book he emerges back into regular space, sees a red giant star surrounded by thousands of abandoned alien space ships (from other races who had been uplifted by the monolith aliens and found their way there). He flies closer to the star and the hotel room is assembled around his pod. The cost of filming this scene using 1960s special effects technology would've been astronomical, so they never even tried.
  • Offscreen Reality Warp:
    • This provides much of the Mind Screw in the hotel room scene at the end of the movie. Bowman is in the pod, then he sees a slightly older version of himself in his spacesuit outside the pod, then the pod disappears. From the bathroom, he sees an older version of himself having dinner, then when the elderly Bowman gets up to look in the bathroom, the spacesuited Bowman has disappeared. The elderly Bowman sees an even older version of himself in the bed, then he and the dining table have been replaced by the Monolith. It conveys the effect of time dilation well, as if Bowman's entire life in that hotel existed simultaneously in one space.
    • The comic adaptation simply states that Bowman is being made to age rapidly in the hotel room, while in some way being made extremely accepting of the rapid changes in his appearance.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Used memorably for the appearances of the Monolith and to show the progression of Dave Bowman's age in the hotel room near the end of the movie.
  • Off-the-Shelf FX: The Trope Codifier of this technique for science fiction films, if not the Trope Maker. Whilst many of the spacecraft models were bespoke creations from the beginning, kitbashing was used significantly throughout, especially on the Discovery hull and Clavius moonbase. Prior to this film, the style for sci-fi modelmaking was usually sleek designs with little surface texture or external features.
  • Oh, Crap!: David Bowman as he is taken Beyond the Infinite.
    • Dave gets three Oh Crap's in a row in the space of about a minute.... First, "I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me." He tries to bluff, but then Hal answers, "Although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move." Finally, the look on Dave's face when he realizes that he forgot his helmet.
    • "Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Goodbye."
    • HAL gets one of his own. "My mind is going... I'm afraid..."
    • In the novel, the leopard experiences this when, because it cornered them in their own cave, Moon-Watcher's tribe break into a desperate frenzy and gang up on it.
  • Ominous Latin Chanting: György Ligeti's "Requiem" and "Lux Aeterna" are so ominous, you can't even tell they're in Latin anymore. (Or Greek, in the case of the Kyrie from the "Requiem"!)
  • One-Eyed Shot: During the Star Gate sequence, there are several extreme close-up shots of Bowman's eye with solarized colors. The colors of the eye only return to normal when the pod arrives in the hotel room. The image is featured on this movie poster◊.
  • Our Graphics Will Suck in the Future: Averted (a bit). The film used modified cel animation to depict computer readouts that would otherwise be difficult or impossible in 1968, such as David Bowman watching television on a paper-thin tablet aboard the Discovery.
  • Paleolithic Pioneer: The film opens with a prologue depicting the invention of weapons and hunting.
  • Panspermia: The aliens didn't necessarily seed Earth, but most definitely influenced the evolution of mankind.
  • Parting-from-Consciousness Words: Played with. HAL is effectively dead for the remainder of the movie, but is only shut down, as he's a computer. It's one of the most famous moments in the film.
    HAL: "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..."
  • Pick Your Human Half: HAL 9000 (rather subtly), the ship's psychotic computer.
  • Pietà Plagiarism: Dave is holding Frank Poole's body this way—using the arms of the EVA pod—during the "pod bay doors" sequence.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Had HAL simply been told that he could tell Bowman and Poole about the mission once they reached their destination, he might not have broken down as badly as he did — or maybe not broken down at all.
  • Posthuman Nudism: The finale features Dave Bowman transcending human existence and becoming the Star Child, a giant floating godlike fetus — naked, of course.
  • Precursors: The Firstborn, the creators of the Monolith.
  • Pride:
    Dave Bowman: Another thing just occurred to me: as far as I know, no 9000 computer's ever been disconnected.
    Frank Poole: No 9000 computer's ever fouled up before.
    Bowman: That's not what I mean. I'm not so sure what he'll think of it.
  • Primitive Clubs: When apes exposed to the Monolith start developing intelligence, the first thing they do is figure out the most primitive concept of a tool: how to use a large bone as a bludgeon. At the end of this segment, a shot of the bone being flung in the air is followed by a shot of a similarly shaped space station, suggesting that all of Man's technological achievements started with the club.
  • Product Placement: Some, like Pan Am and the AT&T Bell System, are hilariously dated.
  • Properly Paranoid:
    • Dave and Frank when suspecting HAL move to a location where they are confident they cannot be overheard by to discuss what they are going to do about it - but it turns out they were not paranoid enough as neither of them realized HAL could read lips and didn't need audio to understand them.
    • Once Dave makes it back on board the Odyssey having just experienced a rather unpleasant trip through hard vacuum, he immediately gets into a full spacesuit. Removing any ability for HAL to use the life support systems or decompress the ship to stop him from shutting HAL down.
  • Public Domain Soundtrack: There was a soundtrack by Alex North created for the movie, but until it was ready they used the classical music as a placeholder. Kubrick ended up liking the classical music version so much that he never used North's compositions.
  • Purgatory and Limbo: The "white hotel room" Dave Bowman finds himself in after entering the monolith is a secular version of this, as it is an intermediate step between his existence as a human being and his existence as the immortal Star Child.
  • Quieter than Silence: Used all the time, and in many scary parts.

    R-S 
  • Reading Lips: Despite all of Bowman's precautions, he can't keep HAL from visually eavesdropping on his chat with Poole.
  • A Real Man Is a Killer: Literally evoked in a biological sense; the dawn of man is marked by the ape becoming a hunter. Killing a former fellow-creature to feed is a direct and immediate side effect of learning to use tools to manipulate the environment, a defining moment of the new species.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic:
    • The original plan was to have Discovery fly to Saturn. To that end, Kubrick's special effects team tried to create a model of Saturn that was as realistic as possible. However, the more realistic they made it, the faker it looked! The rings looked like a flat band of metal foil held up by plexiglass. Thus, the trip to Saturn was scrapped in favor of a trip to Jupiter. Flash forward a decade-and-a-half, when Voyager 1 sent back close-up Real Life photos of Saturn and its rings — the rings in Voyager's photos looked exactly like the flat, "fake" ones that Kubrick's production team had abandoned!
    • Also, the Discovery was originally designed with large radiator fins, which is indeed realistic because spacecraft need a way to dissipate excess heat from the engines, life support, electronics, etc. However, the production team chose to omit the fins because they looked too much like wings, and they didn't want audience members to think that the Discovery was intended for atmospheric flight.
    • The space scenes have a considerably higher star density than what would actually be visible in those circumstances, and also have apparent motion that shouldn't be there (the stars are too far away to have any motion perceivable on Earth on human time scales), but the scenes would look fake if there wasn't a source of apparent background motion. Similarly, shadows are flat black in space because there's no air to diffuse light into the shadows, but that'd look quite wrong to most eyes.
  • Recurring Camera Shot: As the Monolith is jumpstarting human development it is shown with the sun right behind its top edge and the moon above that. Later when the one on the moon sends its signal, the shot is seen again, the sun over its top edge and the earth this time above that.
  • Re-Cut: In the early 2010s, Steven Soderbergh released an edit of the film on his website (through Vimeo) as part of a personal project to practice editing techniques. His edit trims about half the length of the film off, and notably inserts HAL's eye frames into monolith-oriented scenes.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: The cameras HAL looks through have glowing red lenses.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: While their personalities are overall pretty mellow, Frank is shown to be a little more confrontational/hot-headed than Dave is, openly challenging HAL about his error-free status, having more of a look of disbelief during HAL's denials, and being the first to suggest disconnection. Until everything that occurs after the intermission, Dave is generally more diplomatic and reluctant to directly confront HAL.
  • Reflective Eyes: There are a couple of shots where one of the astronauts is reflected in HAL's red eye.
  • Remote Vitals Monitoring: Played with. Dave leaves the Discovery to rescue Frank, which leaves only the three researchers in suspended animation plus HAL-9000. Each of the three "sleepers" has six vital functions monitored as real-time waveform graphs. Suddenly, an alarm sounds "COMPUTER MALFUNCTION" as some of the waveforms begin to flatline (metabolic rate) or become erratic (cardiovascular/heart rate). This is replaced by a faster, higher-pitched alarm of "LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL" as all the vitals eventually flatline, ending in silence and "LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED".
  • Ridiculous Future Inflation:
    • Inverted, Floyd makes a video telephone call (via AT&T, no less) from a pay phone on the space station to Earth, using his credit card, talks to his daughter in what we would now call High Definition video for about 2 minutes, and the listed call charge is exactly $1.70. (Today, if you used a public pay phone to make a call—presuming you could find a pay phone—the price in numbers (for a voice call) would be about the same, except the decimal point would be one space to the right...)
    • Again, the novel describes a moon administrator's office as having "all the fittings and status symbols of the typical $50,000 a year head of a department."
  • Ridiculously Human Robots: Discussed in the segment where the crew, and HAL himself, are being asked about his emotional capacity.
  • The Rival: The rival group of man-apes that antagonizes the main group, referred to as "the Others" in the novel.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Downplayed, but after watching his friend die in the cold vacuum of space and then being refused re-entry to the ship by HAL, forcing him to enter through the emergency airlock in a vacuum with no helmet on, Dave is, as HAL himself notes, quite stressed out. He subsequently deactivates/lobotomizes HAL as he begs not to be switched off, but does it more out of desperation than anger.
  • Rule of Symbolism:
    • The monolith appears in every section of the film, but we never get a full explanation of its meaning. It's a tall, black, rectangular object that looks like a giant external hard drive — and kinda is. One with all the information of the universe on it. Floyd's pre-recorded message to the Jupiter crew and his discussions with his moon-based colleagues provide us with the only real clues we have. The monoliths were created by extraterrestrials, but their purpose is unknown. The moon monolith is a signaling device, but the Jupiter monolith serves as a Star Gate and the prehistoric one as a genetic transmogrifier. György Litgeti's "Requiem" plays when the monolith is discovered by the early hominids as well as when Floyd reaches it on the moon. This score imbues these scenes with a sense of fear and awe, and the name of the work refers to a death song sung during Catholic Mass. Both the hominids and Floyd treat their respective monoliths with a type of religious reverence. The hominids are initially terrified—as most characters tend to be when faced with the almighty—but they soon gather around its base in a huddled group that draws parallels to bowing or kneeling motions used in worship. When Floyd touches the monolith, his hand does so slowly and deliberately, as though he's admiring an object with totemic power rather than studying an object with detached objectivity. Finally, when the monolith appears before Bowman on his deathbed, it does so in a dominating position that resembles an angel of death. Like a religious artifact, the monolith also appears supernatural, as in "unexplainable by natural laws." These monoliths likely follow natural laws that are so beyond our understanding of nature that they appear magical. Their role in the film also seems to be to help humanity reach the same levels of evolution their alien designers reached. They alter the evolutionary path of the hominids towards that of homo sapiens, and later they change Bowman into a Star Child. This final evolutionary state shares at least one trait similar to the extraterrestrials: the ability to traverse space like it owns the place. This is a nod to several religious beliefs that claim God (or the gods) created humans to be in his image, such as in Genesis 1:27.
    • Screens and windows are everywhere in the film — and we mean everywhere. 2001 explores our reliance on technology to survive. The near constant presence of screens and windows expands upon this theme. Here, not only do we rely on technology to survive, but our reliance on technology has shaped how we view the world. Consider the scene where the lunar shuttle lands on the moon. The pilots have a view of the lunar surface, but equally important, perhaps more important, to the safety of their descent is the targeting screen between them that changes when they're lined up with the landing pad. A similar scene occurs when Bowman takes the EVA pod to rescue Poole. Like the shuttle pilots, Bowman has a tiny window, but he navigates space through the information provided by his many screens. In the straight-on shots, the screens reflect their information across Bowman's eyes and face, reinforcing the idea that technology interprets the way we view the world. Also, let's not forget that HAL views the world exclusively through lenses and screens. As a character, he can only interpret the world through the means of technology. This results in a worldview that is distorted from a human's perspective, represented by the use of a fish-eyed lens used for HAL's point-of-view shots. Plus, Bowman's transformation into the Star Child has him shedding these screens from his world. After his mind-expanding trip through the Star Gate—where we see Bowman mostly through shots of his eyes—Bowman and his EVA pod appear in the hotel room. The first thing to disappear is the EVA pod with its screens of information. The next thing to disappear is his spacesuit with the glass helmet that reflected so much of his experience to the viewer. Only in shedding his human view, as represented by windows and screens, can Bowman make the transition to the Star Child, a being that will look on the world in an entirely different way.
    • The bone is naturally a very important symbol in the film as it symbolizes humanity's tools and our development of technology. After contacting the monolith, an early hominid sits on top of a pile of tapir bones. He then toys around with a bone, giving the other bones a few experimental taps. He then wallops the skull hard enough to shatter it into pieces. This hominid has become the first human inventor, and he's invented the club. This new invention converts momentum into power, allowing him to strike harder than he could with his hand. It also extends his reach and prevents the risk of injury that attacking with only his body would expose him to. Using this new tool, the hominids begin to act more like humans than we've previously seen them. They hunt tapirs, giving them meat which will increase their caloric intake and further allow for the development of their brains. They also begin to walk around more upright. Finally, they take their new weapons to the watering hole and chase off rival hominids, displaying their power by beating the rival group's alpha male to death. The implication is that it is our development of tools and technology that led humanity to evolve. This development allowed us to conquer our planet. The bone club eventually led to other inventions such as the tools of agriculture, hunting, travel and architecture. And then there's the famous Match Cut. The film is suggesting that all of our technological advancements came from this makeshift club. Just like we evolved from Australopithecus afarensis, and war evolved from waterhole skirmishes, so do satellites have their origins in that original technology. And just as the club improved the lives of our hominid ancestors, technology helps the astronauts survive in space in 2001.
    • Birthdays are a recurring motif in the film. We get word of the first birthday when Dr. Floyd calls his daughter on the video phone. The second birthday is Dr. Poole's, as while aboard Discovery One, Poole celebrates his birthday with a video message from his parents. They even bake him a good-looking cake, just to rub in how nasty that zero-G space food looks. Interestingly, parents and child are always separated during their birthdays. Floyd can't make it to Squirt's party, and Poole's message is entirely one-way; he can't respond to the birthday well-wishes. HAL's death provides us the third birthday. As Bowman removes his memory cards, HAL reverts back to who (or what) he was when he was first activated; he sings the song he learned that day. There aren't any birthdays in the first and final sections, but there are two births. In the Dawn of Man section, the early hominids learn to manipulate tools, and in a sense, this is the birthday of the human race. When Bowman becomes the Star Child, we have another birthday. This time the scene depicts the birth of a species hereto unknown to humanity. Note that these birthdays tie into the separation of parent and child we noticed earlier. Just like Floyd is separated from his daughter, these evolutionary births separate the individuals from their parent species. The film's always reminding us of the cycle of death and birth/rebirth. For humans to exist, our early hominid ancestors have to become extinct. Or, in the case of that one hominid, viciously beaten to death. For the Star Child to come into existence, Bowman has to die. In HAL's attempt to succeed in his evolutionary path, he tried to kill his human creators but failed.
  • Sapient Ship: HAL, while not the ship itself, is its controlling computer. While HAL and Discovery are never treated as being one and the same, it is explicitly noted that HAL is, in effect, the ship's brain and central nervous system.
  • Scenery Porn: Spacecraft in orbit around the Earth, waltzing to the Blue Danube. Too awesome to describe...
  • Sealed Orders: HAL's sealed orders, and the anxiety over having to lie, are what cause him to go psychotic and murder the crew.
  • Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere: The hotel room has no windows or exits. In the novel, it's specifically a sealed room in the middle of a red giant star, and when it's no longer needed, it's allowed to burn up.
  • Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: HAL Is About to Launch a Maintenance Pod Right at You.
  • Sensory Abuse: The monolith emits a piercing noise.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: When Bowman goes out to rescue Poole, the entire sequence is shown in real time in order to make it absolutely clear that there's no way Poole could survive that long without air. HAL takes advantage of Bowman's absence to kill the other crew members by Cryonics Failure. Bowman recovers Poole's body, but ends up having to release it back into space again in order to get back onto the ship.
  • Shiny-Looking Spaceships: Inverted. 2001 changed the mainstream style of sci-fi spacecraft from sleek-and-polished rocket-like designs to more utilitarian-looking vehicles, using parts from model aircraft kits to create texture and an appearance of complex machinery (later called "kitbashing"). This style would be codified by Star Wars a decade later.
  • Shout-Out:
    • During HAL's death scene, he sings a brief snatch of the song "Daisy Bell" ("Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..."); this was chosen because Arthur C. Clarke had, a few years previous, visited a Bell Labs demonstration of synthesized speech, which included singing the song in question, and was the first example ever of computer speech. This Shout-Out is itself a frequent source of shout-outs in other films.
    • The rectangular blocks in HAL's brain room are intended to be far more advanced versions of the logic and memory modules in the Apollo Guidance Computer.
    • A wheel-shaped space station and an interplanetary mission jeopardized by Space Madness were previously seen in George Pal's Conquest of Space, released in 1955.
    • The Odyssey, of course. HAL was even originally going to be named Athena, after Odysseus's patron goddess, and the protagonist being named Bowman may be a reference to Odysseus owning a bow only he was strong enough to string. HAL's Cyber Cyclops design may allude to Polyphemus, the cyclops Odysseus defeated. Also see Sole Survivor.
    • In a 1969 interview, Kubrick specifically mentions the influence of Carl Jung on the monolith design. In fact, the entire "Beyond the Infinite" sequence is similar to a section of Carl Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in which Jung dreams he is floating above Earth when a black monolith appears. He enters it, finding an entire Hindu temple, and undergoes a spiritual evolution.
    • The film famously uses Also sprach Zarathustra as a leitmotif. It's so famous that almost every use since then is a reference to (or parody of) 2001.
    • The EVA (Extravehicular Activity) Pod is evocative to the RB-79 Ball from Mobile Suit Gundam where it was originally a colony construction vehicle before it was turned into an Improvised Weapon by the Earth Federation alongside the GMs in large numbers during the One Year War against the Principality of Zeon.
  • Show, Don't Tell: This is why the novel works so well as a companion piece. Whereas the film has astonishing visuals, the story is deliberately vague. The novel obviously can't show any visuals, so Clarke devotes a lot of time to explaining the backstory, the history of the technology in the film, and what's really happening with the prehistoric humans and Bowman after he enters the Star Gate.
  • Shown Their Work: Clarke and Kubrick made the same effort in regards to space travel and general scientific accuracy, even though the atomic-powered spaceship does not have radiator fins to get rid of the reactor's waste heat. The makers intentionally left them off, because after a decade teaching the public that there is no air in space, they didn't want them wondering why the spacecraft has wings.
  • Silence Is Golden: Long stretches of the film have no dialogue, including the first 22 and last 24 minutes (not counting the overture and end credits/exit music), and there are sections that have neither dialogue, sound, nor music, leaving the audience in total silence.
  • The Singularity: The monoliths are machines left behind by a race of aliens that underwent one of these.
  • Silicon Snarker: HAL has an understated form of snark:
    Bowman: Alright, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency airlock.
    HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
  • Sinister Geometry: The monoliths, featuring the arc numbers of 1, 4, and 9; 1:4:9 being the ratio of the monolith's depth to width to height, the squares of the first three positive integers. "And how naive to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!" The films and some of the cover art mess up the dimensions.
  • Slain in Their Sleep: Hal 9000 does this to three crew members in hibernation by disabling their life support functions.
  • Sleeper Starship: The hibernation systems. The trip is one of months, not centuries, but suspended animation is used to avoid the problem of having to pack several months' worth of food, and to help keep secret the real purpose of the mission.
  • Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: This is a very male-dominated movie. We do see women working in space, though largely as stewardesses, secretaries, and other stereotypically female professions. Dr. Floyd does speak to two female Soviet scientistsnote , but the group conducting the lunar expedition as well as the Discovery crew are both made up entirely of men. Arthur C. Clarke's sequel novels, especially 2010: Odyssey Two, incorporate more strong female characters.
  • Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: A substantial amount of time is spent in discussions over the intelligence and emotional capacity of the H.A.L. 9000 computer that runs the spaceship USS Discovery. It's generally agreed that HAL is of human-level intelligence, but while he has vastly superior powers of calculation (obviously), his emotional capacity and intellectual maturity are those of a child. This factors heavily into the explanation of the Logic Bomb that causes him to turn on the crew.
  • Smart People Play Chess:
    • HAL-9000 demonstrates its superior intellect early on by beating Poole in a game of chess. Since HAL errs reporting a move and Kubrick was a talented and knowledgeable player, the scene may be subtly Foreshadowing HAL's deception or inaccuracy.
    • The novel states that HAL deliberately loses against the human players 50% of the time so that they would find him a challenging opponent as opposed to frustratingly perfect and unbeatable. The crew are of course smart enough to know that this is the case but everyone involved decides to keep up the pretense for the sake of everybody's happiness. Interestingly, HAL appears to bluff Poole into surrendering, as well as read his lips as he mouths his next several moves.
  • Smash Cut: In the prehistoric prologue, the ape who just used a bone to kill another of his kind tosses the killing implement up in the air. It turns end-over-end in slow motion—then instantly cuts to a large, scientifically sophisticated space station, bridging the gap between millions of years in a few seconds.
  • Sniff Sniff Nom: When the Palaeolithic prehumans wake up to find a totally alien monolith outside their cave, they are completely freaked. It relentlessly sits there as they slowly grow bolder and start checking it out, including a few sniffs and a quick nibble to see if it's edible.
  • Social Services Does Not Exist: For HAL. Despite the magnitude of the mission, evidently this computer is not programmed to go into any sort of safe mode when conflicts pop up in its programming, nor are logs of his thoughts being beamed back to Earth to be reviewed, nor is there a teeny stripped down separate AI "subconscious" watching his thoughts and alerting Earth in case of problems, nor is there an automatic "kill switch" for Dave or Frank to use to cut off HAL's higher functions in case of trouble.
  • Soft-Spoken Sadist: HAL 9000 is this, overlapping with Creepy Monotone.
  • Sole Survivor: Like Odysseus, Bowman is the only member of his crew to return home, albeit transformed by the experience.
  • Some Dexterity Required: After extended sequences depicting the reduction of space travel to mundane actions and everyday situations, Dr. Heywood Floyd encounters an enormously long set of instructions for operation of the "Space Toilet".
  • Sound-Only Death: The hibernating astronauts who are murdered by HAL. Our only indication that they are dying comes from their life sign monitors, which flatline in a chorus of alarming beeps.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: HAL sings "Daisy Bell" as it dies.
  • Space Clothes: A more realistic version. Though early on we see Dr. Floyd travelling through space in a casual suit as well as a few people on the space station dressed similarly, the Stewardesses are seen wearing a strange white suit which includes a round hat and velcro shoes; it looks odd but the design is somewhat practical (the shoes are designed so they can walk down aisles in zero-gravity, while the hats are probably to keep their hair from floating all over the place). However, on board Discovery, Dave and Frank are simply wearing gray jumpsuits like you'd expect from real astronauts.
  • Space Is Cold: In a story explaining the making of the movie, Arthur C. Clarke notes that the Discovery One spaceship should have had large radiating surfaces to dissipate the heat from the reactors powering it. They were not put in because they didn't want to have to spend the time explaining why a ship that never enters an atmosphere has "wings".
  • Space Is Noisy:
    • An all-too-rare aversion, which adds to the creepiness of certain scenes, such as when Bowman is attempting to re-enter Discovery via the airlock — sound suddenly stops when Bowman detonates the explosive bolts and undergoes decompression.
    • Played straight when apparently noise can be heard during the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence, although it's an open question if it either actually occurs in the vacuum of space or if the noise is not diegetic and simply for the audience's benefit.
  • Space Is Slow Motion: Trope Codifier. Sure, everything is beautiful, but everything also moved at a crawl. Justified with the workpods Frank and Dave use. They move very slowly, but you don't want to hurry when slinging a multi-ton pod around delicate exterior equipment. But when Frank is murdered by HAL he flails around wildly as he suffocates, and Dave bounces all over the airlock when he makes his famous Spacewalk Sans Helmet. Also justified with the shuttle docking sequences (see the video below). When docking with the ISS in Real Life, it takes a couple of hours to cover the last hundred metres. There's a lot of very expensive equipment here doing a lot of very important things. Don't break anything.
  • Space Isolation Horror: Thousands of miles away from any help, two men, several frozen passengers, and an artificial intelligence that is nowadays one of the Trope Codifiers for A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
  • Space Station: The "rotating orbital wheel"-styled Space Station V (Five), perhaps the most recognizable in fiction.
  • Space Suits Are Scuba Gear: The space suits have an attached air line, which Frank frantically tries to reattach as he drifts off into space.
  • Special Effects: The film is notable and well-remembered for its visual effects — most of which still hold up remarkably well when seen today, and look downright incredible when compared to other science fiction films of the 60s and 70s (right up until A New Hope a decade later). Expert camera work, incredibly well-crafted models, and clever practical effects, combined with a healthy budget, result in space scenes that look as real as the best of what modern CGI can cook up today. There are some unfortunately unavoidable exceptions — a few "microgravity" effects are unconvincing, and there are a couple of fairly obvious Matte Shots here and there, but by and large it's very obvious why the film won the 1969 "Best Effects" Oscar (somewhat controversially, its only Oscar win).
  • Spheroid Dropship:
    • The Aries series of orbit-to-Moon shuttles are Spheroid Spaceliners.
    • The Discovery's main crew section is also spherical. It is separated from the rest of the ship — the (nuclear) drive section and the communication antenna — by a long boom in order to protect the crew from radiation from the ship's engines. Supplementary material indicates that the modules on the boom are also used for consumables storage.
  • Staggered Zoom: Into HAL's camera on the front of the space pod that he kills Frank with.
  • Standard Establishing Spaceship Shot: The Ur-Example, with the Discovery gliding slowly past the camera to establish how large and complex it is.
  • Starfish Aliens: The aliens are so alien that they can't even be shown on screen. The novels imply that they started as Starfish Aliens, but later transformed themselves into Mechanical Lifeforms, and eventually into Energy Beings. Clarke and Kubrick consulted Carl Sagan for advice on how to portray aliens onscreen, and Sagan actually felt like showing the aliens at all would inevitably diminish their impact, so they left the aliens implied but never shown. In a supplementary book called Lost Worlds of 2001, Clarke records failed experiments with writing about both Human Aliens and worlds filled with Starfish Aliens, before he finally decided to have the monoliths be the last relics of an unseen, long-ago-vanished civilization.
  • Starship Luxurious: The Orion III spaceplane, which carries Dr. Heywood Floyd to a space station orbiting Earth, is clearly designed for comfort and luxury. Justified because it is explicitly a passenger vehicle meant to transport VIPs, rather than a utilitarian spacecraft built for hardened astronauts. The spaceplane is owned and operated by Pan Am, an actual airline at the time the film was released (though now defunct in real life). Other spacecraft seen in the film, such as the "Moon bus" and Discovery itself, are much less luxurious.
  • Starter Villain: The leopard serves as this to humanity. While not evil, it's the biggest threat to the apes destined to become the ancestors of mankind at the beginning. Then the Monolith teaches apes how to make tools, and their next confrontation goes quite differently as they become their own villains.
  • Stay in the Kitchen:
    • PanAm offers passenger service to low Earth orbit and the Moon, but the flight crews are all men and the flight attendants are all women (which was the case in the commercial airline industry in 1968, when the movie was made.)
    • In the novel, we see that the Soviet Union of 2001 has somewhat more egalitarian attitudes towards women, with female scientists working alongside men in the Soviet space program. Given that the USSR launched the first woman into space a few years before 2001 hit theatres and bookshelves, at a time when America's space program would hardly do such a thing, this was another reasonable extrapolation into the future. A female Soviet scientist is briefly seen in the space station segment of the film, though her role there isn't made clear as it is in the book.
  • Stay with the Aliens: Spelled out in rather greater detail in the novel, the whole point of the Monolith setup is to "capture" the first human who makes it out that far into space.
  • Sticky Shoes: The stewardess on the lunar shuttle has "grip shoes" that stick to certain types of flooring.
  • Stock Femur Bone: The bone that Moonwatcher picks up from the skeleton of a tapir is one of the animal's femur bones. Justified in that he's going to use it as a club, and there are few other bones in any vertebrate skeleton that are better suited for that purpose.
  • Stock Shout-Outs: One of the poster children. The sunrise sequence, HAL's voice and red eye, the bone/satellite Match Cut...you can reference almost anything in this movie and almost every viewer will instantly get it.
  • Streaming Stars: Within the hyperspace gate, the psychedelic colors are intended to represent the incredible speed of Bowman's travel.
  • Stupidity-Inducing Attack: Dave Bowman pulls a rare lethal version on HAL 9000, removing its memory modules until its "brain" shuts down. Despite the machine being a clear antagonist, the sequence is remarkably upsetting.
    HAL: Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer...
  • Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: Whoever the Monolith's creators are.
  • Surprise Checkmate: HAL does the "number of forced moves" version. Notably, it was cheating and not all of them were really forced — a subtle early hint of HAL's untrustworthy nature.

    T-Z 
  • Tastes Like Chicken: The crew flying to Tycho Crater remarks this of the sandwiches they eat.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Bowman doesn't actually say it, but it's written all over his face right before he blows the pod's hatch, sans helmet.
  • Thrown Out the Airlock: HAL 9000 kills Frank Poole by maneuvering his space pod and using the gripper arms while Poole is on EVA to replace the AE-35 unit. David Bowman rushes out in another pod to rescue his fellow astronaut, but in his haste neglects to take a helmet for his pressure suit. When HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors so Bowman can reenter Discovery, the fact that Bowman lacks a helmet means he has to throw himself out of the airlock in order to regain entry into the spaceship. He is able to open the outer door of the airlock with the gripper arms, but the pod hatch does not mate with the door completely. Bowman blows the explosive bolts on the hatch, tucks down, and is blown into the airlock. In seconds, he is able to shut the outer door manually and repressurize the airlock. Although this scene is perfectly plausible despite Explosive Decompression, Bowman inhales and holds his breath right before the hatch blows, which is the wrong thing to do. This may have been a mistake by actor Keir Dullea, however. Arthur C. Clarke reportedly said that if he had been on the set that day, he would have corrected this.
  • Time-Passes Montage: The opening sequence shows an early human throwing a bone in the air, which dissolves to a satellite of a similar shape — several hundred thousand years of time passing.
  • Title by Year: A 1968 science-fiction film, named for a year in the future.
  • Toilet Humour: The shot of Floyd reading the Zero Gravity Toilet instructions is the film's only intentional joke.
  • Too Dumb to Live: In the novel, the rival group of man-apes was paralyzed with fear upon seeing Moon-Watcher hold the leopard's severed head towards them. Except for One-Ear, who went to attack him anyway, only to get bashed on the head by the leopard's head.
  • Tools of Sapience: The film begins with a tribe of prehistoric apes that live a hardscrabble existence, unable to do more than forage for meagre food and fight over a small pool of water with a neighbouring tribe. After an encounter with a mysterious black monolith, however, one of them begins playing with an old bone and realises that, properly wielded, it can be used to effectively kill things. Suddenly the tribe can kill off their rivals and slaughter animals for meat, and thanks to this ingenuity have stopped being mere animals and begun the journey to humanity.
  • Touched by Vorlons:
    • David Bowman gets captured by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, who cause him to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. He returns to Earth many years later as the Star Child, an Energy Being with superpowers.
    • The entire human race is a product of this, due to their very distant ancestors having been molded by The Monolith while still in a proto-hominid phase of evolution. Their superpower was an expanded capacity for learning how to use basic tools, something that no other species on Earth had yet accomplished.
  • Treacherous Advisor: HAL 9000 is supposed to be an omniscient guide for the rest of the Discovery crew, but after Frank Poole's death it is clear that he no longer wants Dave alive.
  • Trippy Finale Syndrome: The ending, as astronaut David Bowman goes to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite". Arthur C. Clarke's companion novel offers an explanation.
  • Tuneless Song of Madness: As more and more of HAL-9000's mind is shut down, he begins singing "Daisy Bell."
  • Typeset in the Future: HAL is the Ur-Example of using Eurostile Bold Extended on computer screens to indicate a futuristic setting. The zero-gravity toilet instructions are set in Eurostile Bold, but most other signs and control panel markings (such as "Caution Explosive Bolts") are in Futura Bold, the standard font Boeing uses on the control panels of its aircraft.
  • Übermensch: If one follows the Nietzschean line of interpretation (which is backed up as a legitimate strand by the movie's director) to understand the meaning of the film, the Star Child is a visual metaphor for the birth of the Übermensch.
  • The Un-Reveal: We never see any aliens. All we know of them are their tools, the Monoliths. This was due to the suggestion from Carl Sagan that they could never genuinely conceive of an alien lifeform without it looking like a puppet or a bad rubber mask. Kubrick himself later admitted that, as in the novel, the Firstborn have ascended into beings of pure energy, and thus simply don't have a physical form that can be revealed.
  • Upgrade Artifact: The monolith is the ultimate one, as it kickstarts or triggers progressive evolutionary levels.
  • Vader Breath: Prominently featured during spacewalk scenes, reportedly performed by Kubrick himself.
  • Video Phone: The movie features a videophone in a phone booth, in a rotating space station. The AT&T Picturephone had been publicly demonstrated in 1967, the year before the film's release. It never caught on.
  • Villainous Breakdown: HAL's pleas to Bowman become increasingly desperate as he realizes that he's about to be "killed" and has no way to prevent it.
    HAL: I'm afraid, Dave.
  • Watch It Stoned: While Clarke and Kubrick denied doing it on purpose, stories abound of hippies dropping acid for the final sequence of the film, when Dave Bowman enters the Monolith.
  • We Hardly Knew Ye: The three cryogenically frozen scientists get practically no characterization before being killed off. Lampshaded in the novel as David examines their dead bodies:
    "He had never known them very well; he would never know them now."
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: HAL 9000 is only devoted to the mission at hand and believes that Dave and Frank will jeopardize the mission by disconnecting him after lip-reading from them that they intend to do so if the AE-35 component does not fail as HAL has predicted. It turns out this was due to a Logic Bomb: he had been told to lie about the nature of the mission, which conflicted with his programming of providing clear and accessible information, which triggered his breakdown.
  • Wham Line:
    • "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
    • From the book: "The thing's hollow! It goes on forever, and...oh my God, it's full of stars!"
  • Wham Shot:
    • The camera showing HAL can read lips, and then immediately cutting to Intermission.
    • Also, a double wham shot in the ending: the appearance of the Monolith in the hotel and David Bowman being replaced by a space baby within a bubble of light.
  • What Is This Feeling?: In the novel, Moon-Watcher "felt dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness" when he woke up to find his father died in his sleep. Even if he does not truly comprehend the capacity of having a father, much less a relationship with him.
  • The World Is Not Ready: The justification for the Government Conspiracy.
    Floyd: I'm sure you're all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation...if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public without adequate preparation and conditioning.
  • Xenoarchaeology: As in "The Sentinel" (the Arthur C. Clarke short story which formed part of the basis of the plot of the movie), humans find an extremely advanced and very ancient alien artifact on Earth's own Moon. As was the case with the original short story's crystalline pyramid, the Monolith from the film is clearly from somewhere much farther away than the Moon, and is also an example of Lost Technology, from a civilization very far beyond even the civilization of the Monolith's finders (giant rotating space stations and crewed missions to the outer Solar System and all).
  • Zeerust: HAL is a mind-bogglingly advanced, sentient computer, but can't print plain text onto looseleaf paper. Humanity in 2001 can build spectacular space-stations and has mastered interplanetary flight, but people are still using typewriters.note  By 2001, the movie looks more like what the world would have been like with 1960s styles coinciding with a future space age.
Eighteen months ago the first evidence of intelligent life off the earth was discovered. It was buried forty feet below the lunar surface near the crater Tycho. Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter the four-million-year old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total mystery.

 
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A Space Odyssey

Bowman reaches towards the monolith before he's turned into the star child.

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Gainax Ending

★★★★★ 4.89 (9 votes)
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Frank's death

"Life Functions...

GLaDOS Wants HA...

The Monolith on...

Bone to Spaceship

Open the pod ba...

Sunrise

Space Station D...

Alternative Title(s): A Space Odyssey, Two Thousand And One A Space Odyssey

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A Space Odyssey

Bowman reaches towards the monolith before he's turned into the star child.

(Leave a comment)

How well does it match the trope?

4.89 (9 votes)

Example of:

Main / GainaxEnding

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2:22

A Space Odyssey

 0:39

Frank's death

 1:48

"Life Functions...

 1:57

GLaDOS Wants HA...

 2:24

The Monolith on...

 0:20

Bone to Spaceship

 0:33

Open the pod ba...

 1:39

Sunrise

 2:06

Space Station D...