The future we imagined...

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2007)

I don't think contemporary audiences can recreate what it felt like to see this film on its first release. I was seventeen years old and had been an avid science fiction reader since my early teens. I had read all of Clarke's novels, all of Heinlein's written up to 1966 and I was eager to see what Clarke and Kubrick had come up with.
And this did indeed show how those of my generation (before the cultural "break" and the craziness of the late 60s and 70s) imagined that our future would be. And there it was, on the screen! Seeing this on a huge screen, in stereophonic sound, in a large theater with a large audience, for the FIRST time, was awe inspiring. No one had quite done anything like it before, though George Pal had come close.
We did indeed imagine that we were at the dawn of a new era, the era of space travel, and that perhaps we would live to see our first contact with extraterrestrial beings. It was a nice dream, though premature, and Kubrick and Clarke put this vision of it, with its positive, affirming ending, right out there for us to see. The Star Child is humankind, at the beginning of our real existence in the universe.
This didn't come to pass in our lifetime, not yet. But it will.