The Best of SF!

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2009)

It achieves excellence for its vision of realistic space flight, speculative spacecrafts, HAL 9000 (as a sentient computer or simulator of sentience), possibly an ancient alien transport and information pathway system (in the Star Gate sequence), a star child (perhaps an intelligent space dwelling being), and alien technology (the Monolith) that is so advanced in science it would look to us like magic (per one of Clarke's maxims of prediction: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). And perhaps it flaunts a Nietzschean-like evolution of intelligence from our ape ancestors, to humans, to machines, to a star child.
2001 has high artistic appeal and is one of the most influential SF movies (BFI Sight & Sound 2002 Top Ten). It shows that one can fit speculative science into a SF movie without losing artistic value.
Timothy Ferris uses 2001 as an example of a cosmic information intelligence network, mainly for the film's portrayal of an ancient -- yet extinct -- alien pathway system with Trumbull's light effects near the end of the movie ("Coming of Age in the Milky Way", a popular science book). Ferris imagines it as nature's way of evolving an intelligence on a massive scale (much in the same way Carl Sagan does in his Cosmos series and in Contact).
It has many little gems of speculation, such as its subtle stance on artificial intelligence. Kubrick was careful to offer opposing points of view and cite difficult questions. The script never explicitly claims that HAL is intelligent or sentient; it actually remarks that some scientists claim it merely mimics sentience. And it doubts whether we could know if HAL has emotion. Though HAL seems intelligent and emotional (and could be for all we know). Perhaps these are not scientific questions anyway, so Kubrick's critical approach is best since it doesn't take a definite position on such philosophical questions.
The scientific value of the movie is in its very fabric. The astronauts work methodically similar to the way I see NASA conduct its missions on the NASA channel. They use computers and communications with earth to guide their troubleshooting and repairs, for example. It also replaces the emphasis on militaristic chains of command of "Star Trek" or "Forbidden Planet" with a more modern, scientific, technical way of operating. There are scientific flaws in specific details, but science itself is littered with failed attempts that were crucial to future scientists. Where would we be without the reintroduction of the ancient Greeks into western civilization? (So, yes, Aristotle is wrong about almost everything while also being very important arguably. See James Burke's documentary series, "Connections", for this sort of argument.)
Even though the climax has humans combating our flaws and a homicidal computer, it leaves us with a boundless vision of advancement and future possibilities. The movie foreshadows this by (seemingly) beginning from an alien perspective and using repetition of the alien probes/monoliths to get us to feel their technological superiority and presence (or at least feel the same mystery the characters feel from their new discoveries). But it leaves us with a vision of an advanced space civilization, a new space species, and a chance for science and technology to be important to our future perhaps. Believe it or not this is rare in SF!