The future that wasn't

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2001)

Today is the first day of 2001, a fitting day to comment on "2001," the now classic science fiction film that appeared in 1968. With "2001" director Stanley Kubrick permanently upgraded the technical quality of special effects used in science fiction films. The film comes up short if judged by the usual standards with its deliberately wooden acting, thin cryptic plot, and glacial pace. The story begins at the end of the twentieth century when a strange radio burst leads to the excavation of "the monolith," a smooth black wafer-shaped block (bigger than a Buick) that someone buried on the moon. This in turn leads to a secret mission to Jupiter in 2001 and the next stage in human evolution. It seems some extraterrestrial entity has been directing human evolution all along. The monolith actually appeared before ape-like creatures in the distant past causing an upgrade in their tool making abilities causing them to "go human" and eventually launch large and comfortable space stations. The movie provides us with a tour of the future where they have regular Pan American Airway shuttle trips between earth and space stations. You travel in your street clothes, with much more leg room then we have now on a flight to O'Hare. I particularly liked the super-detailed and lengthy instructions for the zero-gravity toilet. They sure got that part of the future right. But what of the rest? Well Pan American Airways went bankrupt and flew its last flight on December 4, 1991. There are no large comfortable space stations, no moon base, and NASA has become a lumbering bureaucracy using shuttle vehicles designed circa 1968! Then there is HAL, IBM's on-board Jupiter-mission computer with human-like consciousness who runs everything on the ship like a bossy mother-in-law. Unfortunately mid-mission HAL makes some bad calculations, get embarrassed, goes nuts, and kills all but one of the crew. Perhaps HAL tried to understand the directions for the zero-gravity toilet. Dave (Keir Dullea) the remaining crew member and HAL duke it out. HAL loses and gets unplugged. Well here we are in 2001 and we have nothing close to the machine intelligence exhibited by HAL. The word processor I'm using to write this (guess which one) is not very reliable and started behaving erratically, but at least it hasn't tried to kill me, yet. The movie is based on a story by Arthur C. Clark one of the science fiction writers best at predicting future technology. He got earth satellites right, but like all the others he didn't foresee microelectronics, HAL is much too big. Computers keep getting smaller as anticipated by the physicist Richard Feynman in his 1959 talk to the annual meeting of the American Physical Society: "There's plenty of room at the bottom." So "2001" was best at predicting the shape of future movies (wooden acting, excessive special effects) than future space travel.