‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Is Still the ‘Ultimate Trip’

In the spring of 1964, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.

At the time, he was deep in development of a blockbuster film about the discovery of alien intelligence. Word was that MGM had bet their studio on the film.

What if Mariner discovered life on Mars and scooped them?

Kubrick looked into whether he could buy insurance against that event. He could, but the price was astronomical. Kubrick decided to take his chances, according to a new book about the making of the movie, “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece,” by Michael Benson.

That was 54 years ago. We still haven’t discovered intelligence or even believable evidence of pond scum anywhere else in the universe — not for lack of effort.

A new spacecraft, TESS, designed to look for habitable nearby planets just vaulted into space, and an interstellar asteroid recently spotted streaking through the solar system was inspected for radio signals. Another robot is on its way to listen in on the heart of Mars.

We still don’t know if we are alone.

Kubrick’s movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” finally debuted, late and over budget in April 1968, to baffled film critics and long lines of young people. John Lennon said he went to see it every week.

It was the top-grossing movie of the year and is now a perennial on critics’ lists of the most important movies of all time, often the first movie scientists mention if you ask them about sci-fi they have enjoyed.

In honor of its 50th anniversary, it was rereleased Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival in a shiny new version overseen by Christopher Nolan, the director of “Dunkirk” and “Inception,” among other films. He told The Los Angeles Times the original film had been a “touchstone” from his childhood.

The movie, written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (whose books and stories the movie was based on), and directed by Kubrick, is a multisensory ode to cosmic mystery, fate and the future.

The story begins 4 million years ago in Africa, where a bunch of bedraggled primates are losing the battle of the survival of the fittest until a strange black monolith appears.

To the thunder of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” one of those apemen is inspired to pick up a bone and use it as a club to kill the animals that have been pushing him around.

Suddenly, the apemen are eating meat and chasing their rivals away from the water hole. In a moment of exultation the ape throws the bone into the sky where, in what has been called the longest fast forward in film history, it turns into a spaceship.

Around that toss Kubrick pivots his movie and all of human evolution. Another monolith appears on the moon, and yet another in orbit around Jupiter, where an astronaut named Dave Bowman connects with it after subduing a neurotic computer, the HAL 9000, which has murdered his shipmates.

In the finale, Bowman is sent through a “star gate” on a trip through space and time, death and rebirth, returning as a glowing Star Child to float like a fetus over the Earth.

I first saw “2001” in the spring of 1968 in the same pharmaceutically compromised condition that all my friends did.

I didn’t need that kind of help, anyway, having grown up reading Clarke’s stories, in particular the novel “Childhood’s End” and the short story “The Sentinel.”

The last time I watched the movie was in 2000.

I never realized how much I had missed until I read Benson’s book, a deep, informative and entertaining dive into the making of the movie.

One mark of the movie’s status as a masterpiece is that it has something different to say to us every time we encounter it anew.

Fifty years ago, it was a harbinger of the future. We were about to win the race with the Russians to the moon. A whole generation was pumped and primed to tune in, turn on and transcend the whole dreary space-time continuum as we knew it.

Thoroughly researched by Kubrick and Clarke, large swaths of the film were like a documentary of the future: the space station, the moon base, the grand-stepping outward just as Clarke and people like Wernher von Braun had prophesied.

It has now been 46 years since there was anyone on the moon. It’s possible to imagine a time in which there will be no humans alive who have been there.

But now the traditional sci-fi script has flipped. A generation of swashbuckling billionaires has taken center stage in the space business, as well as a new class of wealthy customers who can afford to indulge their services. Instead of Star Child these days we have the “Star Man,” launched into orbit past Mars in a Tesla convertible by Elon Musk.

I once wrote that I no longer expected bootprints on Mars in my lifetime. Now I’m not so sure. It’s not crazy to think that private outfits like SpaceX, which seem to be running rings around NASA and Congress, could beat NASA into deeper space. I’d happily come out of retirement sometime in the 2030s to write the words that humans have landed and walked on Mars. Not that NASA has credible plans or the prospect of enough money to go anywhere exciting anytime soon. Under its new administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former congressman, NASA is taking steps to move forward on a long-range program of exploration and survey of resources that would lead to the establishment of a permanent base there.

And space leaders and enthusiasts recently gathered in Washington for the Humans to Mars Summit, sponsored by the aerospace industry. The meeting featured the release of a report outlining how humans could be on Mars as early as 2033.

Where the script has really flipped is in the future history of evolution.

Robots have taken over the sacred task of exploring for us. Increasingly sophisticated and smaller machines have spread out to every world of the solar system, buzzing the rings of Saturn, daring the dark voids beyond Pluto and landing on comets, scanning the heavens for new planets, new places to dream about.

Worse, we may all be part of the dream. The news from some physicists like Stephen Hawking is that the universe might be a hologram. Some cosmologists have argued that it is not inconsistent to imagine that the entire universe as we know it could just be a computer simulation, as in “The Matrix.” In effect, we are all made of bits, so the argument goes, removable, deformable at the click of an interstellar mouse.

In that case, I have a bone or two to pick with the director.