The product of a four-year collaboration between visionary SF writer Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick, MGM’s 2001: a space odyssey premieres, delighting fans of hard SF and bewildering audiences and critics. It is released alongside Clarke’s novel of the same story, which both clarifies some of the more inscrutible story points (such as the reason for the behavior of HAL, the ship’s computer) and confuses others (the book depicts a mission to Saturn; the movie depicts a mission to Jupiter). Many critics and science fiction writers regard the movie as an instant classic of the genre, one which continues to be hugely influential in the years and decades to come.
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