2001: A Space Odyssey had been with Kubrick's film, although he did appear in a cameo role in the finished film, sitting on a park bench feeding birds outside the White House. 2001: A Space Odyssey 2001: A Space Odyssey is the 1968 science fiction written by Arthur C. Clarke and the directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is a part of Clarke's "Space Odyssey" series. Both the novel and the film are partially based on Clarke's 1948 short story "The Sentinel", an entry in a BBC short story competition, and "Encounter in the Dawn", published in 1953 in the magazine "Amazing Stories". After deciding
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) artist.") John Simon felt it was "a regrettable failure, although not a total one. This film is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines ... and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans ... "2001", for all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, is a kind of space-"Spartacus" and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story." Eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. deemed the film "morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long ... a film out of control". In a 2001 review the BBC said that its slow pacing often alienates modern audiences more than it did upon