Technologies in 2001: A Space Odyssey Technologies in 2001: A Space Odyssey The 1968 science fiction film "" featured numerous fictional future technologies, which have proven prescient in light of subsequent developments around the world. Before the film's production began, director Stanley Kubrick sought technical advice from over fifty organizations, and a number of them submitted their ideas to Kubrick of what kind of products might be seen in a movie set in the year 2001. The film is also praised for its accurate portrayal of spaceflight and vacuum. "2001" is, according to four NASA engineers who based their nuclear-propulsion spacecraft design in part on the
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