2001: A Space Odyssey in popular culture 2001: A Space Odyssey in popular culture In popular culture, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film "" has had a significant impact in such diverse cultural forms and media as film, literature, music and technology. The influence of "2001" on subsequent filmmakers is considerable. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and others, including many special effects technicians, discuss the impact the film has had on them in a featurette titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001", included in the 2007 DVD release of the film. Spielberg calls it his film generation's "big bang", while Lucas says it was
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) level of being that represents the next stage of human evolution. The film also conveys what some viewers have described as a sense of the sublime and numinous. Ebert writes in his essay on "2001" in "The Great Movies": In a book on architecture, Gregory Caicco writes that "Space Odyssey" illustrates how our quest for space is motivated by two contradictory desires, a "desire for the sublime" characterized by a need to encounter something totally other than ourselves—"something numinous"—and the conflicting desire for a beauty that makes us feel no longer "lost in space," but at home. Similarly, an article