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
Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans. In the same interview, he also blames the poor critical reaction to "2001" as follows: Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and