2001: A Space Odyssey (film) essay "Odyssey of Stanley Kubrick" wrote, "Kubrick has conceived a film which in one stroke has made the whole science fiction cinema obsolete." Others credit "2001" with opening up a market for films such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Alien", "Blade Runner", "Contact", and "Interstellar", proving that big-budget "serious" science-fiction films can be commercially successful, and establishing the "sci-fi blockbuster" as a Hollywood staple. Science magazine "Discover"s blogger Stephen Cass, discussing the film's considerable impact on subsequent science fiction, writes that "the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the
Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey "The cyclical evolution from ape to man to spaceman to angel-starchild-superman is complete". The monolith appears four times in "2001: A Space Odyssey": on the African savanna, on the moon, in space orbiting Jupiter, and near Bowman's bed before his transformation. After the first encounter with the monolith, we see the leader of the apes have a quick flashback to the monolith after which he picks up a bone and uses it to smash other bones. Its usage as a weapon enables his tribe to defeat the other tribe of apes occupying the water hole who have not learned how