Giant Freakin Robot

Stanley Kubrick’s mind bending 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey is the kind of movie where you can examine practically every single frame and endlessly debate each element. People have been doing it since day one. It already clocks in at well over two hours (damn near three), but if the notoriously meticulous filmmaker had followed his original plan, it could very well have been even longer. With a rerelease currently showing in the U.K., some details about the initial prologue have surfaced and are making the rounds.

The Guardian published an article that explores the intro that fans never got the chance to see included in the movie as part of the British Film Institutes “Days of Fear and Wonder.” Unfortunately this is footage doesn’t exist anymore, lost to the ravages of time, but it apparently featured a bunch of scientists sitting around and talking about “aliens, evolution, and space travel,” among other topics.

As much as I love The Simpsons, I admittedly haven’t watched new episodes with any kind of regularity for a number of years at this point. I still have my favorite moments and episodes, and Simpsons quotes still make up roughly 40% of my daily dialogue, but it hasn’t been consistently good enough to warrant tuning in week in and week out for a while. That said, now that Fox moved Brooklyn Nine-Nine to Sunday evenings immediately following America’s favorite jaundiced-looking family, I’ve tuned in far more frequently than I have in years. This is where and how I first saw this Stanley Kubrick tribute from their annual “Treehouse of Horror,” the 25th such Halloween horror-themed episode.

Primarily, this is an homage to Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ classic dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Moe Szyslak takes the place of Malcolm MacDowell’s violent, fake-eyelash-and-jock-strap-wearing thug, with Homer, Carl, and Lenny as his mates. As youths, all they want to do is hang around picking fights, drinking Duff Milk, and looking for a bit of the in-out, which, in this instance, mean jumping in and out of the Kwik-E-Mart’s automatic doors. That changes, however, when Homer meets Marge, and it all goes to hell in a hand basket. This isn’t the entire video, but it’s a nice chunk.

With Interstellar on the horizon, creeping nearer each and every day, space is on a lot of people’s minds right now. One of the titles often thrown around in comparison to Christopher Nolan’s film, including by the director himself, is Stanley Kubrick’s philosophical, mind-bending genre classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is a movie that has been a staple of repertory and midnight programs damn near since it premiered in 1968, but now it’s getting a new theatrical release. There’s a catch, however, you have to live in the U.K., because that’s where this is happening. Lucky bastards. But still, we have the first new trailer for 2001 in a great many years, and it is just as epic as you remember and imagined.

All of the high points are here in this video. You have the monolith, HAL 9000, those angry apes, Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” and the usual visual smorgasbord you expect from 2001. It’s hard not to watch this and be stirred at least a little. This is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the idea of an epic movie, it’s so sweeping, so big, so jam packed with ideas and themes. As the Nolan quote says, there’s only one Stanley Kubrick, and there is a very good reason we don’t have any other movies like this one anywhere in the world.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Spacy Odyssey is a dense, esoteric, philosophical mind scrambler of a movie that people continue to debate the meaning of even decades later. Books, many of them, have been written about this film, from just about every angle imaginable, but one question remains, can you distill the essence of the movie down into 60-seconds? Well, this new video attempts to do just that. You’ll have to judge for yourself if they’re successful or not.

The answer to this question, which you probably gathered for yourself, is that they don’t really pull this off, but you didn’t really expect them to, did you? But that doesn’t mean this quick animated video isn’t without a certain set of charms. This is the 13th episode from 1A4STUDIO’s Speedrun series, where they recount the entire story of a movie in a minute or less. Some installments work much much better than others, and with a movie like 2001, it’s not an easy feat to accomplish. Hell, HAL 9000, one of the most terrifying antagonists in all of film history, is barely anywhere to be found in this video, and that’s a bummer.

In addition to being one of the most talented and respected filmmakers of all time, Stanley Kubrick gave our beloved genre of science fiction several instant classics. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a hypnotic epic stretching from the dawn of man to our near extinction. A Clockwork Orange adapted Anthony Burgess’ novel in cold, methodical fashion, serving up a bit of the old ultraviolence that inspired countless pop-culture references and hipster Halloween costumes. Those two films are just a few of the many being paid tribute by an exhibition that recently wrapped up its engagement at the Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco. Thankfully you can still see what the show’s artists had to offer, and you don’t even need a plane ticket or a time machine.

Here at GFR we cover anything that fits under the umbrella of our twin loves: science and science fiction. And just as the bleeding edge of our scientific understanding is forever pushing the boundaries of our science fiction, SF is itself inspiring fans to take transform their love of starships, robots, and the like into careers in real scientific fields. So what are some of the science fiction movies, shows, and books that real-life scientists love best? The Huffington Post recently asked a handful of scientists precisely that.

Dr. Max Tegmark is a cosmologist and physics professor at MIT, and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, which provides grants to “catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology.” Tegmark cites Greg Egan’s 1994 science fiction novel Permutation City as his favorite, explaining that Egan’s “explorations of the ultimate nature of reality blew my mind and inspired my own research.”

Dr. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and the author of books including The Particle at the End of the Universe and From Eternity to Here. He lists another semi-obscure work you might want to add to your Kindle: Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg. Carroll says, “It’s a story about life on the surface of a neutron star, which would ordinarily be considered completely outlandish. A good reminder that ‘life’ might take on very different forms than we ordinarily imagine. Here’s the Dragon’s Egg synopsis from Amazon: