IT'S FRIDAY: Stanley Kubrick's epic space film is a stellar but weird masterpiece, says BRIAN VINER as he reviews 2001: A Space Odyssey 50 years after its launch
One of Christopher Nolan's earliest memories of going to the cinema is being taken by his father to see 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The 47-year-old director of Dunkirk and Interstellar admits being hugely inspired by Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking 1968 movie, and next month at the Cannes Film Festival he can acknowledge the debt in public.
The film is being reissued in its original 70mm format, so modern cinemagoers can experience exactly what held audiences spellbound 50 years ago this summer. Nolan, who has worked closely on the project with a team from Warner Brothers, will introduce the premiere in Cannes, after which the film will be shown in selected British cinemas.
2001: A Space Odyssey, used pioneering special effects to show the evolution of humankind over three million years (pictured)
Nolan isn't the only one who has fallen under the film's spell. Four years ago, 150 leading authors, film-makers and scientists were invited to rank their ten favourite science-fiction films.
Alien finished third and Blade Runner second, but comfortably at the top of the pile was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which uses pioneering special effects to show the evolution of humankind over three million years, from grunting apes to space travellers discovering extra-terrestrial life.
Its status as the greatest of all sci-fi films is endorsed by many of Kubrick's fellow directors. George Lucas regards it as a work of genius, 'far superior' to his own 1977 picture Star Wars. Steven Spielberg considers it one of cinema's towering masterpieces.
James Cameron, the director of Titanic, saw it when he was 15 and says it made him want to make films. But Woody Allen couldn't make head nor tail of it, and at the Los Angeles premiere Rock Hudson (as well as 240 others) stalked out, thundering: 'Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'
Soon, we will all get a chance to make up our own minds about Kubrick's film, which was inspired by British writer Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story The Sentinel and released the year before Man first walked on the Moon.
Since then, 2001 has become revered for its powerful classical soundtrack, its extraordinary images of space and much besides. The screenplay was eerily prescient in its vision of a computer-dependent society — long before mobile phones, its characters used what we now know as Skype.
Love it or loathe it, 2001 is a landmark film.
2001: A Space Odyssey will be shown at Picturehouse cinemas around the UK from May 18.
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