X

Great sites

Anything Hollywood

Atomic Popcorn

Banned in Hollywood

Bits & Pieces

Blockbuster Buzz

Book mistakes

CanMag

The Daily Column

Daily Stab

Defamer

Double Viking

EHOWA

The Evil Beet

Film Drunk

Filmofilia

Filmspotting

Foundry Music

Game mistakes

Geek Tyrant

Gone Hollywood

Hollyscoop

Hollywood Outbreak

I Am Bored

I Love Bacon

Joblo movie news

Movie Banter

Movie Buzz

Movie spoilers

Movie timeline

Other crap

Screenjunkies

Sky movie reviews

Something Really Funny

Tengossip

Trailer Addict

Unreality Magazine

Virtually Existing

Quotes

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

See more...

Mistakes

When Dave begins to disconnect HAL's circuits, one angle shows him unlock the first, second, then third unit. Just as he's about to remove the key from the third lock, the angle changes and he's pulling the key from the second lock and then goes for the third again. We know this is consecutive time as HAL is pleading with Dave the entire time. See more...

Trivia

The leopard lying on a dead zebra was actually lying on a dead horse painted to look like a zebra. The cat wasn't too happy with that scene. See more...

Picture

Movie Mistakes blog

Popular blog posts:

Top 15 biggest Harry Potter film mistakes

The biggest mistakes in the Harry Potter movies

15 biggest mistakes in Titanic

The 20 biggest Friends mistake pictures

10 Twilight mistakes in pictures

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - 42 corrections

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Gary Lockwood (add more)

Genres: Adventure, Sci-fi

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

Mistakes
Trivia
Pictures
Quotes
Corrections
Questions
Submit
In the scene where we see the Moonbus landing at the Tycho Excavation Base, it's descent engines raise dust that billows rather than falling in an arc straight back to the ground as would normally be the case in a vacuum. [Previously posted and corrected. This is an accepted film technique, not a mistake. You cannot film in a vacuum.]
Edit Time
While Dave Bowman & Frank Poole are in the pod bay they lean against the workbench much as anyone would on Earth, yet the pod bay is a weightless environment. [Already posted and corrected. Microgravity doesn't paralyse your muscles. You'd lean on things just the way you do under normal gravity.]
Edit
Counter to a previous claim of factual error . In various scenes on both the Discovery spaceship and the Pod, angular momentum CAN be preserved without rotating the whole Discovery ship, as was claimed, if there were unseen counter-motions (as in a possible "sub floor" rotating in the opposite direction as the visible floor). The same principle can explain how the pod rotates without any visible thrust from, for example, gas jets. Rotation can be all mechanically achieved, with motors, and all angular momentum is preserved as the ship avoids appearing to rotate against the background stars. What we see is all plausibly accurate according to Newtonian Mechanics. [Good point, but this is a section for posting mistakes, not non-mistakes. If you are claiming that a previous post for a factual error is incorrect you would need to correct that submission, not post the correction as a mistake.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
The storage area from which the AE-35 unit is retrieved is "supposed" to be down the long spine of Discovery. During the premier of the film in 1968, there was a scene where Astronaut Poole went through an additional doorway/airlock to get the spare unit (this scene was later deleted to shorten the film's length, but publicity photos still exist). However, the storage area is not directly behind the pod bay, but off to the right (as viewed from the front of the pod bay). [Please clarify this submission; what is the mistake? Are you stating that the storage area is moved from the spine to an area behind (or to the right of) the pod bay? The only thing to the right of the pod bay is the emergency hatch.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
If you take the letters in the computer's name (HAL), and then the next letter in the alphabet after each one, you get IBM. Stanley Kubrick denied it was on purpose but it is still kind of neat. [Arthur C. Clarke who wrote the book from the film also always and consistently denied this .]
Edit
In the famous scene where the ape throws a bone into the sky, in one shot the bone at first revolves anti-clockwise and then in the next shot, just before the jump cut to the shot of the spaceship, it now revolves clockwise. [As the background changes dramatically, it's obvious this is shot from the other side.]
Edit Corrected by John W Rosa
In the beginning of the film where we see the ape-men, it looks as if they are wearing Converse All-Star type gym shoes that have been painted to look like feet. Perhaps the rocky terrain was too hard on the costumed actors' feet. [No shot clearly indicates this suggestion. A more specific scene description or timecode is needed to verify this claim as the 'Dawn of Man" sequence is 20 minutes long.]
Edit Corrected by John W Rosa
When all the apes are gathering around the big block at the beginning of the film, look carefully at the sky. The clouds never move, not even slowly. [It's not that they NEVER move; they just don't appear to move within the few minutes we are watching, which is perfectly natural.]
Edit Corrected by John W Rosa Time
When Dave recaptures Frank with the pod, one of Frank's legs is outside the pod's pincers, but when Dave releases Frank to reenter the ship, both legs are in the pincer. Seems a bit risky to try to get another grip in the vacuum of space... [Not at all. The other arm held Frank securely around the neck so that opening and re-grasping for both Frank's legs would be risk-free.]
Edit Corrected by John W Rosa
The first time Dave is shown running around the room on the ship, in the roomwide shot he runs past the three hibernating crew, then the two empty beds. In the following chase shot on his back, he passes them in reverse order. [The scenes aren't necessarily continuous time, but a collage of shots of his exercise period. He even reverses direction between two of the shots so where the pair of sleeping crew was on his left, they are now on his right.]
Edit Corrected by John W Rosa
On Discovery, artificial gravity is created by a spinning centrifuge. This is fine, but crew members are shown climbing a ladder into the center, where they are weightless. In reality, they would experience a quite large force perpendicular to the ladder. This is because they still have momentum from traveling with the floor of the centrifuge, but the speed of the higher steps is lower, and the speed in the center is zero. [True, but you are not taking all of the variables into consideration. Most importantly, how fast is the centrifuge spinning? We don't really know; they never say that the subjects standing at the bottom of the ladder are under full gravity; it may be a fraction of earth's gravity. Second, they take a few seconds to climb/descend the ladder, and they are bracing themselves from any sideways motion while on the trips up and down. Saying they would experience "quite a large force perpendicular to the ladder" is an asumption. It is also not a movie mistake, your statement would have to include both the amount of force that should be pushing them sideways and proof that they could not overcome the force by grasping the ladder rungs tightly.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
During the scene when the photographer is taking photographs of the scientists next to the monolith on the moon, a flying insect e.g. a fly or moth, can quite be briefly seen against the dark background of the monolith itself. [I just watched this scene twice, once in slow motion, and can see no such thing. Screenshot, please?]
Edit
In the scenes with the lunar shuttle and the lunar buggy, we see a swirling cloud of dust as they are touching down. The dust would only swirl around like this within an atmosphere; it would not do this on the airless moon. [Similar mistakes have been posted and corrected. This is an accepted film technique, not an error. You cannot film in a vacuum, even if you could find a studio big enough to have the air pumped out.]
Edit Time
The initial scene shows a desert with Brazilian tapirs grazing in the background. Tapirs have never been recorded living in any sort of desert, either through live sightings, secondary evidence, or fossil record. [Neither have apes, leopards or zebras. This is not a desert - it is tropical grassland which has been devastated by drought.]
Edit
In the montage of various Earth orbiting satellites, there is a shot of a device which is clearly illuminated mainly from underneath, whereas the Earth & Moon in the background are clearly lit from above. [That's because it is lit from underneath - by reflected light from the Earth, which is only a few hundred kilometres away. The Earth has a very high albedo and would reflect a huge amount of light onto the satellite.]
Edit
During the trip to the Moon, the spacecraft's captain makes a friendly call on his passenger, Dr. Floyd. Although they are weightless, the captain leans onto Floyd's chair under his full body weight. [Microgravity doesn't paralyse your muscles. Someone used to 'weightlessness' would be able to pose in such a manner simply by leaning at the right angle.]
Edit
At the beginning of the TMA-1 excavation scene, studio lights can be seen reflecting off the tops of the astronauts' helmets (note the position of the sun low on the horizon versus the camera's perspective). [Those are the reflections of the construction lights positioned to light the excavation, which are in shot, as they are intended to be.]
Edit
When Heywood Floyd was talking to his daughter on the video-phone, the camera at home was moving slightly (up, down and sideways) to follow the movements of the girl. In reality, the phone camera would have been in a fixed position. [I have a webcam with a motion sensor which follows me as I move, and a studio protected by CCTV cameras similarly equipped. Bog standard technology.]
Edit
There's a 'Floating Pen' on the PanAm shuttle when Dr. Floyd is sleeping. On the DVD, you can see the thread holding the pen when the camera quickly re-focuses from the stewardess to the pen. Just before the re-focus occurs, go to slo-mo and it's very obvious. [No it isn't, because a thread was not used. The pen was glued to a disc of glass which was slowly rotated, and a careful cut insterspersed when the stewardess plucks the pen out of the air.]
Edit
In the briefing room on the moon, folks are walking around normally with no apparent effects of the moon's weak gravity. Same for the group of men walking to the monolith in space suits. [This is an accepted film convention, not a mistake. Films like 'Red Planet' and 'Mission to Mars' were shot years after 2001 and had the advantage of much more advanced special effects techniques, but they didn't attempt to simulate Martian gravity. The same can be said of 'Pluto Nash', shot on a $100,000,000 budget and set on the moon but making no attempt to show the effects of lunar gravity.]
Edit

1 2 3 • Next page • Show all