2001: A Space Odyssey corrections

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - 31 corrections

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Gary Lockwood

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "make changes" when viewing mistakes, and click "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

In the scene where Dave is replacing the AE35 unit at the antenna he is steadying himself only with his hand as he does his work. In reality every motion he made would have a equal opposite reactions so he would have been twisting in space and unable to do a basic task. He should be more firmly anchored to the antenna to be accurate. [The fact that he can manoevre towards the antenna mount while not tethered to the pod shows he has some form of steering in space, such as small reaction jets. These can be preset to overcome rotational motion of the body nowadays - Space Shuttle astronauts use them. No reason the crew of the Discovery can't be similarly equipped.]

When the scientists are on the moon and approaching the monolith, the lighting from the floodlights changes from shot to shot. [I have watched the scene over and over again - the lighting changes are caused by the rising sun and the changing position of the men as they walk down the ramp. The position of the floodlights is totally consistent throughout.]

When Floyd is going to make his call to his home, the image of the Earth or the Moon seen in the window behind him changes the way it circles from clockwise to anticlockwise. [The rotation of Earth in the windows does change direction between the telephone scene and another previous scene. But it doesn't change during the phone scene. I've checked & double-checked; it runs counter-clockwise the whole time.]

The spacecraft Discovery contains within it the rotating centrifuge-room, in which the astronauts spend most of their time to avoid the detrimental effects of prolonged weightlessness. The room is coupled to the rest of the ship and is kept spinning by way of a motor. But by Newton's laws the torque on the centrifuge must be countered by an equal anti-torque, so the surrounding body of the ship ought to be counter-rotating to conserve angular momentum. [Previously corrected. The central room is NOT spinning. It is a micro-gravity environment. The astronauts do nothing to counteract the problems of weightlessness - they live with them as best they can.]

Dave Bowman parks the pod next to the emergency airlock and blows the door off by detonating the explosive bolts. Since the pod was full of air, the door ought to have been ejected into the airlock and become a rather hazardous projectile. But in the scene it's nowhere to be found. What became of it? [The explosive bolts are along one side of the door. It is blown sideways into the recess in the wall of the pod it is designed to close into during normal use. The fact that there was air inside the air lock makes absolutely no difference to this.]

Dave exited the ship for an EVA to replace the 'flawed' AE35 unit. Unfortunately, Dave would've received five times the lethal dose of radiation during that brief jaunt. This is typical when in that proximity to Jupiter. Even though Dr. Floyd says "they can't be exposed to that radiation for any longer than four minutes", they'd still die from it within a few weeks of that brief exposure. [Despite its attempts at authenticity, 2001 is still a science fiction film, and in its reality, Poole's space suit and helmet are made of some futuristic material that provides protection from radiation.]

The stewardess, in her 360-degree stroll to the control room aboard the spherical Aries lunar shuttle, is most certainly going through the wrong door, if you think about where the control room is relative to the rest of the interior (she should have been stepping through the access on the top of the set). [We do not know that as she exits the 'hallway' where she gets the meals, that she immediately enters the cockpit. There may have been corridors, or even another elevator or stairs, to get to the cockpit.]

As the Pan-Am shuttle is approaching the spinning space station there as a shot of it from within the hub based dock. The star filled background is spinning as it ought to, but the shuttle, which is not yet centered on the dock, is seen swinging across the sky independent of the background. To do this the craft would be tracing a spiral through space. [We see it comes from one side, swinging across to the other as it tries to line up directly in front of the target. This is like driving a car from across three lanes of traffic to tailgate a truck - you will likely swerve a little too far and have to correct your position once or twice. In 3 dimensions, plus a 4th dimension of moving space as they orbit the moon, this becomes triply difficult to do. So yes, they'd be tracing a spiral, but take a soda can and spin it while flipping it end-over-end, and visualize how the opening tab moves through space - a 3-D spiral.]

There is something drastically wrong with the design of the spherical 'Aries' moon shuttle. Some seats and many fixtures are 'upside down' relative to the up-down orientation of the shuttle itself, and we see loose food trays and equipment about the place as if this is routine. But - the shuttle is designed to land on the moon. What happens then? The moon has gravity, remember? There are going to be quite a few very disgruntled people dangling upside down like spiders, and there will be loose gear (and perhaps a stewardess or two) bouncing about all over the place. What a dumb design flaw. [The shuttle lands "on its back" with legs extending beyond the engines. As in most traditional sci-fi, and ALL actual, space flights to date, the launch (and landing) orientation for humans is to be on one's back. This minimizes blood being sucked down to your feet if you were sitting upright at launch - you could pass out. So we see this when the shuttle lands on the moon - the cockpit (red window) faces up (pilots on their backs, facing out the window). When we presume that the passenger cabin was 180 degrees spun around from the cockpit seating, they're still on their backs. Any loose objects would have been stowed before landing - the airlines don't lock down your bags, newspapers and coffee cups, right? They're loose in the cabin during flight, but put away on takeoff and landing. ]

When Dave is trapped in the pod outside the ship and has to go through the airlock, the solution is impossible (and a real astronaut would have known that). The change in pressure between the pod and the vacuum of space would cause the body to explode without a pressure suit (including the helmet, which was missing). Also, the absolute zero temperature of space would have frozen Dave solid before he ever got the Discovery's door closed. [The suggestion that a human body would immediately explode in a vacuum is a common fallacy. Nor would they immediately freeze solid - heat does not transfer away from a body particularly quickly, even in a very cold environment. NASA estimates that a human being could survive exposure to space for thirty seconds without suffering any lasting injury, provided that they didn't try to hold their breath - something that Bowman, as an astronaut, would be well aware of. His actions are quite plausible.] Corrected by Tailkinker

On the moon shuttle after Dr. Floyd, Dr. Halvorsen, and Bill look at pictures and eat their sandwiches, Bill serves coffee with no regard for the weak gravity. Very dangerous. [There's nothing dangerous about it. Under one sixth gravity the coffee would behave almost the same as it would on earth. For someone used to such gravity conditions it would pose no danger at all. It's only in orbit under 'zero-gravity' that liquids are dangerous.]

2001 is the only space-based film that correctly portrays 'space' as a soundless vacuum. No whooshes, no THX explosions... [Actually, this is a common misconception. There are at least two other space movies which accurately omit sound effects in the vacuum of space: Destination Moon and Moon Zero Two.]