Corrected entry: 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.
Corrected entry: 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.
Correction: As the background changes dramatically, it's obvious this is shot from the other side.
Corrected entry: 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.
Correction: 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.
Corrected entry: 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).
Correction: Those are the reflections of the construction lights positioned to light the excavation, which are in shot, as they are intended to be.
Corrected entry: 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?
Correction: 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.
Corrected entry: 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.
Correction: 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.
Corrected entry: 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.
Correction: 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.
Corrected entry: 2001 is the only space-based film that correctly portrays 'space' as a soundless vacuum. No whooshes, no THX explosions...
Correction: 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.
Corrected entry: When David Bowman is travelling through the space portal, many streaks of light can be seen passing him on both sides yet when we see David Bowman himself, the streaks are reflected in his helmet and they don't seem to be moving at all.
Correction: The reflections in the helmet are of the instruments inside the pod, which we see again after the pod has stopped in the room.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Bowman is attempting to force entry into the Discovery by using the pod's robotic arm to manually open the exterior door, the error is that the force needed to turn the door opener in a weightless environment should have twisted the pod in the opposite direction as it wasn't physically locked to the mother ship anywhere else by the other arm.
Correction: We see the arm opening the hatch in close ups. We don't see the rest of the pod. As the pod is not spinning, there must be something keeping it stable such as the pod's thrusters firing or a powerful gyroscope.
Corrected entry: When they try to hide from HAL, Dave comments that there is a malfunction in the "C" pod. HAL should protest because it doesn’t detect anything wrong, but it doesn’t say anything.
Correction: HAL is already suspicious of the pilots, obvious from the fact that he reads their lips through the window of the pod. Perhaps he ignores this lie in order to learn of their plans.
Corrected entry: When Bowman leaves Discovery to retrieve the AE-35 Unit, he asks HAL to prepare the "B Pod" and HAL powers up and rotates the middle of three pods. Later, when Bowman asks Poole to help him with a problematic transmitter in "C-pod", they go to the pod bay and enter the middle pod which must still be B-pod as no two pods have left the ship and returned to shuffle their positions. (01:12:30 - 01:22:40)
Correction: This could be a character mistake. And it makes sense in the context of the film. It's the exact kind of thing that would make HAL paranoid if Dave and Frank entered a different pod that they mentioned earlier. It's kind of a counterpart to HAL incorrectly identifying the sequence of moves to checkmate in the Chess game he was playing with Frank.
Corrected entry: 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. (00:11:55 - 00:13:55)
Correction: 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.
Corrected entry: When Frank Poole and HAL are playing chess, HAL states his move as (in what is called "Descriptive Notation") "Queen to Bishop Three". This is not true, the move he makes is "Queen to Bishop Six".
Correction: This mistake is intentional, meant for the astute viewer to notice that something isn't quite right with HAL.
Corrected entry: The movie was a financial and critical bomb when it premiered.
Correction: While many viewers complained that the film was confusing and even boring, the critical reviews of "2001: A Space Odyssey" were mixed, with more than half praising Stanley Kubrick's monumental cinematic achievement as a landmark in filmmaking. Even the negative reviews acknowledged the movie's towering technical genius, while mainly deriding the flat dialogue, character development and puzzling final scenes. Negative reviews notwithstanding, the movie played continuously in theatres across the USA for over a hundred weeks straight and won numerous awards (including an Academy Award for visual effects, Bafta Awards for best cinematography, sound and art direction, and science fiction's Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation, among other awards) in 1969. Thus, it was far from being a "critical bomb," as asserted. Produced at a cost of $10.5 Million (a monster budget in the late 1960s and the most expensive movie Metro Goldwyn Mayer had ever produced up to that point), the film made back about $9 Million upon its release but went on to gross over $58 Million domestically and $12 Million internationally during its theatrical run, for a worldwide boxoffice of over $70 Million (or about seven times its production budget). Again, this was far from being the "financial bomb" you suggest.
Corrected entry: When Bowman is getting ready to leave Discovery to retrieve the allegedly-faulty AE-35 Unit, he instructs HAL to "open the pod doors (plural), HAL" when he should be well aware it has only one door. He is not asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. (01:12:40)
Correction: Each pod has two doors - an inner and an outer door.
Corrected entry: When Dave goes to retrieve lifeless Frank the computer screen to his right which is supposed to show continuously updated data, twice displays a jagged line like those found near the end of a reel of a motion picture film.
Correction: Those things in films are there to tell the projectionist that the reel is about to end. The first tells him to expect a projector swap, and the second means "switch projectors." Whatever you see is DEFINITELY not projector switch signals, as the little mini-movies on screens would not have them. I just looked at the scene seven times and I don't see it. Either I missed it or it's an image compression artifact. What color was the screen background, and was it the front or rear right screen? Where on the screen was it? If it was a purple background, those are numbers flashing onscreen.
Corrected entry: When Astronaut Poole goes on the EVA to retrieve the AE-35 unit from Discovery's antenna, the scene shows the Pod coming directly over the top of the sphere. However, the view from inside the Pod has it off to the side of the spaceship.
Correction: There is a time interval during which the window is not seen, during that time, Bowman maneuvers the pod to the side of the ship.
Corrected entry: Early in this chapter of the film, we see Discovery has three EVA Pods (from HAL's view, left to right they are C-pod, B-pod and A-pod). When Poole is killed, we see he was using the center pod. Bowman then goes after Poole with A-pod. This leaves behind the C-pod. Bowman gets back aboard Discovery by blowing explosive bolts to release his pod's door. After Bowman deactivates HAL, we can presume he recovers the now-damaged A-pod he ejected from. It can only be placed in either the right or center pod locations, and as we learn in 2010, it is found sitting in its original right-side location. So to leave Discovery for the last time, Bowman must use the C-pod which is on the left, yet is shown emerging from the center doorway B-pod originally launched from. (01:32:50 - 01:59:45)
Correction: Bowman must have made an EVA during the time he was alone on board, and opened the middle door on returning to the podbay. Mistakes are definite mistakes, not ones for which there is a reasonable explanation.
I believe that the last pod departure in the movie from the "wrong door", the center one, was not a mistake but one of Kubrick's subtle visual clues. My interpretation is that it meant the whole end of the movie was Bowman's dream before dying when he was stranded at Jupiter.
Corrected entry: Towards the end of the movie where there are deep space shots of the planets, the spaceship and the sun, there is one shot where the sun is in the middle of several planetary objects. The objects closer to the viewer show crescent as they should due to the suns orientation to the planetary objects. On the far side of the sun however, the planetary objects also show crescent but shouldn't. They should show FULL or nearly full.
Correction: 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.
BocaDavie ★