Corrected entry: When Frank goes to retrieve the failing AE-35, he stops the pod hundreds of yards from the ship and floats his way to the ship. If I were doing this, I would park 10 feet from where I needed to go to avoid the possibility of missing my target and getting lost in space.
Corrected entry: Moon Watcher, inspired somehow by the Monolith, invents the club. Presumably, it's the first invention ever. He imagines clubbing a herbivore. In the next scene, he brings skabs of meat to his buddies. But he had neither a knife nor any skill in butchering. He could not have cut up the carcass.
Correction: Wild chimpanzees, baboons and other primates kill their prey and tear them to pieces with their hands. Smashing a leg bone (with a club) would make the flesh relatively easy to remove.
Corrected entry: In the scene where we see the Moonbus landing at the Tycho Excavation Base, its 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. (00:50:35)
Correction: Previously posted and corrected. This is an accepted film technique, not a mistake. You cannot film in a vacuum.
Vacuum chambers certainly existed at the time. NASA tested Apollo spacecraft in them. It may have been difficult, but it certainly would have been feasible to film models in a vacuum at the time. Further, why should an "accepted film technique" forgive an obvious mistake in physics. If anything, it would be an intentional mistake if there was no way to simulate the effect of dust in a vacuum.
Correction: Dust particles will billow out in the manner we see if they have gas molecules to bounce off. Normally on the moon they have no such thing but in this case they do - the exhaust plume of the landing spacecraft. Until it slowly dissipates it will react with the dust molecules just like an atmosphere does.
Corrected entry: After HAL kills Poole we see his body cross paths in an X with the spinning away pod, as if they originated in two different locations.
Correction: Anything could have affected his trajectory and that of the pod, like a ruptured air line (we see him frantically trying to plug one back in) or he could have bounced off the hull or any of the structures on the Discovery.
Corrected entry: When Bowman blows the pod hatch and is ejected by the air into the ship's airlock, Newton's First Law dictates that the pod should move in the opposite direction, away from the ship.
Correction: Already posted and corrected - The pod would be weightless in outer space but it still has mass and inertia. The total change in momentum of Bowman and the air escaping from the pod, applied to a pod with about the mass of medium sized car, would result in the pod moving away at only about 50cm per second. That would be barely noticeable from our point of view, even if the change wasn't immediately corrected by an auto-pilot mechanism, which is feasible. We can calculate the reaction speed of the pod this way : assume a gas volume of 4 cubic metres, a mass for the pod of 2500 kg, a mass for Bowman of 150 kg, an average delta v of 100 m/s for the air in the pod, and a delta v of 10 m/s for Bowman - all of which yields a result of 0.5 m/s, and if air pressure in the pod were lower it would have moved even more slowly.
Corrected entry: When Dave is overflying Jupiter (on the left side of the screen, in the center), we see animals climbing up the hills. (02:10:42)
Correction: I just replayed this shot multiple times off my Blu-ray. I see nothing that looks remotely like "animals" climbing the mountain. 1) If there is something there, it requires freeze framing and/or zooming to see, therefore invalidating the error. 2) Considering the scale of the shot, I can't imagine anything smaller than a Brontosaurus being visible. 3) Dave is not flying over Jupiter. Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface. He has travelled through an interdimensional gateway. What do you think the eight minutes leading up to this shot were about?
Corrected entry: When Bowman and Poole get into the pod they have HAL spin it around for seemingly no other reason than to allow HAL to read their lips through the window.
Correction: They are giving HAL random orders to make sure he is obeying them. They have no idea he is going to be able to read their lips through the porthole so it does not form part of their planning.
Corrected entry: Early in the movie, when the Aries moon shuttle touches down on the covered/shielded landing platform, a considerable amount of dust is kicked up by the engines. But with no atmosphere to blow dust around, it couldn't have blown in from the moon's surface and since this is seemingly the only landing site at the base, it wasn't caused by other landers. Nice effect, though.
Correction: Watch the scene again - that's not dust. It is rocket exhaust from the Aries moon shuttle itself.
You may be correct! I'll have to withhold judgement till I see the movie again.
Corrected entry: When the explosive bolts blow as Dave Bowman is about to be exposed to the vacuum of space, entering the emergency airlock, wouldn't his eardrums have been blown by the explosive bolts going off in that cramped and pressurized pod? And wouldn't he be so severely eyesight impaired due to the fluid boil-off in his eyes in a vacuum, that he wouldn't be able to see, let alone operate the emergency door control lever in the airlock which he just happened to conveniently end up at? This scene looks wrong.
Correction: Since that same scenario happened in a 1960s Mercury program capsule to astronaut Gus Grissom without ear damage, we can assume that the technology of 2001 would also not damage Bowman's ears. Likewise, all astronauts on Skylab and International Space Station were trained to find and operate all hatches in the dark. Bowman should have been able to operate the airlock with his eyes closed or blinded.
Correction: As for eyes being useless in a vacuum, tell that to Jim Leblanc, a NASA technician who was accidentally exposed to vacuum for 27 seconds during a space suit test in 1966. He reported a slight earache, a loss of his sense of taste, but no problems with his eyesight.
Revealing mistake: When Dave Bowman attempts to re-enter Discovery One via the emergency airlock after blowing the explosive bolts on the pod door, where does said pod door go? And also, because of Newton's law of motion, the sudden rush of cabin air during decompression inside said pod after the bolts had blown the door off would have resulted in the pod being pushed in the opposite direction (in effect, that rapid escaping air would have acted like a rocket motor, propelling the pod like a cannonball from a gun!).
Suggested correction: Did you watch the film? The pod bay door doesn't come into it. Bowman enters via the emergency entrance, not a pod bay. The door of the pod and the door of the emergency exit slide sideways into cavities that are there for that purpose - hinged doors don't make any sense in a cramped spacecraft. We see the emergency entrance doorway slide back into position when Bowman activates it.
I think you confused the pod bay door with the door on the pod itself. In the explosive bolt sequence, the pod door does disappear. There is an expanding cloud from the pod door, but no flying door or evidence of it in the emergency airlock. Just an open hole in the pod.
In the scene just before HAL reads the astronauts' lips in the pod, we see that the pod door does slide sideways into the pod hull. The explosive bolts, marked by small red patches, are located in a pattern all around the edge of the door. This indicates that the explosive bolts would blow that section of the door outward rather than sideways into the hull storage pocket.
Bowman programmes the bolts on one side of the door only to detonate, blowing it sideways.
Sure, that might work, but how about this? Bowman knows that the door is constructed of a special composite material that instantly vaporises if it is compressed in just the right way. So, he reprograms the charges to set up a harmonic series of shock wave fronts that destabilises the composite of the door structure, tuning it into the large cloud of smoke we see in the scene.
Corrected entry: The scene at the Tycho excavation site where the uncovered monolith emits a radio signal after being illuminated by the rising sun incorrectly shows the sun directly overhead. This would be impossible as the crater Tycho is in the moon's southern hemisphere and the sun would never rise that high during the lunar summer.
Correction: When is it ever specified that this scene takes place in the lunar summer?
Corrected entry: Originally the film was going to end with the Starchild activating the nuclear launch platforms orbiting Earth, using the planet's destruction as a means to accelerate the evolution of mankind into its new universally intelligent form. Stanley Kubrick eventually decided against this as it was too similar to the ending of his previous film "Dr. Strangelove".
Correction: As author Arthur C. Clarke conceived the story, Dave Bowman transforms into the Starchild and instantaneously returns to Earth to become the planet's guardian. The Starchild arrives just as international tensions erupt into nuclear war; whereupon, the Starchild safely destroys the nuclear weapons, saving Mankind from itself. There was never any mention or intention of the Starchild destroying Earth.
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 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.
Trivia: People speculate that HAL is a reference to IBM, as the letters differ by one position. Kubrick says this is a coincidence, but was concerned about IBM's reaction to the film's references, including the IBM logo on Bowman's spacesuit. However IBM had no problem as long as they weren't associated with the "equipment failure," or listed as technical advisors for the computer.
Suggested correction: Despite decades of rumors regarding the relationship between Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and IBM, the fact is that IBM worked very closely with the production (assisting and advising on futuristic onscreen computer effects), and there was never any conflict or concern with IBM's reaction to the film.
Correction: This isn't a mistake - it is you second guessing the film. What you would have done in Poole's place is irrelevant. We have no idea about the logistics of a maintenance mission carried out on a fictional space craft on its way to Jupiter - it has never happened and it is very likely it never will. Not knowing the reasons for Poole parking the pod where he did doesn't mean there isn't one.
I'm not second guessing the film, just the logistical decision Pool made. Makes no practical sense, filmmaking not withstanding.
steven_frankel