2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

6 mistakes since 12 Jun '19, 00:00

(17 votes)

2001: A Space Odyssey mistake picture

Continuity mistake: After David Bowman returns to Discovery One, HAL disables all life support systems in order to protect "himself" from being shut off. But Bowman successfully enters the ship, grab a helmet and goes to the Logic Center, to shut down HAL by disabling the Memory Banks. But, when opening the hatch to enter the Memory Bank, you can see his naked left wrist, for the spacesuit and the glove are disconnected. (01:51:10)

RuboSay

2001: A Space Odyssey mistake picture

Deliberate mistake: When Dave is in the pod arguing with Hal to let him back in, various patterns of light are projected on Dave's face presumably from the video screens that say NAV and COM and such. Light on such a screen would diffuse and not project like this. It is likely those screens had rear projection and they merely removed the screens for this effect.

2001: A Space Odyssey mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: When David walks with the case in the hand inside the Discovery One, you can see the dolly track below at David's feet blending in the structure. (01:12:12)

Continuity mistake: When we see the outside of the cave where the apes are sleeping for the first time it's at sunset. We can see the sun and cloud behind the cave as if it is just sitting in a rock face with nothing behind it, but in the next shot when it's daytime suddenly there is a background of rocks and mountains behind the cave.

jbrbbt

Deliberate mistake: On the space station after Dr. Floyd has just gotten off the elevator and is talking to a receptionist, the moon image in the window is revolving with the exact appearance it had when Floyd was in the telephone booth when the camera angle is perpendicular to the window and presumably parallel to the station's rotational axis. In the receptionist scene, the view of the window is at an angle yet the rotating moon image is the same. This would require a different axis of rotation for the space staton - one in which the station would be wobbling.

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!).

Zippy Zubes

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

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.

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

More quotes from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Trivia: The little girl on the picture phone is director Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian. (00:27:50)

Larry Koehn

More trivia for 2001: A Space Odyssey

Question: I don't understand the significance of the monolith or the starbaby. Can someone explain it to me?

Answer: As author Arthur C. Clarke explained it, the first Monolith (the one seen at the beginning of the film and then buried on the Moon) was a space probe from an incomprehensibly more advanced alien intelligence that resided inside a star elsewhere in the cosmos. The Monolith's objective was to seek out lifeforms that had potential and "tweak" their neural evolution, causing them to evolve toward intelligence. In the case of Mankind on Earth, once the modification was made, the Monolith probe retreated to the Moon and waited 4 million years for Mankind to reach it. When Mankind reached the Moon, the Monolith sent a signal to the next phase of the experiment, which was another Monolith in orbit of Jupiter. When Mankind reached the Jupiter Monolith in a matter of months, the Monolith acted as an interdimensional portal to the other side of the universe, transporting the evolved human specimen to its creator (that resided within a star). The creator intelligence found the specimen (Dave Bowman) to be of acceptable quality and rapidly evolved him to the next level, a Star Child. The Star Child is a "godly" evolution of Mankind. The Star Child chooses to instantaneously return to its home planet (Earth), where it stops a nuclear war.

Charles Austin Miller

Answer: The monolith is a monitor placed by the aliens to track the progress of developing civilizations. When humanity found the monolith on the Moon, that signaled a certain level of technological advancement. The starbaby is the evolution of the astronaut, as the symbol of humanity, from "Earth-bound" to a true child of the universe, turning his back on the Earth and looking toward the stars.

scwilliam

In both the Arthur C. Clarke story and in the movie, the Star Child does not "turn his back on Earth"; quite the contrary, as soon as Bowman transforms into the Star Child, his first impulse is to instantaneously return to Earth, which he does just in time to stop a nuclear war. In essence, Bowman becomes the guardian of Earth.

Charles Austin Miller

Answer: In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Clarke makes clear what many already suspected: The Monolith was malfunctioning by the time it tweaked human evolution. It increased human aggression in order to assure human survival, but this was a hasty move, which saddled humanity with a never ending series of destructive conflicts. Kubrick also hinted at this in a later movie. The Monolith appears in Full Metal Jacket, presumably inspiring the soldiers in the Vietnamese War to solve their problems by killing, just as it had inspired the fighting hominids millions of years before.

The monolith from 2001 does not appear in Full Metal Jacket. There is a tall burning building in the background during Cowboy's death scene but it takes a hell of a stretch of the imagination to see it as a monolith. It's just a ruined building. Kubrick himself confirmed this in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine - it's combination of coincidence and wishful thinking.

More questions & answers from 2001: A Space Odyssey

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