2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968): FINAL SCENE
The Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photograph: Kobal
Chosen by Stephen Poliakoff.
After starting out as a playwright, Poliakoff turned to writing and directing television dramas including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince. His feature films include Hidden City and Glorious 39.
After decades, people are arguing about the ending of 2001. What the ending means. The computer taking over, the menacing computer howl, the fetus – it has passed into cinema folklore.
Science fiction was not a genre that attracted me much, and it was very unsexy in the 1960s. But Kubrick’s film was the most original I had ever seen. It came at me for the first time, completely alone, in a cinema on a summer afternoon in 1968. I was 15, and it made an extraordinary impression on me. There was a lot more mainstream “auteur cinema” than there is now, Hollywood studios producing personal films. Nevertheless Kubrick stood alone, a titanic figure that obsessively made films, under great secrecy, and with nobody interfering.
I had never seen such a bold use of cinema, and certainly never such an incredibly obscure ending. To have spent all that time and money and to have the daring – some would say foolhardy daring, but nevertheless a magnificent daring – to end the film on such an elusive and obscure note, I found it amazing as a 15-year-old that anybody should have the balls to do that. It excited me and changed my whole view of what you could do as a writer, whatever medium you were attempting – Kubrick’s aspiration to be original. Now it’s been much imitated but 2001 was extraordinarily ahead of its time, and has continued to survive and influence generations.
