2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest films ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is pretty much perfect. This 1968 masterpiece has everything: a robot who murders people; a floating space baby thing; apes gone wild; a psychedelic light show and time travel. It’s hard to go wrong with this movie. That said, there is definitely one thing missing and that is an accurate prediction of what the year 2001 would look like. We definitely did not have commercial space stations or talking computers at that point. No, America was still awash with Hummers, the first iPods, mostly terrible pop culture, post-9/11 xenophobia, and rampant Bush administration cronyism. Elegant and visually breathtaking it was not. As prescient as Kubrick’s opus was in many ways, it ultimately failed to foresee that turn-of-the-millennia Americans would be less interested in space travel than they were in who won Survivor.
