Of Course It's 2001: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 80-92

 I have a confession to make I don’t like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think it’s a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, it’s certainly a science fiction milestone, but it’s boring as fuck. I’ve seen every Stanley Kubrick movie up to A.I. (his quasi-last movie) and the man knew the technical craft of filmmaking. He knew how to frame a shot (just watch the big wheel scenes with Danny in The Shining), how to do lighting (Barry Lyndon), and execute unbroken long takes (the opening scene in Full Metal Jacket). Most of his movies are very slow paced, and hard to watch. You have to sit down and ready yourself. Most of his movies are great examples of why film is a form of art; but 2001 is not one of them.

I don’t say this to be shocking, and some of you right now are probably thinking what the hell is he on about 2001 is a great movie. It’s not, it’s too long. The opening scene with the apes does not need to go on as long as it did. The end hyperspace scene is much the same. We remember the movie because the scenes that work, kill. The conflict between the astronauts and HAL, the entire sequence on the space station, those work so effectively that they wash out the rest of the movie. It’s just poorly paced, and probably because Kubrick was not a science fiction director.

That shocking admission aside, the only reason that 2001 gets lumped in with the Apollo landing is because of the proximity between the film and the landing. The easiest way to answer the question: how did Kubrick get so many details right? is to point out that spaceflight was very much a thing prior to the making of the movie. The details were known. Translating them to film was an exercise in technical skill, but it wasn’t a mystery as to what it should look like.

Kaysing claims that the movie was made for three reasons. The first was profit. The other two were: “With government sponsorship, to sell the concept of space travel prior to the Apollo missions.” And “to provide the technical know-how for creating all Apollo stills and motion pictures ON EARTH!”

I find even the profit-motive to be a dubious claim. Kubrick didn’t need the money and by all-accounts his filmmaking was not profit directed. The next two claims are absurd and completely undercut the rest of the chapter. Someone debunking this claim in the 70s could do so in five minutes at a library. The Apollo Moon landing takes place in 1969, 2001 is release in 1968. However, this claim ignores the fact that the Apollo program had been running since 1967, the Gemini program since 1964, and Mercury since 1961. If the 2001 was made in order to “sell” the public on space travel, it came seven years too late. The third point makes even less sense than the previous two. Kubrick’s movie comes too late for this aspect of the conspiracy theory.

The movie doesn’t start filming until 1965, it’s finished in 1967; but the effects editing; the stuff that Kaysing says is used to fake the Apollo missions isn’t completed until 1968—one month before the theatrical release. There isn’t any time to fake the space flight missions that happened before the movie’s release unless Kaysing wants to allege that Kubrick had a time machine he could play with. Otherwise faking the space missions runs into Kubrick filming Dr. Strangelove.

“Thus, the time sequence is perfect. Americans were conditioned by ‘2001’ to expect to see a certain quality in space films.”—No, none of this makes sense, they couldn’t be conditioned to see anything if they’d already had seen it on the evening news. Kaysing is playing a gambit and here; a gambit which pays off. He’s counting on the fact that no one is going to remember that manned space flight predates the Kubrick film because all people really remember is the Apollo 11 landing. Just a little film history knowledge tosses this whole thing in the garbage.

There’s an anti-government rant about food additives and social security—it’s out of place and entirely a non-sequitur. Other than that, the rest of this chapter is trash. We don’t need to debunk the claims about photography or how they faked zero-G because of a decade of space flights prior to the movie.

The final page of this chapter claims that the film Capricorn 1 was inspired by an earlier version of the book we are currently reading. I have not seen this movie, but I can say that Kaysing is lying here. This book isn’t a big enough hit, and the earliest draft of Capricorn 1 was written in 1972, while the first edition of this book was written in 1976. These kinds of claim might float back in the late 70s, but that’s because they didn’t have Wikipedia.

The 2001 claim is poorly executed that I begin to wonder if Kaysing had even seen the movie. The joke about this is that Kubrick did direct the Moon landing, but he flew to the Moon to shoot it for authenticity’s sake. The only reason to make this claim is because Kubrick’s movie looks so good; but it just doesn’t hold up in any way.