A flurry of space movies has fluttered out of Hollywood over the past few years. Generally speaking, movies skew toward the trivial side of the news spectrum — but the new space flicks are a national bellwether. There are good things to come.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted in 1968. It started filming in December 1965, a year into NASA’s Gemini program. Gemini was a proof-of-concept program, for NASA to figure out how to do everything it had to do to land men on the moon. And in 1965, it really did look like we were on our way out into the cosmos. NASA had successfully completed its first long-duration spaceflight, its first orbital rendezvous, its first orbit-adjustment maneuvers, its first spacewalk: four of the major hurdles on the way to the moon. Nineteen sixty-five was also the year of Mariner 4, which took the first-ever close-up photos of Mars. When 2001 came out, we were just a year away from Apollo 11, and people in the Nixon administration would soon be talking about America going to Mars. Kubrick’s movie was a serious look at the adventures yet to come.
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