50 Years Later

From a recent Washington Post about “2001: A Space Odyssey”:

“2001”™s” official premiere was at the Uptown theater in Washington”™s Cleveland Park neighborhood, with stars and MGM brass in attendance.

By intermission, attendees were “streaming out. It was a disaster. No one liked it,” Benson recounts in his book.

Wrote one British journalist: “There was not a single handclap. ”¦ The audience just rose, stunned and thoughtful, and shuffled out to the pavement.”

The next night, after the New York premiere, Clarke reportedly heard MGM suits saying: “Well, that”™s the end of Stanley Kubrick.”

50 years later? One of the most influential of all science fiction films.

This film tops my list of the best science fiction movies. Others include Alien, Blade Runner, Inception, Metropolis, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Matrix, Interstellar, Mad Max:Fury Road, Gravity amongst others.

But 2001: A Space Odyssey remains at the top for me.

April 2nd, 1968. I cannot believe it has been 50 years since it was first released.