SPOILER ALERT
WHAT'S SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN<p>Much regard heaped upon 2001's effects, including the zero-G sequences, but if you just watch the people, they are so obviously carrying their own weight and the weight of objects: the posture and movement yells 1-G at you from the screen. When the stewardess reclaims the floating pen, she's balancing her weight with each step and touching the seat backs for support, then stoops and leans. In the ship crossing to the moon, the stewardess is walking and her hips sway to her weight with each step and her feet compress. The food trays slide out of kitchen console by gravity. When the trays are delivered to the flight staff, one reach out his hand under a tray to steady it from below. When an officer visits crew in the cabin, he comes up from behind their seats, leans in to talk and rests his arms on the seatbacks. As food is sipped through clear straws, it rises and falls with G pressure. Floyd stands with his own weight in contemplation before the long instructions for the zero-G toilet. In the Discovery, spacesuits hang from the wall and the crew sit at the table to perform the antenna-module diagnostic.<p>The toilet instructions are a static print on plastic with a backlight. The joke about the length of the instructions is now lost to absurdity of the display.<p>On the moon, the excavation of the monolith is surrounded with floodlights that reveal a distinct atmospheric haze.<p>The camera used at the excavation site is beautifully retro. That it's used to take a group photo is quaint, especially when you consider more modern ideas like the survey "pups" deployed to map the site of the Engineers' spacecraft in the movie Prometheus.<p>While 2001 has been one of the most affecting movie experiences of my life— I first saw it by myself in a nearly empty large auditorium in 1972 at the age of 10 and have seen it maybe 10 more times since 2001's effects seem more prosaic with every viewing and my mind wanders into disbelief about the entire mis-en-scene. Eroding amazement is replaced by a fascination with how quickly a fantasy about an amazing future has become retro in its fashion.<p>The Stargate crossing seemed like one of the weaker elements in the movies heyday, but to me it's holding up better than most other design elements. The ape costumes are holding up uncannily well, as do the intro landscapes. Other elements are quirky: the mule painted like a zebra, the vastly over-complicated landing pad on the moon with the pizza-slices retractable dome, the clouds of dust swirling at the landing, and the absurdly ornate elevator than descends beneath the moon surface. Hal's memory closet with arrays of keyed optical modules that slowly eject to inconsistent extents. The oddly opaque schematics and diagnostics for the Discovey's "malfunctioning" antenna unit. The external air supply hose for the space suit. The extendable pads for the pods. The chain of blocks design for the Discovery, with the large off-axis mass of the antenna. Why is a pod needed to reach the antenna? Etc, on and on.<p>The ultimate movie about the future of mankind is now a beautiful relic.<p>With every viewing of 2001 I recall with more appreciation Andrei Tarkovsky's lament about what he might have been able to achieve with his Solaris if he had access to the kind of wealth available to Kubrick.