Yes, it was an intentional paradox on Kubrick’s part.

How is the connection shallow…nevertheless? Nevertheless of what? Of all the evidence in that article? How so?

That’s a very interesting article you linked to, and I agree with it to a certain extent. The problem is that although we see Bullock’s character go through the grief/rebirth process there is something very shallow about our connection to her nevertheless.

Also, I just want to add that the stages of grief are not a linear progression, as they are sometimes portrayed.

How “Gravity” is a metaphor for the grieving process

I’m sure there was quite a bit of head-scratching among film-goers in ’68, though.

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As is my wont, I was mainly interested in the spacecraft and the movie’s attempt to depict spaceflight realistically, which was groundbreaking and had a lasting impact in how spaceflight was shown in the movies.

One important point is that the movie showed a variety of different spacecraft which were specialized for different roles. There was an airplane-like passenger carrier which flew between Earth and the space station. It bore the Pan Am insignia, which recognized that privately-owned spacecraft would have a role to play in the future. Then there was the Moon shuttle, which was optimized to fly between the station and the Moon, and landed with legs and thrusters. Finally there was the enormous Discovery interplanetary craft, which I believe was nuclear-powered.

The same applies to airplanes. There is no single design of airplane that is suitable for every role. There are lots of different specialized designs which are optimized for their purpose, such as passenger planes, fighters, bombers, spy planes, crop dusters, traffic helicopters, etc.

But in the 1970s, we got the Space Shuttle, which was a one-size-fits-all spacecraft which didn’t perform any role efficiently and turned out to be not only much more expensive than advertised, but extremely fragile as well.

One thing that bothered me a little about 2001 was the way it portrayed spaceflight as sterile and antiseptic, almost inhuman. There was one scene where an astronaut was eating a meal. It was a plastic tray filled with different colors of paste which was apparently supposed to represent different foods.

About a decade later, the first Star Wars movie again revolutionized the way spaceflight was depicted on screen. It made it seem more human in a way that 2001 didn’t. It had spacecraft that were a little dingy and banged-up, and “lived-in”. My favorite scene was in the Millennium Falcon, which was portrayed as an old junker. They were flying along and the lights in the cockpit suddenly went out. Han Solo banged on the instrument panel, and they came on again.