Prestigious Homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ranked in Order of How Much Dad Love is the Key to the Universe

My wife and I were watching Ad Astra the other night, because it seemed very pretty and Brad Pitt. And I noticed that, like many movies that are about space exploration, and feature vast stretches of silence and trippy graphics and atmospheric music, it is a very conscious homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. And so I started putting together a list of such homages in my head, and I realized they had something in common: they were all about the main character’s relationship with their dad.

Ok, not all of them. Sometimes the main character is the dad. Occasionally it’s more of a romantic love story, or both romance and daddy stuff. But it’s usually a dad.

Now, a trope is not a problem in and of itself. But I find this one really irritating, because it’s like, well…I have a hypothesis. And the hypothesis is this: every three years, a prestigious white male film director, 45-55 years old, walks into a movie studio office, and has a conversation with a producer, and it goes like this.

Director: “Hey, you know what’s a great film? 2001: A Space Oddyssey. I want to make that film.”

Producer: “But it’s already been made!”

Director: “I can make it better!”

Producer: “How?”

Director: “Well, you know how in 2001: A Space Oddyssey, all of its human characters are very unemotional, but then there’s the HAL character, who is very emotional and irrational in a way, and this is against the backdrop of a plot that’s about the evolution of life from unthinking beasts to superpowered star people, and so the emotionality and rationality of the characters becomes, like, the thematic hinge of the movie, and you know how 2001: A Space Oddyssey is like, the defining film about humanity in the modern age?”

Producer: “Right…”

Director: “What if I tossed all that shit out, and kept the cool space ships floating through a vast emptiness with weird music and graphics, but it’s really about how much kids love their dads?”

Producer: “Take 200 million dollars, but please hire exactly one black person and one Asian.”

So this is my list of, like, those films. Because they all got made. They are ranked here on a scale of “stars,” keeping in mind that there are at least quadrillions of stars in the universe and the only reason a quantity of stars is meaningful is if you love your dad.

8. Contact

4 STARS

Contact is less a movie about the vast reaches of space and the infinite destiny of the human spirit than it is about faith in science versus faith faith in religion or God, and how different those things necessarily are or must be. It takes some cues from 2001, but is it really an homage? Only a little bit - the graphics sequence during the trippy space travel bit.

Famously, the plot of the movie has to do with the receipt of a message from (possibly) an alien civilization. Our hero, Jodie Foster, discovers the message and leads the charge to create a space ship, having interpreted the message as a sort of blueprint. Depending on how you interpret the film’s ending, either (a) she meets the aliens, and they present themselves as her father, played by David Morse (who I saw once, at a Whole Foods in Florida!), or (b) her spaceship never goes anywhere and it’s all in her own mind, because daddy issues. This has given rise to at least two pretty good jokes.

7. Moon

17 STARS

Moon is a movie about a guy running a mining operation on the Moon. He gets very lonely. He pines for his wife and daughter. Spoiler alert - they’re not his wife and daughter, they’re implanted memories. But he still pines for them! What is real? Profound.

6. Arrival

81 STARS

Arrival is an homage to 2001 only in the loose sense that it’s about aliens, exploration, and the existential dread of the one-way trip. BUT THERE’S ANOTHER ONE WAY TRIP, BUDDY. IT’S CALLED LIFE. This movie takes place exclusively on Earth, though.

Like Youth Without Youth, Arrival is a movie about language, memory, and knowledge, and the cost of the pursuit of each. Amy Adams is a linguist tasked with learning the language of recently arrived aliens. As she learns their language, she starts having flashbacks - OR ARE THEY - to her daughter’s childhood. Should she keep learning and communicating, if it will kill her daughter? Why does she have a daughter anyway? What about the daughter’s dad? It’s like Youth Without Youth meets 2001, powered by mom love.

In my 30s, I’ve gotten pretty into Amy Adams. That handjob she gives Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master? Chef’s kiss. I mean, it’s not the handjob. Talent, baby. That’s what turns me on.

5. High Life

2 STARS

High Life is about a death row inmate who elects a one-way ticket to a black hole for scientific research, rather than certain death by something other than a black hole. Most people remember the movie more because the crew of the inmate ship take turns using a “fuck box” full of sex toys. But, one thing leads to another (like, multiple rapes), and suddenly our hero has a daughter. WHATS HE GONNA DO TO SURVIVE. WHAT IS SURVIVAL. WHY IS THERE A SPACESHIP FULL OF DOGS.

In my 20s, I had such a crush on Juliette Binoche. Amelie. Chocolat. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I already wrote about my teens. There you go, now you know all you’d ever need to know about my taste in sex. The fuck box didn’t really do it for me, though. Not sure it was supposed to.

This film has the distinction of being the only one on the list directed by a woman. Points.

4. Solaris (1972)

5,471 STARS

We’re getting to the part of the list where nearly every scene of every movie has a knowing, conscious, specific debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey. And even basic youtube synopsis blogs will tell you that they’re all about “what it means to be human.”

I’m not going to pretend I understand Andrei Tarkovsky. This is like, what if instead of long scenes of spacecraft traveling in the infinite blackness, you had a dude sitting in a car driving on the highway around Moscow, and the ambient noise is very loud and he feels kinda bad about the future. Ok, guy.

But then you get to the space station, and mysterious visitors start appearing. Like, our hero’s long-dead wife. Why is she on the space station? What is this mysterious space ocean they’re studying? What are life and death? Would you rather have a facsimile of a person you love forever, than mourn the real thing until you die? Bum bum BUM. This movie seems too thoughtful to have been made in the Soviet Union. Maybe we were wrong about Communism.

3. Ad Astra

1 STAR

Here’s what you gotta know: Brad Pitt? He’s a cool guy. Brad Pitt’s dad, Tommy Lee Jones? He was a hero, led a space exploration mission until it disappeared near Neptune 15 years ago carrying valuable scientific data and, somehow, a weapon that can destroy Earth itself? What?

What’s it going to take to bridge the gap between Earth and the infinite, and save all of humanity? What’s it going to take, to learn whether there’s really any other life in the universe? It’s going to take the love between a dad and his boy. Or maybe the boy and his estranged wife? WHATEVER, MONKEY ATTACK.

2. Solaris (2003)

5,476 STARS

Like the Tarkovsky Solaris, but it’s Steven Soderbergh instead of Andrei Tarkovsky. So the plot is more straightforward and explicit, no random traffic noise and it really leans into the romantic aspect. And it has a black person!

1.Interstellar

1 STAR, BUT IT’S THE BEST ONE

I’ve sort of tried to avoid terrible spoilers here, except for Contact, for which the plot isn’t the point, and Interstellar, which I recommend watching with full knowledge of the plot because my goodness, is it insane.

Here it is: Matthew McConaughey travels into a black hole. In the middle of the black hole is a “tesseract” (a four-dimensional cube) that contains the key to manipulating gravity and traveling faster than light. McConaughey communicates through the tesseract, back in time, to give the key to his daughter so she can save humanity.

Love is the LITERAL KEY TO HUMANITY, and it lets you travel through time and space. Also, there is a completely separate plot about how McConaughey and a fellow astronaut were going to go to one planet, because literally, love was calling to them. But they didn’t listen and that’s why shit got fucked and McConaughey ends up in the black hole. LISTEN TO YOUR HEART.

And yet this is somehow, obviously and consciously, also an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The visuals are very similar. It’s Christopher Nolan’s 2001. I’m pretty sure he’s said that in interviews. But unlike most of the other movies on this list, which are enjoyable to watch, the plot of this movie is so bad it makes me angry and I can’t get past it and enjoy the movie. I’ll never watch it again.

Honorable Mentions:

Aliens - Not a 2001 homage, closer to a Vietnam movie set in space. But there’s a subtext to it, relating to the fact that Sigourney Weaver’s Ridley, the rare female action hero, is battling the Alien Queen, the rare female action villain. It’s less about mother-daughter love than feminist badassery, in my opinion, but that’s not a knock.

Armageddon/Independence Day/All Shoot-em-ups - I could do a few sentences about how not every space-based action movie is an homage to 2001, but every action movie (other than Aliens) follows a certain set of tropes about men protecting and trading in women. Or you could watch this other video.

ET/My Neighbor Totoro - The thing about all the other movies above is that at the top-line plot level, they’re all about space exploration and aliens, and at the secondary (or thematic) level, they’re all about kids who love their moms and dads and vice versa. But there are some movies that run the other way around: movies that are fundamentally about mom and dad love (which is emphasized through the loss of a mom or dad), and use an alien/mysticism plot to temper the darkness. That’s ET, and My Neighbor Totoro, which is ET with Japanese mythology instead of an alien, and arguably Home Alone and a lot of other movies marketed to kids that are very dark and violent.