
Having just written about
another, older film that helped inspired some of Kubrick’s most memorable montages, I thought it was a nice coincidence that the always brilliant
Dangerous Minds served up this engrossing appreciation of the development and divergence of
2001: A Space Odyssey. The article, with more to explore, discusses the difference between the storytelling devices of the director and the writer,
Arthur C. Clark, and how the different media access the imagination, mystery and a cosmos fraught with either enfeeblement or indifference, but it also reveals another homage, influence Kubrick had in Russian film-maker Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957
The Road to the Stars that debuted a decade earlier—which is far too full of artistry and vision to be labelled as propaganda but did coincide with the launch of Sputnik.