Think back to the spring of 1968. The country was changing fast, and a strange new film showed up in Washington, D.C., then New York, then Los Angeles. Some people sat through it in wonder. Others got up and walked out.
The film was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And the critics were not exactly kind. The New York Times critic Renata Adler called it somewhere between “hypnotic” and “immensely boring.” Pauline Kael went further, calling it “monumentally unimaginative.”
Hard to imagine anyone saying that today.
Tom Hanks Cannot Stop Watching It
In a Deseret News feature asking stars to name their all-time favorite films, Tom Hanks did not hesitate for a second.
“Absolutely, ‘2001’ is my favorite movie of all time,” he said. “All the rest of the movies ever made just pale in comparison.”
What got him? Kubrick’s commitment to real physics. The zero-gravity scenes were filmed to actually reflect how things would behave in space. Hanks pointed that out specifically, noting that very few films ever bother to do that.
And his admiration goes well beyond a casual appreciation. In a later interview, Hanks said he had seen 2001 roughly 120 times. In a Q&A with the app Letterboxd, he told users, “I still watch it a couple of times a year. I could walk you through 2001: A Space Odyssey and not stop talking once during the entire film.”
Critics Have Come Around in a Big Way
By the early 1970s, audiences and critics had started to come around. What felt strange and slow in 1968 began to look like something else entirely, something ahead of its time.
The film stars Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood as astronauts aboard the Discovery One, sent toward Jupiter after a mysterious artifact turns up on the moon. But 2001 was never really about plot. It was about big ideas: human evolution, artificial intelligence, isolation, and where we fit in the universe.
Time Out‘s list of the 100 best movies of all time, updated in September 2026, now puts 2001: A Space Odyssey at number one. The Godfather comes in at number two, Citizen Kane at number three, and Psycho at number 38. Senior film critic Joshua Rothkopf and film writer Matthew Singer compiled the list, edited by global film editor Phil de Semlyen. They describe Kubrick’s vision of the future as “prophetic.”
A long way from “immensely boring.”
If you saw 2001 when it first came out, you were watching history even if nobody quite knew it yet. And if it has been a while since you last sat down with it, Tom Hanks would probably say it is time to watch it again.
