2. The Film's Version Of The Year 2001 Is A Cliche'
This is so flippant a criticism that it really feels like an overdone source of nitpicking. The fact that this is a common criticism only goes to show that a lot of people weren't paying nearly enough attention to the movie as they should have been. What Science Fiction movie actually lived up to it's depiction of the future? Blade Runner is easily the most notable film that is clearly so far off in the way that it shows the future of Los Angeles but it doesn't matter at all because the story dictates that Los Angeles be the rundown, over commercialized source of despair that it is in the movie. Children of Men proposes the most realistic Sci-Fi future, frighteningly realistic actually, but still only succeeds in that regard because it serves the story so perfectly. As I have mentioned exhaustively in this article, 2001 is a film that is completely designed around telling a story that is fully realized yet ambiguous in equal measures. The title of "2001: A Space Odyssey" was never meant to be a prophetic vision of the future. The "2001" in the title isn't meant to be taken as overtly serious as people think, it's meant to represent a new millennium and the progression of humanity. The use of the words " A Space Odyssey" as the second half of the title is a dead giveaway here as it suggests that this is a grand story for a new millennium that was 35 years away when Kubrick started production on the film.