That Stanley Kubrick Was a visionary was also known at the time when he churded out masterpieces, one after the other. But that his vision came to predict the future, well 51 years ago, few could think of it.
It was on April 2, 1968 when in Washington it was projected, in the States “2001, Space Odyssey“.
On April 2, 2019, at 51 years, the anniversary of the film, which in Italy only arrived in December of ‘ 68. And still today the iconic scene remains etched in the mind, turned to the Rallenty, as if to go in time with the equally iconic soundtrack of Richard Strauss, “Così parlò Zarathustra“, of the primate with his new weapon. That bone of femur which is the emblem of progress, of the slow and primitive development of a human intellect that succeeds, with difficulty, in the course of centuries of evolution, to understand the usefulness of a tool. And not by chance used for war purposes.
After millions of years of evolution we reach Hal 9000, the supercomputer from the voice and human Thoughts accompanying Discovery astronauts on their journey through the cosmos. At a time when space was the mistress of the struggles between the USSR and the Usa to get to the moon, Kubrick already spoke of artificial intelligence, interstellar journeys and computers with a human personality endowed with the consequent weaknesses.
An anticipator of the times he saw in Daryl of 1985, the bicentenary man with the late Robin Williams, Spielberg’s and the recent Her with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlet Johansson, to name but a few, works that have highlighted how technology and man can, in a future not too far, intertwined to merge. Making it even complicated one day to understand who the man is and who the machine is.