Sci-fi film: The apes weren't cuddly

FORTY years ago, at the height of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to lay claim to the cosmos, a much-anticipated science-fiction movie made its debut, and sci-fi was never the same again. Kids whose parents dragged them along to the theater were alternately bemused, disturbed and mesmerized. We knew we'd seen a grown-up movie, even if we couldn't completely make sense of it all. We were being initiated into a cultural dialogue that was, after all, about our future. The movie, of course, was Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many critics and much of the public instantly recognized it as a landmark. It was, wrote L.A. Times film critic Charles Champlin, "the picture that science-fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them."