Open the pod bay doors, Howell.

Regular readers will know I often cite 2001: A Space Odyssey, as my favourite movie of all time. I don’t usually go much beyond that.

But this is 2001 week in Toronto. TIFF Bell Lightbox is screening Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece multiple times, in rarely seen 70mm splendour. On Wednesday night, TIFF will also present a talk by Douglas Trumbull, the 2001 special effects wizard. Details are at www.tiff.net.

In honor of the occasion and the film, I present 21 cool things about 2001: A Space Odyssey:

1. The film’s dark-screen overture, set to György Ligeti’s atonal Atmospheres, essentially tells the film’s story in three minutes, entirely by sound. It is mysterious, ominous and finally thrilling.

2. The wordless Dawn of Man sequence that follows featured actors inside ape costumes. But they looked so real, rumor has it Oscar voters thought they were in fact animals. Had they known, Daniel Richter might have received a nomination for his performance as lead ape Moon-Watcher.

3. The Dawn of Man sequence was the inspiration for Kubrick admirer Paul Thomas Anderson’s similarly wordless and primitive opener for There Will Be Blood, 39 years later.

4. The “match cut,” where Moon-Watcher’s hurled bone suddenly turns into a spacecraft thousands of years later, is one of the most famous such cuts in movie history.

5. Three words for the Pan Am Orion III Space Clipper that begins the top-secret moon trip for Dr. Heywood Floyd, the mysterioso U.S. government scientist: Coolest. Spacecraft. Ever. I will broach no argument on this.

6. The backseat movie monitor that Floyd watches — or rather dozes before — aboard the Space Clipper looks identical to ones now used by Air Canada.

7. Voiceprint identification on the space station anticipates our 21st century security paranoia. So does Floyd’s secret journey and his deliberate disinformation hints about an “epidemic” aboard the moon. Something freakier is afoot: signs of alien life have been found.

8. All those commercial references — Pan Am (now defunct), Hilton, Howard Johnson’s, AT&T — correctly predicted the corporate-run world we now live in.

9. The shoes used by the flight attendants on the space station were made with Velcro, unheard-of for footwear in 1968, but commonplace now.

10. Floyd calls his daughter back on Earth using a video phone arrangement that looks a lot like today’s Skype set-up. Kubrick even anticipated inflation, although not high enough: the call from space to Earth is only $1.70.

11. There’s just one deliberate joke in 2001. It’s the wordless scene where Floyd reads a long list of instructions before using the Zero Gravity Toilet. It’s also a goof — wouldn’t a veteran space traveler like Floyd already know how to do this?

12. Those groovy pink Djinn chairs and sofas on the space station became a design hit. For a time after the film’s release, they were made and sold by a company in France called Airborne, which is now defunc — eBay, anyone?

13. “I bring a personal message from Dr. Howell,” Floyd tells scientists at top-security briefing. I first heard this at age 13 and nudged my father, “Dad! Did you hear that?” Note: this is cool only for people named Howell.

14. The mystery monolith known as TMA-1, found at the Tycho Base on the moon, emits a sound remarkably like a computer modem when it is touched by sunlight. History’s first Internet sign-on?

15. The acronyms ATM, NAV, COM and VEH, seen on spacecraft computer monitors, weren’t in common usage in 1968, although they’re familiar to today’s gadget freaks.

16. The astronauts aboard the Jupiter-bound Discovery spacecraft, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, watch a BBC news program with devices that look a lot like iPads, devices introduced just this year.

17. Treacherous computer HAL 9000 confirms our increasing suspicion that all these boxes of silicon on our desks and in our hands are trying to kill us.

18. HAL is Canadian. His voice is provided by Winnipeg-born actor Douglas Rain, who is appropriately inscrutable, refusing all interview requests.

19. Symbolism alert! The aligned planets and monolith at the beginning of the Trumbull-designed Star Gate psychedelic sequence form a crucifix. This is no accident.

20. Kubrick originally wanted to show the aliens near Jupiter. He and Turnbull devised a plan to have actor Richter wear a special polka-dot suit to facilitate photo manipulation. It anticipated today’s motion-capture film technology.

21. Aliens actually exist! Just last week, scientists announced that bacteria found at the bottom of Mono Lake near California’s Yosemite National Park live on the poison arsenic. It disproves all previous theories that life can only occur in places where there is oxygen.