In the envisioned year 2001, humanity has entered a golden age of peaceful scientific exploration under the total governance of the United Nations. Having eliminated war and famine, the global community has successfully explored six of the nine planets in the solar system. The film follows a five-man international crew on the final frontier of this expansion: a mission to Uranus, the seventh planet. Upon arrival, the crew finds the planet's frozen, ammonia-choked atmosphere replaced by a lush, temperate forest that appears to be a direct recreation of their own memories and childhood homes on Earth.

This idyllic setting is revealed as a synthetic mirage generated by a massive, malevolent alien brain residing in a cavern. The entity uses telepathic scanning to manifest the crew's deepest desires—most notably idealized women from their pasts—and their most primal fears to weaken their resolve. Earth is depicted as a unified, highly advanced political center that the alien brain intends to conquer by possessing the astronauts and hitching a ride back to the home world. The film suggests an Earth that has transcended national borders in favor of transnational scientific cooperation, though its defense depends entirely on the psychological fortitude of its explorers.

The film’s vision of 2001 presents a sharp contrast to actual historical outcomes; while it predicted a world government and the end of the arms race, the real 2001 remained geopolitically fractured. Its prediction of manned missions to the outer solar system proved overly optimistic, as human spaceflight has not yet progressed beyond lunar orbit. However, the narrative concept of an intelligence creating simulated realities based on user data serves as an early, albeit fantastical, precursor to modern discussions regarding virtual reality and generative environments. As only two high-quality retrospective analyses were identified, some comparisons regarding the film's sociopolitical 'United Nations' utopia are inferred from the film's opening narration and standard genre tropes of the 1960s.