2001: A Space Odyssey
The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey a science fiction movie directed by Stanley Kubrick came out in 1968. The movie depicts the evolution of the human race and tries to predict what the future might be like. The movie was based on the book called The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke and it appeared in theatres during the space race between U.S.A. and the USSR (Dirks). This movie received four Academy Awards nominations for Best Director, Best Art Direction, Best Original Story, and Screenplay and also won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. In my opinion I thought the film deserved all of the awards because even though this movie hardly had any dialogue, it depicted how things evolved because of technology.
This movie is broken up into four parts; each depicts a different piece of the evolution process. The parts are called The Dawn of Man, Untitled, Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later, and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. The three main characters in which this movie focuses on: Dr. David Bowman (Keir Duella), Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester). The Dawn of Man is where a pack of apes figure out the first technology in the form of tools. They use animal bones as weapons and fight off the other pack of apes from the water. This shows the development of creative thinking. Also in the Dawn of Man, the first monolithic slab is introduced.
The Untitled part is when Dr. Floyd travels to the moon to talk to the people on Clavius, which is a crater on the moon where the second monolithic slab is seen. When the sun signed on the slab, there is a piercing sound that was traced to the third slab on Lapetus, a moon of Saturn. The next part of the movie is set 18 months later on a spaceship, which contains five astronauts and the computer HAL. HAL ends up killing all of the astronauts except Dr. Bowman. Bowman eventually shuts down HAL when important information was coming in about the real reason of the mission. The fourth and final part, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, Bowman completes his journey to Jupiter. We are shown what time has done to Bowman as we see him in bed almost lifeless and then we see him being reborn as the space baby.
Yes, even though only 40 minutes of this movie was dialogue, the visual effects were very high tech for that time period. “Nobody having seen 2001 has ever quite been able to forget it. Even now, some four decades on, when the optimistic buzz of the space race has drifted away and we're awash in films whose special effects dwarf the imaginations of an earlier Hollywood, and our media-saturated selves have been assaulted by more homages and parodies than one can even begin to count, there is still nothing quite like the film's opening, with the sun and crescent moon perfectly aligned and the soundtrack blasting Wagner's Also Sprach Zarathustra” (Barsanti). This is a very true statement; yes one has to think about the point of the movie, but the way Kubrick incorporates things into the movie is just amazing. Not only did he use the apes in the beginning, he used video calling, a livable space shuttle, HAL the computer, and monolithic slabs that are there to watch the rise of the human race. Not to mention the music that was played throughout the movie was very classical and many people know that music because of this movie.
All in all, this movie was great because even though there was not a lot of dialogue, the visual aspects will bring one into the movie. This movie predicts the future and how the human race evolves based on their use of technology. I think that because people were so dependent on the technology, they portrayed HAL as bad technology to get people to realize that we should not be dependent on technology. Also, the way Kubrick showed the evolution from the apes to humans was very intelligent. How he showed the apes with the tools and then jumped to the space station was a very clever way to show how fast things evolve, especially technology. Even though I am not a science fiction person, this movie made me appreciate the past more because that is when things were discovered and it made me thankful for the present and excited for the future.
