Stanley Kubric in the Movie "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Essay by tmilk • June 9, 2013 • Essay • 1,010 Words (5 Pages) • 1,358 Views
Stanley Kubric in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" does a great job using as little as possible to make the most out of a movie. What he actually did with the film was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe. He did this by using images and left the movie up for interpretation, allowing the viewer to contemplate what they saw instead of being told in a sense like other movies. The film has four different parts to it. The first part is set in the prehistoric period and opens up with apes foraging for food when a leopard kills one of the apes. Later they are driven from their watering hole by another group of apes. They sleep overnight on a rock and awake to find a black monolith in front of them. Soon after they find this monolith, one of the apes discovers how to use a bone as a weapon and as a tool. With this discovery of the weapon, the apes take back the watering hole from their competitors by killing the tribe's leader with the bone. After the leader is killed the bone is thrown into the air and dissolves into a space shuttle. In the second section, we meet Dr. Heywood Floyd as he is traveling to a space station that is orbiting earth, a pit stop on his way to the Clavius Base on the moon. He makes a phone call from the station to his daughter and then meets up with his friends, one named Elena, who is a Russian scientist, and one named Dr. Smyslov. They were asking him about "odd things" that were going on at the base on the moon. They were talking about a mysterious epidemic that was occurring there. Floyd says "He is not at liberty to discuss this". When he reaches Clavius, he heads a meeting with the people at the base already apologizing for the epidemic and rumors going on but stressing the importance of secrecy. He tells them he is there to do research on the artifact that they found, TMA-1, which was buried there some four million years ago intentionally. Floyd and his group ride in a vehicle to the TMA-1, a black monolith that is exactly the same as the one found by the apes in the first section. They are looking at the object and are about to take a picture when they hear a loud sound coming from the TMA-1. This, similar to how the apes discovered tools from the monolith, gave the researchers another tool, the spaceship Discovery. In the next section the spaceship discovery is on its way to Jupiter. A computer that the crew calls "Hal" controls the ship. Bowman and Poole are watching an interview of them selves and the computer talking about the mission. Hal states that it is "foolproof and incapable of error" and that it is excited about the mission. The host asks bowman if Hal has emotions and he said that it seemed like it but was impossible to tell. Hal then asks the secrecy involving the mission but interrupts himself to let them know of a failure of a device that controls the ships main antenna. Hal tells them to
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