2001: a Space Odyssey. Movie Essay
What are the major conflicts of the movie and are these conflicts resolved satisfactorily at the end? Would you characterize the ending of the film as happy, sad, or somewhere in between?
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
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
Cited: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM, 1968. Film