The film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was directed by Stanley Kubrick and was released on April 6, 1968. The plot followed mankind on an adventure of finding a mysterious and artificial artifact that was buried on the moon. The adventure started off with primates in an open desert, finding themselves with tools for hunting. The movie then progresses to space where Frank and Dave are using HAL 9000, a computer, to see how helpful it is to mankind. Then ending is based off the expedition of the Jupiter mission. The part of the movie that I found criticism in the most was its content.
The primates in the beginning were awkward. I did not understand the meaning behind their involvement in the movie. At first I thought that maybe they were there to symbolize evolution, the theory of how man came to be. I also noticed the sun that was constantly shown and thought that it could mean with each gradual raise of the sun, perhaps it meant the apes were becoming smarter or more like “man”. The discovery of the bones gave a confusing meaning of their significance to me. The bones were used as a tool of crushing the other bones and for beating another ape. Were the bones just supposed to serve as a tool for future mankind, or were they symbolizing a man’s power in the future? The role of the primates were all together confusing to me, I could not comprehend the meaning of them.
The lack of dialogue was a downfall to this film, in my opinion. I realize that movies may exclude dialogue due to the attempt of emphasizing a point, but was that what this movie was trying to do? I could not find any explanation behind so little communication throughout this movie. I believed that was the reason why this movie was so confusing to me. I did not know what was going on when they only thing that was playing were pictures. The few times that communication did occur I got a sense of what was happening. All the different space crafts and people moving around simply perplexed me. I strongly believe that if there was more dialogue I would have enjoyed it more.
The characters were not very good. Of the few whose names were even mentioned, none of the others were even memorable. I would not be able to distinguish any of the characters from each other, all but the main characters. The way these people were portraying their role was unemotional. There were no points, in my opinion that I knew when something good or bad was happening. Facial expressions or body language would be a clear indicator of some sort of excitement or tragedy, but with blank, calm faces I felt like this movie was boring. Perhaps nothing extremely good or bad happened, but something else besides “blah” must have occurred. Also, it could be due to the writer that each character seemed flat. I never learned much about the characters, such as Frank and Dave, but I learned more about HAL 9000. I prefer movies with a little background on its characters. The one aspect of background that was shown during the film was families. In two cases, I saw families of the characters. One of which was the call from the little girl and the other with the family calling to wish Happy Birthday. I liked that part due to the fact of knowing a little more of the background.
In conclusion, this movie was very outdated for people of my age. I knew nothing about the basis of this movie, to my understanding the point of the film was to inform people of the sixties of what the future will hold. Although I am not a science fiction movie fan, I still believe that this movie was one of the worst I have seen. It was very hard to concentrate on it and extremely hard to understand. I wish I could have had some background on it before I watched, but I thought that watching the movie should enlighten me to some of the education from back then. I personally would not recommend this movie to other viewers simply because of my lack of emotion towards it.
