Space Odyssey second draft

Kellee Grahn
Space Odyssey Review
Second Draft


The Space Odyssey was very confusing to me. I’m not really into science fiction movies like that so it was hard for me to follow. It was known to be one of the greatest films ever made when it came out. “A Space Odyssey is so acclaimed by mainstream critics – it is one of the most eminently visual of all science-fiction films. Spaceflight had been depicted on screen before but never with such realism – there is the breathtaking visual poetry of the scenes where Stanley Kubrick shows us the docking with a space station and Moon landing where spaceships gracefully twirl and dock in freefall all to the sweep and lull of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. This is why 2001 is great as science-fiction because it is a demonstration of what science-fiction can conjure in the visual medium .” I also have to consider the time period that it was made. They didn’t have all the special effects that we do, so for that time period, I think the viewers were impressed. I liked seeing how they thought the future was going to be. It was interesting to see what they thought was going to happen in 2001.
In the beginning, it went kind of slow. The movie had a lot of shots of deserted land for about ten minutes. Then we began to see violent apes with very little water and food. One morning, the apes wake up and see that there is a suspicious monolith outside their cave. After this discovery, the “Dawn of Man” begins and the apes slowly but surely begin to turn into humans. At one point, one of the apes finds bones from a dead animal. The scene depicts the ape’s thought process as he gradually puts two and two together and uses the bone as a toll of survival. I believe this was supposed to represent evolution and how far mankind has come.
Millions and millions of years later in 2001, things have changed. Technology is outstanding, and five scientists are on their way to Jupiter. These scientists are equipped with HAL. HAL is a remarkable computer that is thought of to never fail. However, HAL detects a problem with the communicating hardware and ends up being wrong. Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, who are two of the astronauts on the mission, talk about deactivating HAL. What they do not know is HAL can read their lips and from then on plots revenge on the two unknowing men. This is the major turning point because it turns this mission into a dangerous, and deadly operation.
Watching the movie, I had no interest in it. It was very hard for me to keep up with the plot and understand it. It wasn’t until I researched it after that I even fully understood it and what is was actually about. When I read the reviews of the movie, I taken aback at how amazing critics thought this movie was. Then I began to realize when this was made and slowly I began to understand the significance of this movie. In my generation, there is so much technology that can make special effects in movies look as if they are realistic. I decided I was being bias of this movie. For its time, 2001 The Space Odyssey was an exceptional film. Stanley Kubrick had to have a brilliant mind to think of all the futuristic technology. Man himself had not even landed on the moon yet in 1968 when this film was released. This shows that the technology such as HAL and most of the other interesting things that were depicted in the movie were imagined. Most of the technology shown in the beginning is white, which to me, makes it look new, modern, and clean. The people in the movie act like the technology is no big deal. They act like they have been around it forever. I think by the actors doing this, it made the technology seem even more realistic. Nothing goes wrong in the beginning and the astronauts have trust in their technology. On the other hand, as the movie goes on, we see that HAL not only fails the humans, but turns on them. People knew about the moon and space, and just a year later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I thought that that was very interesting. However, 2001 A Space Odyssey was not about the moon, it was about landing on Jupiter which is an even bigger deal at that time.