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The music itself takes the watcher on a journey of their own, causing mixed emotions to be felt as the music changes volume. The iconic opening theme catches your attention immediately, setting the tone of the movie. The movie is split into four different sections, each following its own storyline, with all four eventually coming together. All four sections carry great significance, but perhaps the most interesting is “The Dawn Of Man”, which occurs at the beginning of the movie.
The use of dialogue, or lack thereof, gave the film a twist that at first, seems impractical, but works in Kickback’s favor. Whereas most films rely on witty banter and emotional peaches to carry the movie, 2001 : A Space Odyssey instead follows a completely different path, taking advantage of ground-breaking technology to create visual masterpieces with a classic score to match, as well as silence at times. In one scene, the apes discover a black monolith, which is arguably the biggest source of confusion throughout the movie, as its true purpose is never revealed.
The apes circle around the monolith in confusion before finally approaching it, with the sun and moon positioning to echo the visual at the introduction to the movie. When the apes become self-aware, and discover tools and how they can be used to solve the issue of food, one of them kills a fellow animal, and the scene cuts back and forth between the bones of the dead animal and the living animal following to the ground, juxtaposing it.
This scene brings into question the true nature of man, as the apes’ first act as intelligent beings was to kill fellow mammals for food. When the ape banging the bone club into the bones of the dead animal in slow- motion ceases, it throws the stick into the air triumphantly, with a famous attach-cut going from the bone in the air to an implied weapons spaceship, further showing how, despite evolving over the centuries from the early apes to an intelligent species, the human race still relies on weapons as a way to get ahead of other species in the world.
In the second section of the film, “TAMA-I”, the watcher is instantly greeted by The Blue Danube Waltz, which makes the scene feel light and relaxed as opposed to the drama of the former scene, and almost sexualities the spaceships, as done in a number of other Cubic films, including Dry. Strangulate. The docking sequence with the spaceships is a ground-breaking scene, offering a look into the future that most people would not have even dreamed about at that point in time.
Once aboard the ship, the watcher IS able to see how the director envisioned spaceships would look 50 years into the future. The interior of the spaceship has a feel similar to that of an airplane, and the crew is reminiscent of flight attendants. Many of the designs would be considered impractical in the year 2013, however at the time, the outfits for the flight attendants and the use of anti-gravity in a number of contraptions seemed like something that could logically happen in the future.
The scenes on the spaceship also mark the first lines of dialogue in the movie, more than 20 minutes in. Throughout this section, dialogue is used similar to what would have been used in the ass when this movie was made. The main character of the section, Heywood Floyd, is seen video-calling his daughter, something unimaginable at that point in time, and uses the word “telephone” s a verb several times, sounds old-fashioned when watched now so far into the future.
At the end of the section, the characters discover the black monolith that was uncovered centuries ago, and approach it, once again seeing the alignment of the moon over the monolith. Eighteen months later in “Jupiter Mission”, an American space ship has left for Jupiter. This third section of the movie continues the lack of dialogue seen throughout the rest of the movie, but uses it wisely in certain scenes for added effect. Early in the section, one of the astronauts on the ship can be en running on a spinning wheel, which is basically a human-sized hamster wheel.
At first, we do not see the entire shot, but rather see the astronaut’s back and everything forward from that. The shot later expands to show the entirety of the wheel. This section of the movie contains some of the most memorable and classic scenes from the entire movie, introducing “Hal 9000”, who is one of, if not the first example of the artificial intelligence going rogue trope, creating an archetype that would span decades of cinema.