Kane Rose
Assignment 2
2001: A Space Odyssey
In Stanley Kubrick’s movie, 2001: A space Odyssey, the audience was awed by the stunning special effects and the relationship of man and his computer. In 1968, movie goers were shocked to see the cinematic quality that Kubrick displayed, however, the narrative captures the event of a computer overhauling a space ship and causing harm to innocent humans. One key sequence shows the power shift from, the computer to the human, using Kubrick’s camera work to provide evidence of the climatic event ensuing. From one age to another, Kubrick’s captivating advances in technology presents fear of modern day technology for when it becomes smarter than the average human. It starts with a group of ape-like creatures with no dialog for the first 20 minutes of the film.
This sequence is titled “The Dawn of Man,” and it depicts these ape-like creatures in the middle of the desert struggling for survival. The mysterious black monolith appears before them one night as they are sleeping, which prompts them on how to use a bone as a weapon. This is significant technology for the ape-like creatures. One ape begins hammering his bone-weapon on a pile of other bones. Music is played as the bone-weapon flies into the air, spinning in slow motion, which leads to a jump-cut of an orbiting space craft. Millions of years have passed before the audience eyes as one frame cuts to another. This leads the viewer to think that the bone resembles a space craft as a tool for humanity. Technology started with a single swing of a hammer and has lead mankind to space travel and super computers that is introduced in the next act of the film.
In the third act of 2001: A space Odyssey, the audience is introduced to a small crew onboard a ship called discovery. The ship is equipped with an infallible talking super-computer named HAL that is complete control of the ship. He begins to speculate the mission they are going on and becomes introspective within himself. HAL commits an error that then leads the crew to think that HAL may be compromising the mission due to his human-like thinking. This sequence of the movie shows us conversations between the crew members and HAL. These conversations are filmed with a fish eye lens to give us HAL’s perspective. When the crew realizes that HAL perhaps has malfunctioned with a ship error, the crew heads to a pod within the ship to get away from him. The crew is having a conversation about shutting HAL down. This scene is important due to the perspective of HAL as he watches them through the air tight window of their pod. HAL’s fixed camera eye is positioned right at the crew as his eye bounces back and forth between each crew members’ lips. He is reading their lips the whole time and knows that the crew is planning to deactivate him, if they find out the super computer has malfunctioned. One crew member heads outside the ship to debunk the problem and without hesitation, HAL gets rid of one crew mem...
