PDE student
2001
Film Reflection
There are two types of works in the film industry that can be regarded as ‘great’ from my perspective. One can expand the audience's horizons and give people inspiration based on its theme and contents, and the other uses unique techniques to enhance the level and space of film creation. The former category of the film works often sparks controversy for their subjective judgments and cultural differences, but relatively speaking, the latter is more objective and easier to obtain public consensus. The movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a classic example of the latter because a wide variety of the elements used in space science fiction films that we see today can be found in 2001.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a milestone in space science fiction movies, and it established the ‘standard’ of current space science fiction movies. But the pace of the movie is extremely slow. The length of the movie is actually 2 hours, but it gives the audience a psychological feeling that the time might be doubled. Besides, most audience’s reviews after watching are just like mine: I have no idea what it is.
Regarding the name of the film, 2001 refers to the first year of the new century, and Odyssey refers to the title of Homer's epic ‘The Odyssey’, which tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus' victory in the Trojan War and his return to homeland. ‘Odyssey’ is often used to symbolize the journey of ‘return’ because Homer’s epic is full of stories with fragments of adventure, trial, death, and rebirth. Thus, the title of the film somewhat points to Kubrick's view of the universe, of the future, of science, and of life: a back-and-forth cycle. And Kubrick's space science fiction film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, therefore focuses on human development and technological progress to explore the nature of life evolution and the ultimate destination of human beings rather than space missions or space travel.
The biggest attraction in the film is Kubrick's depiction of future space technology and development at this point in 1968: human landing on the cratered and barren moon, which actually happened in 1969, discovering signs of life on alien planets, computers becoming the space tool that human beings have to rely on, the state and operation mode in the space capsule, the voyage under hibernation and the roaming under no gravity, the time tunnel that can see the past and the future and so on. Regardless of whether the depiction content is in line with the development of reality, these depictions in the movie and the processing of sound and light effects in space in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey have been widely copied and quoted by later space science fiction films.