We all have our reserves about the future; whether it be the world will end in 2012 or cars will one day fly. These reserves have always been there, even in the 1960’s. After watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, many of their reserves became apparent; however, overall the movie was ineffective to me.
When the movie started, it was easy to tell that the special effects weren’t as advanced as they are now. The monkeys looked like humans and seemed to act as humans more than primates. I understand that effects weren’t as developed as they are now, but in my opinion better effects were achievable by standards of other movies such as the Wizard of Oz. Even thought the primates were not convincing, I like how they added the discovery of the first “tool.” The way it was portrayed however, made the “tool” seem more like a weapon. I came across this opinion by analyzing the aggressiveness of the primate when he first discovers the “tool” and when the group of primates decides to beat the other primate.
One part that I did not understand, which could be caused because I would often zone out, was that of the black column just showing up and then primates beating it up and the sound coming from it when the explorers visit the column.
The transitions throughout the movie seemed very abrupt and didn’t seem to enhance the movie; in fact it seemed to hurt it. The transitions were not the only aspect that seemed to hurt the movie; the sound would be really loud and then just shut off. It turned me off and led me to think the movie did not flow well causing me to zone out. Also, I did not understand why they would put a black screen up that said “Intermission” in the middle of the movie. This is not a play or a musical; it is a movie and should have been treated like one. The intermission led to making the movie a little difficult to understand. In order to clear up some of the confusion of the movie would have been to add subtitles saying what year it was. More often than not, I found myself wondering what stuff was happening in what year and how big of a time difference there was between certain things.
Throughout the movie I found it quite humorous as to how they depicted the year of 2001. The first thing that really made me laugh was they made it seem that by this time in the future we would be able to live not only on Earth but in space also. Airplanes had already been invented by the 1960’s but the first spaceship had yet to be launched. Their idea of a spaceship is greatly different of that of which we actually have. The inside looked more like a plane than a spaceship, complete with stewardesses.
They did have one thing right, there are to be video chats. I was actually shocked when I saw the scene of him talking to his daughter via a video. I don’t believe video chat was a very prominent form of communication in 2001 (not as prominent as it is now), but it did exist. I am an everyday user of Skype and that scene greatly reflected it. To the writers of A Space Odyssey video chatting was probably one of the far-fetched ideas that were put into this movie, and it is a reality now along with that of voice identification. Voice identification is not at its peak yet, but it used. This leads to something that the writers did not put in the movie that is a big part of our society now: cell phones. This shows that the concept of cell phones hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind at this time.
A big part of the movie was that of the expedition of Jupiter. So far in real life we have only been able to land a few spacecrafts on Jupiter, but no living creatures. This is one thing we have yet to complete that was in the movie. The talking computer is much a reality; I own a MAC and there is an application on it that allows the computer to read what you have typed out loud. However, we have not yet had to compete against computers for control of anything besides our papers and Internet connection, nothing too serious. There are many people that are still afraid of computers taking over the world; it is still in our future.
Through the special effects and acting I was not impressed with this movie one bit; through the accuracy of some of the facts, I was very impressed. With that said, 2001: A Space Odyssey is not a movie I would directly recommend to anyone I know.
