Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey paints a 1968 image of the year 2001 and the predicted progress that humanity has made. The film takes the audience on a journey through space, to places that even today, we could only dream of. Kubrick’s brilliance shines throughout this film exposing a dark image over human progress. The two particular scenes that most accurately show this dark image is the “Dawn of Man” scene, where Kubrick shows humanities first use of tools, and the “Hal versus Humanity” scene, where Kubrick shows Hal killing most of the crew on the mission. Using cinematography, and sound, Kubrick shows the slow evolution of man’s creation and use of tools in order to warn society about an over-reliance on tools and instill

The essential opening of the movie begins with a warm color scheme and extreme long shots of surrounding landscape. Kubrick also clearly uses wide angle lenses throughout this scene, which when combined with the previous two effects, give a very open and almost welcoming feel to the environment. In the opening of the Hal versus Humanity scene, the cool colors, masked shots and medium close-up shots, sometimes even more than that, makes a suffocating feel in this very mechanicalized ship. In the “Hal versus Humanity” scene, Kubrick starts it by using a close up on Hal’s eye which then cuts to Hal’s perspective, which is created using a fisheye lens. Kubrick does this in order to show Hal’s ability to rely on only himself versus needing human help. This idea is further shown when Kubrick uses a cutaway to zoom in on the mechanical hibernation displays, until they fully encapsulate the screen. The screen jump cuts to a close up on Hal, showing how he is the one in control and that these men died due to their reliance on a machine. This reliance is contrasted in the “Dawn of Man” scene, where the scene initially uses eye level shots to show their simplicity and how they have essentially no power against everything else. The shots are also long shots to give the humans space to evolve. The

The “Dawn of Man” scene uses a lot of non-diegetic sounds in the way the scene was composed. The non-diegetic sound in this scene begins with the spiritual howls that emerge during the time that the first humans encounter the black monolith. These howls are very eerie, but not threatening. Kubrick does this in order to show a hopeful evolution for the early humans. These sounds cut out with the cut from the monolith to only having the very primitive sounds of the early humans. This gives the people a lot of empty space as the scene never goes completely silent. Kubrick does this as it gives the early humans space to breath. The non-diegetic sound that ensues is a hopeful and triumphant fanfare, only played at the beginning and the end of the movie as this score is meant to display human improvement, and not de-evolution though the over-reliance of tools. The constant flow of sound in the “Dawn of Man” scene is contrasted by the suffocating silence of the “Hal versus humanity” scene. The “Hal versus humanity scene” only uses diegetic sound that exists in the suffocating vacuum of space and the spaceship. This is shown when the hyperreal robotic sound of the hibernation displays starts to beep. Kubrick uses this along with the complete silence in space in order to show the audience that humanity will be stuck