Space Odyssey 2001, AI and motion graphics

Finaly this happened, I’ve watched this film, which is very often mentioned as the best sci-fi, and as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. Pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery and award for a direction of the visual effects. In 1968.

So, I was trying to watch it earlier, but usually stopped on the beginning or somewhere a little bit later. When was seeing the primitive level of animation or space scenery (compared to nowadays films). But this time I decide to eliminate the judgment and just try to understand the story and why this film is so important.

I decided to watch it attentively without any distractions and someone’s instant feedback in the middle of the movie.

The story leads by voiceless visual scenes very often, so everyone has personal emotions during watching it, but I’ll try to make a short explanation of my own understanding and point on some interesting moments.

Story

So, the movie was created during 4 years. Started from a letter from Stanley Kubrick to Arthur C. Clarke with a proposition to meet and discuss the idea of the film about the space, extraterrestrial life and place of a human in the universe. Arthur C. Clarke was a writer that wrote the novel Sentinel of Eternity and published it in 1951.

Some elements were taken from the story, but the movie has a different story, and has too much of own developed ideas, that now it's can be seen how revolutionary was the approach of Stanley Kubrick and his vision of the future.

So, originaly in the Sentinel was mentioned Pyramidal objects, protected with an energy shields, which was impossible to cross. And only nuclear explosion was able to destroy them and then it was found that pyramids was created with unearthy technologies. Which pointed to other forms of life from other galaxies. But as this pyramids was kind of retranslators and destoying of a single unit was signalizing that there's found another advanced form of life somewhere in the space.

But the film touches this idea from another angle, and shows that human was always trying to reach for something unknown, to technology that leads him to the skies.

There were no orbital stations in 1965, but USSR was planning to create one. Which was probably known by americans. And which later lead to creation of big internation space station, which is shown in the film as a gigantic structure in the space, like international space airport.

There are some examples of hidden advertisent like IBM, Hilton, Howard Johnson's, BBC. Which is interesting to see nowadays. And I guess they were supporting the film production very generously.