2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

Non spoiler thoughts (summary): A meditative sci-fi experience that feels more like art than traditional storytelling. The practical scale models, classical music, and silence create a grand and sacred atmosphere, while the slow pacing demands patience. It is less about action and more about evolution, artificial intelligence, and humanity’s place in the universe. I admire its ambition and craft, even if parts of it left me confused and overwhelmed. The film follows humanity’s mysterious encounters with a monolith across different stages of evolution, culminating in a deep space mission controlled by an advanced artificial intelligence. What begins as a technological journey gradually transforms into an abstract exploration of consciousness, existence, and transformation beyond human understanding. ⚠️ Spoilers ahead. From here on, plot details are discussed. Read on if you’ve seen the film. If not, save this post and come back after. ⚠️ Beautiful horizon and landscape shots. The eerie vocal and musical score during the monolith scenes reminds me of the unsettling soundscapes in Yorgos Lanthimos films. The fear comes from how the music feels sacred yet unnatural at the same time, like a choir meant for something divine but directed toward something unknown and indifferent to humanity. It sounds holy but emotionally empty, which makes it weirdly scary and gives me the creeps. The scale models in the film look amazing. The sense of size feels tactile compared to CGI, and the lighting interacts with the miniature surfaces naturally, with believable absorption and bounce that makes everything feel physical. For the music, the film uses classical compositions that elevate the grandeur of space: Also sprach Zarathustra, The Blue Danube. All of them reinforce the majestic and mysterious tone of outer space. This is a very slow burn. Some scenes are intentionally prolonged to immerse me in the visuals. For me, it is not always effective because the message could be delivered with about three fourths of the runtime of certain shots. The silence is used brilliantly though, emphasizing what space actually sounds like, nothing. Showing HAL as just a red dot works really well. The image never changes but the meaning changes. At first it feels like a watchful guardian, but later the same visual becomes threatening, almost vengeful. I remember the visual of HAL reading the lips of the two crew members. I actually recreated that idea in a college project where I avoided dialogue and focused the camera on lips so the audience had to read them instead of hearing them. The film also feels like an early warning about dependence on artificial intelligence. A machine without morality or compassion simply follows instructions perfectly, and that perfection becomes dangerous. HAL’s monotonous voice makes it colder and more menacing. I expected more of a space journey because of the title Odyssey, but instead the film becomes about a journey of human evolution into a higher form of existence. It still holds up after almost sixty years, though I expected a different kind of approach. I definitely can feel that Chrisopher Nolan took some inspiration from here. I think this would be best experienced on an IMAX screen. The last thirty minutes become extremely strange. The visuals shift rapidly from digital looking patterns to cosmic imagery to liquid like reactions similar to chemical reactions in Oppenheimer, then landscapes tinted like negative film, night vision, or heat vision. I honestly do not know what is happening. It feels like a drug trip and left me disoriented with a headache. I honestly thought that when the pod is in a bedroom scene that the film will reveal that the astronaut just experienced some sort of a "ride simulation". There's a lot of things need to be unpacked in this film and I definitely need a rewatch to understand it better.