It's pretty odd to know that 2001: A Space Odyssey was never nominated as Best Picture at the 41st Academy Awards. Even though Stanley Kubrick was nominated for Best Director, the film never broke the nomination list. It seems that during that time, people thought that it was not relevant.
However, Stanley Kubrick's classic broke the standards and became the pinnacle of sci-fi movies.
Plot Overview
It's hard to dissect the real story of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The movie is divided into three parts. While they are not distinctly connected, there are common elements across all of them.
The first part has no dialogue that happened when humans still haven't developed. A group of hominins roamed the Earth. A tribe lives quietly in a water hole until another tribe fights them, and they are expelled. Then they stumbled upon a massive black monolith. Soon, they learned how to use tools such as bones, rocks, and sticks as weapons, and they could win their water hole back from the other tribe.
The second part happens millions of years later. Dr. Heywood Floyd travels to a lunar outpost. During a stopover at Space Station 5, he meets several Russian scientists concerned that the scientist does not disclose information. His mission is soon revealed to investigate a discovered artifact near the lunar crater Tycho. It's a monolith, and when they begin taking pictures, it suddenly emits a high-frequency signal.
The third part happened eighteen months after the second event. An American spacecraft named Discovery One is bound for Jupiter. In suspended animation, three other scientists, Dr. Dave Bowman, and Dr. Frank Poole, join the mission pilots. The ship is controlled mainly by HAL, a supercomputer with a human personality. It was a smooth sailing journey until HAL reported a failure in the antenna, but Dave discovered nothing wrong. Mission Control advises that HAL is malfunctioning because its calculations are incorrect, but the computer blames it on human error. Dave and Frank discuss the behavior of HAL and agree to disconnect it; however, they do not notice that the supercomputer can go against its orders.
Review
This might be one of Stanley Kubrick's most difficult-to-understand movies because there is no interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a puzzling film that doesn't get better after watching it for the first time. It's a classic of absurd proportions.
However, it's also a movie that popularized several astronomical concepts used in several intergalactic films today. It's a visual effects masterpiece that puzzles and excites you the more you watch. It is an otherworldly style that sticks to you until the end.
What's the point of this movie? No one will know. It's up to us on how to interpret it.
A perfect 5 out of 5 stars.