2001: A Space Odyssey - Craig Walters

It’s similar in the fact that it is built in a chronological fashion much like these other movies you’ve listened. However, the time frame of this movie is extended beyond anything I’ve ever seen before. It starts with man, in his most primitive state to the year 2001 where space travel has become more of a common place and human kind is attempting to extend this travel to unknown realms where some believe there is intelligent life. The movie is very much to a documentary because we don’t follow a central character throughout the movie, doesn’t have a narrator and the audience is taken to periodic incidences dealing with a central issue or theme, alien intelligence. The wall between the audience and the subject are never broken and Kubrick never seems to push the audience to support or reject any of the characters. It seems to be a very unbiased demonstration of the eventual evolution of mankind, through the process of the mechanization of society, which transcends natural order, which was seen at the beginning of the film during ‘The Dawn of Man’. It seems to be a documentary of human life prior to and thereafter the time in which the movie was made. In a sense I believe Kubrick was attempting to make a social statement about the current times (1968) using this mythology to narrate the past and the possible future.