The movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was made with the sole purpose of making its audience extremely aware of the passage of time. Without actually sitting in on the millions of years of human evolution,  or a journey through the vast nothingness of space, we still get to experience the full affect of such a lapse in time within the two and a half torturous hours that comprise the god awful film. The plot, if you would be so inclined to assume that the movie even has one, starts with a look into the evolution of apes, then goes on to follow an astronaut as he journeys to Jupiter in response to something found on the moon. The astronaut is faced with a dysfunctional computer, named Hal, that kills off his colleagues and is left alone to defeat it.  After successfully shutting off Hal’s intelligence, the astronaut travels through a world of colors to arrive on Jupiter, where within a minute or two of screen time, he ages completely and then turns into an infant. The end.

If you had not walked out of the theatre halfway through one of the seemingly endless scenes of the protagonist breathing heavily, you may have been carried out on a stretcher in response to the scene where the astronaut lands on Jupiter. Regardless of which point in the Odyssey you leave off, you leave the film feeling quiet literally mind blown.

Despite the completely mentally violating experience imagined by Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick does a phenomenal job of delivering these twisted ideas on screen. Clearly, the movie is quiet the experience (I hope that you will take my word on it, as I would not wish such an experience on anybody.) Though, what does this experience tell us about the generation that proposed the idea? The year was 1968 when the book was published, shortly after the first human was sent to space (1961). Clearly, our knowledge of space and time had reached new heights, as seen in the very accurate depiction of space travel in the movie. The 60s seemed to predict a future where traveling throughout the solar system would be as common a commute as a quick flight across the country. It was a time where the opportunities in science seemed boundless and were the compass of the generation. No wonder they imagined the year 2001 to be as depicted in the film.

So then what was that creepy feeling you had the entire time? That would probably be the fear of the uncertain. Now that we had a general idea of the vastness of the cosmos and a means by which to explore it, what would we find? The answer is as equally terrifying as it is exciting. Throughout the movie, we feel a sense of loneliness, as did the generation that realized what a tiny spec we were on the fabric of space. The excitement of new technology also accompanied the fear of technology taking over, as demonstrated by HAL. Basically, you cannot have yin without the yang. The film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, shows us the deepest insecurities of the generation of the space race.